Is Urban Space Able to Affect Community Participation? a Research Proposal between Urban Sociology and Environmental Psychology

Abstract

This paper will deal with the study of the relation between the urban spaces and social phenomena. Today the world is considered as a "global village", where the borders and differences between the places seem to lose their meaning; it would be interesting to ask whether the space is still crucial to understand social phenomena in contemporary societies. This opens the big question that we will try to give an answer: may the space be considered as a variable able to affect social behavior? In last decades sociologists have further increased the interest about this issue, coming to what has been defined “spatial sociology”. In social science we rarely find out researches which try to answer to the key question: how space affects inhabitants? How can we measure this relation? We can insight more and more this very fascinating issue looking at other disciplines. For instance, environmental psychology has developed a long tradition in the identification and measurement of the perception of space by people. This different point of view allow us to deepen the relation within spaces and people, measuring several aspect of the impact of space in individual’s life, such as place attachment, urban quality perceived, and so on. In this paper I will present my PhD’s research project, endorsing the environmental psychological as useful theoretical and methodological framework to study the space-people relation in urban sociology.