Advancing theory of place and place-making for landscape science using big data and machine learning in the urban-rural gradient
Embargoed until 2024-08-21
Author
Date
2023Type
- Doctoral Thesis
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Abstract
We are living in the urban century, with cities and urbanisation continuing to exert unprecedented pressures on landscapes and people. This globally occurring process generates a broad range of sustainability challenges, which if left unaddressed, will result in an irreversible degradation of both natural and urban landscapes.
Indeed, contemporary urbanisation processes can be thought of as a feedback loop, where global homogenisation processes degrade local landscape qualities and transforming them into homogenous areas, which erode people's ties with their neighbourhoods – resulting in decreased engagement and motivation to take positive actions and thus allowing further homogenisation to take place. Engaging people as part of this process, by reconnecting them to their local landscapes, can break this cycle or even reverse its direction. Under ever-increasing globalised urbanisation and periurbanisation, this reversal becomes key in turning fragile homogenised landscapes into resilient domains capable of facing future sustainability challenges. Engaging people for positive change requires in turn engaging their ideas, values, beliefs and emotions – which given the decreasing meaning and isolation from their everyday surroundings – is a complex tasks indeed.
To navigate this complexity, the concepts of place and place-making are increasingly taking precedence in landscape science as a means of advancing current approaches in both research and practice. Place can be described as physical space experienced by people, therefore, places are a way of understanding and navigating meaningful connections between people and landscapes. More concretely, place connects physical elements (which can be manipulated in direct and straightforward ways) with subjective phenomena that are emergent and latent results of a variety of interactions between people and their surroundings. Therefore, using place as a research tool can help understanding not only which particular meanings and under which conditions can be perpetuated – but also the resulting effect on the well-being of people and nature.
However, there is a lack of established ways of incorporating place specifically into current landscape research. The existing challenges in overcoming this obstacle are due to the subjectivity, complexity, variability of place and people's perceptions and a general lack of data to substantiate these aspects of place-based measurements. However, big data approaches in combination with increased computational throughput are being increasingly used to successfully uncover new knowledge on subjective landscape measurements, paving a way to new measurement models of place through crowd sourcing, use of virtual environments, deep learning and artificial intelligence.
Fundamentally, this thesis is about creating a theoretical framework and testing its validity for landscape science using quantitative measurement methods and models; in particular big data and machine learning to uncover new relationships and patterns between subjective and objective elements of landscape. The aim of this thesis is to develop the concept of place in order to: i) better understand place-making (how places are generated or changed), and to ii) model place rather than space on a landscape level. The overall motivation is to gain a deeper understanding of the various transformation processes in the urban-rural continuum – and as a result deepen our understanding on how to engage people in enacting positive change in their everyday lived environments.
The methods and results collected as part of this thesis are structured around the following three research questions, which have been addressed in three peer-reviewed scientific publications:
1. How can place and place-making be defined for landscape science based research?
2. How can place-making be operationalised for a better understanding of engaging people in transformation processes?
3. What are the patterns of place that can be measured at the scale of the urban-rural continuum?
The first publication used a critical review of place literature which covered all domains of the so-called place studies to define place as physical space experienced by people, consisting of form (physical characteristics), function (activities), and perception (affective-cognitive experiences). This parallels the commonplace classifications of land cover, land use and landscape perception – enabling to interface with existing data and process knowledge in each of these wider landscape science subdomains. The dynamic and process-centred counterpart to place, place-making, is conceptually defined as the totality of processes responsible for how places are created or changed. Therefore, place-making is a construct that connects landscape and people's behaviours for the purposes of understanding a wide range of transformation processes (“making”) through specific contexts (“place”). This research question resulted in formulating and deriving novel measurement methods for place and place-making, which are used not only in the remainder of the thesis, but have since been used in research spanning other experimental setups and locations. Concretely, they were used in the second research question to formulate a set of 36 survey questions measuring place-making, and in the third research question to guide the survey design, data collection and indicator selection.
