Describe Your City! Experienced and Physical Space in Descriptions of Public Places

How did people experience and describe urban space? Spontaneous, oral descriptions of urban places proved that descriptions of space consisted of more than just objects scattered over a physical space. Rather, these descriptions illuminated what a city’s residents held meaningful, for example, what usage they allowed, which groups of people could be found there, or which events had taken place. