Evaluating a gentrifying neighborhood's changing sense of place using participatory mapping: Fid-Bau Portal

Evaluating a gentrifying neighborhood's changing sense of place using participatory mapping

Pánek, Jiří / Glass, Michael R. / Marek, Lukáš

Abstract Participatory mapping techniques and social surveys are combined with spatial statistics to examine resident senses of place in a gentrifying neighborhood. Whereas recent debates on gentrification describe how physical displacement need not occur for an area's sense of place to change, there are few tools that test this presumption. Attitudes of current residents toward features of a gentrifying neighborhood are captured using polygons drawn in Collector for ArcGIS. The results were aggregated according to the social characteristics of the respondents (length of residency, education, and housing status). After testing for randomness, it was proven that highly educated newcomers have significantly different attitudes toward their neighborhood when compared to long-term residents. This study supports concerns that the emotional geographies of a gentrifying neighborhood can be disrupted without physical displacement of long-term residents and provides a novel combination of methods for evaluating between-group differences in a sense of place.

Highlights • Combination of spatial and qualitative research about gentrification was applied. • Spatial statistics based on respondents profiled proved various sense of place in Lawrenceville, Pittsburgh, PA. • Gentrification has an effect on spatial perception of the place.