The second publication presents the first data driven measurement model of place-making, based on a large and representative sample (N=7'035). Using latent variable modelling in the context of psychometric scale development, showed that place-making can be characterised by three components, "The 3 P's of Place-making": one’s personal attitudes to place-making (factor 1: person), the influence of existing administrative or collectively organised procedures on place-making (factor 2: procedures), and the existing outcomes of place-making (factor 3: place). These results were validated and confirmed using survey data collected in a separate experiment and in different locations, and also showed that place-making has the potential to drive transformative behaviour change in different socio-demographic groups. Overall, this paper confirms the theoretical notion that place-making links people (person), with their environments (place) in an emergent way through a variety of interactions (procedures). Consequently it provides evidence and advances the notion that place-making can engage people in transformative behaviour change, in addition to interventions which are exclusively targeted at practical or aesthetic elements of place (which has been the de facto approach for real-estate and urban design driven transformations).
The subject of the third publication is moving place from theory to practice and demonstrating its effectiveness as a measurement methodology which captures the complex patterns of the urban-rural landscape. The three components of form, function, perception are used to combine 33 indicators measuring objective and subjective elements of place. The particular contribution of this publication is collecting subjective valuations of place for 7'008 location covering the entire urban-rural gradient of the Utrecht region (Netherlands), by using street view photographs and a representative online survey (N=10'042). Therefore, this publication demonstrates how big data can advance the measurement of landscape, particularly in the domain of perception and subjective indicators, which hitherto were reliant on small-scale and expert-based data collection procedures. The results show that perception is a crucial component of place, for example, uncovering that the character of most residential places is incongruent with their perceived recreational value – a finding difficult to measure by using space alone. Further using recreation as an example shows that if people would need to be engaged in typical periurban neighbourhoods through specific activities, the character of places (perception) would have to follow to accommodate and stimulate such activities. At the same time, the results show that perception of place is not the same as place (totality of subjective and objective indicators), and can be used as a way of representing the urban-rural gradient that moves beyond simple density-based methods of classifying space on the landscape scale.
The main conclusion of the thesis is that landscape science can benefit from incorporating the concepts of place and place-making in both theory and measurement, to further our understanding of influencing people's values and perceptions as way of steering transformation. In addition, the methods developed and applied in this thesis show a high potential to be transferred to different research domains and landscapes, to provide even further valuable insights into how people experience and perceive places. The results suggest that these methods can connect subjective with objective indicators in an iterative design-science loop, enabling the linking of design decisions with how people feel and experience places, creating more responsive designs and data driven solutions to existing planning challenges. The more fundamental and wide-reaching consequence of this ability to readily connect subjective with objective indicators, is that the we can understand the impact of overarching landscape planning decisions (e.g. land zoning) on how people feel – and vice versa – we can begin to systematically formulate how people can be mobilised to impact changes in landscapes. This advances the current theoretical understanding of place and place-making as local phenomena with limited effect – expanding them to domains of system-based research with landscape-wide impacts. Show more
Permanent link
https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000627479Publication status
publishedExternal links
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Contributors
Examiner: Grêt-Regamey, Adrienne
Examiner: Nassauer, Joan Iverson
Examiner: Filatova, Tatiana
Publisher
ETH ZurichSubject
Environmental psychology; Landscape planning; Place attachment; Place-making; Place theory; Landscape modeling; machine learning; UrbanisationOrganisational unit
02656 - Inst. f. Raum- und Landschaftsentw. / Inst Spatial and Landscape Development03823 - Grêt-Regamey, Adrienne / Grêt-Regamey, Adrienne
02655 - Netzwerk Stadt u. Landschaft ARCH u BAUG / Network City and Landscape ARCH and BAUG
Funding
757565 - Enabling transformation: Linking design and land system science to foster place-making in peri-urban landscapes under increasing globalization (EC)
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