Place and city: Operationalizing sense of place and social capital in the urban context

Abstract

The academic interest in social concepts in city contexts, such as sense of place and social capital, has been growing in the last decades. We present a systematic literature review that confirms the strong relationship between sense of place and social capital, from a social sciences point-of-view. It also reveal that little attention has been paid to their spatial dimensions at the urban level, thereby missing the chance to exploit socio-spatial knowledge to improve the day-to-day life in and functioning of the city (e.g. in planning processes, citizen participation, civic engagement). We therefore examine sense of place and social capital from a Geographic Information Science (GISc) viewpoint, and present a formal conceptualization and initial theoretical framework which explicitly describes both concepts, and the relation between them, within the context of a city and from a spatial point of view.