Renato Troffa

The Role of Place Identity in the Perception, Understanding, and Design of Built Environments

Description: In an era of globalization, where the progressive deterioration of local values is a dominating characteristic, identity is seen as a fundamental need that encompasses all aspects of human life. One of these identities relates to place and the physical environment. Place identity is concerned with a set of ideas about place and identity from the perspective of a wide range of disciplines. Mainly, it refers to the meaning and importance of places for their inhabitants and users. Readers of this e-book will gain an insight on the role of identity as a basis for the perception, experience, and appreciation of the form of built structures. This e-book explains knowledge in relation to place identity, focusing on peoples identity, and those factors that play a significant role in this process. Most of all, it enables to gain further insight about place identity with regard to global and local contexts, and across multifaceted and multicultural societies. The theme is approached from a number of disciplines that include environmental psychology, philosophy, urban sociology, geography, urban planning, urban design, architecture and landscape architecture.

Escape: wayfinding strategies and emergency.

This work aims to face the relationship between spatial configuration and wayfinding. In particular, it targets the influence of two environmental variables on spatial behaviour: angularity and visibility. The topic of the different processes implied in spatial behaviour and, in particular, in wayfinding and route processing and choice, has a fundamental importance in human’s daily life. It is also a challenging topic for research in cognitive, environmental and architectural research (but also in anthropological, linguistic and geographical ones, among the others), since it can be considered as a crossing point for studying different aspects of cognition, perception and planning. As stressed by Conroy Dalton et al. (2009), the cognitive and behavioural determinants of human pedestrian displacements in different kinds of built environments have been deeply investigated for a long time, because of their highly complex nature. Displacements are influenced not only by the human agents, but also by the task structure and by environmental factors. Research in this field has focused on the different effects of environmental factors on wayfinding, considering both internal and external spaces. According to literature, some of the environmental factors that can influence wayfinding are as follows:

European and natural landscapes as carriers of place identity: a correlational study in Italian and Spanish regions

ABSTRACT This study investigated whether European, Mediterranean and natural landscapes might trigger identification responses among residents of Mediterranean Europe. The participants (N = 546) were students from three Italian and three Spanish regions who rated their level of place identification by looking at eight pictures of prototypical landscapes, each depicting a unique combination of attributes in a 2×2×2 research design (European/non-European, Mediterranean/non-Mediterranean and natural/built). The results confirmed both European and natural landscapes as stronger carriers of identification than non-European and built landscapes, respectively, whereas no differences emerged between Mediterranean and non-Mediterranean landscapes. The statistical analysis of two-way interactions showed the amplification effect of the combined European–natural landscape, whilst a less clear picture emerged from the other two interactions. These findings suggest that landscape images may be used to foster a more inclusive identity at the supranational level and thus increase the sense of belonging among European citizens.

Measuring Implicit European and Mediterranean Landscape Identity: A Tool Proposal.

This study presents a tool – the Landscape Identity Implicit Association Test (LI-IAT) – devoted to measure the implicit identification with European and Mediterranean landscapes. To this aim, a series of prototypical landscapes was selected as stimulus, following an accurate multi-step procedure. Participants (N = 174), recruited in two Italian cities, performed two LI-IATs devoted to assess their identification with European vs. Not-European and Mediterranean vs. Not-Mediterranean prototypical landscapes. Psychometric properties and criterion validity of these measures were investigated. Two self-report measures, assessing, respectively, European and Mediterranean place identity and pleasantness of the target landscapes, were also administered. Results showed: (1) an adequate level of internal consistency for both LI-IATs; (2) a higher identification with European and Mediterranean landscapes than, respectively, with Not-European and Not-Mediterranean ones; and (3) a significant positive relationship between the European and Mediterranean LI-IATs and the corresponding place identity scores, also when pleasantness of landscapes was controlled for. Overall, these findings provide a first evidence supporting the reliability and criterion validity of the European and Mediterranean LI-IATs.

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