Marina Mura

Powering the change: a Contingent Valuation study on the determinants of demand for green vs. brown energy

A Contingent Valuation study was performed to assess a potential trade-off between external costs (impacts on health caused by pollution) and the cost of electricity paid by households. Two technologies were selected for the valuation exercise: coal-fired thermal and solar photovoltaic. Our results show that households are interested in buying solar energy, and are willing to pay an additional premium for it, which would support maintenance of a feed-in tariff system. In addition, it is found that higher awareness of the external benefits and costs related, respectively, to solar and coal energy, is a crucial factor that shapes their demand in the household sector. According to the results of our study, we can expect that if electric utilities were required by regulators to provide detailed information on the external effects (and in particular, on health impacts) of coal and other fossil fuels used in their energy mix, there will be a sizeable positive shift in the demand of green electric energy in the household sector.

Aesthetic, perception and preference for historical and modern buildings

Mura 2005), a big difference could be found among the buildings built after and before 1950s. Furthermore we hypothesize that preference for buildings is related to the complexity of the facades— higher in most ancient buildings—because of the process of structuration of a specific visual environment. This process has been analysed according to the rules of perception of the macro-morphemes from the level of the road: exterior walls, roof, window openings, entrance, principal divisions of the solid and other large elements (Niezabitowski 2001–2002, p 5). The appreciation for western cities characterized in a different way by modern or ancient architecture (renaissance, modern, contemporary) was analysed to understand if the preference derives from the identification with the social group (preference for the historical buildings of one’s own city) or from a more general preference for ancient architectural typologies. Starting from this consideration, our research aims to deepen the relationships among buildings’ age, familiarity and expressed aesthetical preference. Twenty-one buildings of the city of Cagliari, divided into

Cognitive mapping analysis and regional identity

The internal representation of the spatial models of the environment is usually defined through the term ‘‘cognitive map’’ (Tolman 1948; Lynch 1960). Cognitive mapping process is an internal representation of the spatial information, consisting in the acquisition, memorisation, recovering and decoding of environmental information (Downs and Stea 1977). It can be defined as a mental construction useful to understand the environment through remembering and processing the spatial information (Kitchin and Freundschuh 2000). A cognitive map can be then considered as an internal model of the world that helps people to cope successfully with the demands coming from the surrounding environment. This internal model has been generally considered as an useful source of information for spatial behaviours (Golledge and Stimpson 1997; Golledge 1987). People use different sources to develop their own image of the spatial environment with which they are interacting. Wide spaces, in particular, may include a lot of different places, as whole regions and states, requiring for several sources to be conceived and represented. Geographic regions, in turn, are defined as ‘‘spatial extended pieces of (near) earth surface that share some aspect of similarity across their extents’’ (Montello 2008, p. 305). These kinds of spaces are usually elaborated through a multiplicity of modalities, e.g. navigation, maps and descriptions (Tversky 2003). The scientific literature on cognitive maps has provided an useful instrument, i.e. the sketch map, for analysing the internalised cognitive map of the individuals. Sketch by means of map is an easy-to-use tool which is based on a graphical representation of the space. In fact, it relies on people’s common ability to make spatial inferences and on shared spatial schemes, insofar it can be considered a reliable method of data collection (Blades 1990). Usually, sketch maps are characterised by a series of biases due to perceptual cognitive factors that affects memory, so that people seem to reorganise completely the spatial information by semantic categories (McNamara et al. 1992). Nevertheless, primary aspects are not the only factors involved in the cognitive mapping process, especially in the case of regional maps. In fact, the bigger is the area represented in the map, the bigger is the role of symbolic aspects of the environment (Pinheiro 1998). In this sense, the study of mental representations of geographic regions and wide areas can provide information about the way in which people organise their world in a recognisable and manageable way (Ittelson et al. 1974). Following this conceptual line, the method of the sketch maps has met the interest of the Environmental Psychology domain, with particular reference to the depiction of broad levels of territorial scale (such as regions and nations, e.g. see Pinheiro 1998). In fact, this method is often used, in literature, to detect those psychosocial dimensions (such as social and place identity) that express the transactional pattern between people and their social–physical environment. One of the psychological patterns that can influence people–environment transaction and, in particular, the organisation of spatial information is place identity that R. Troffa (&) M. Mura P. Caddeo Department of Economic and Social Research, University of Cagliari, DRES, Cagliari, Italy e-mail: renato.troffa@uniroma1.it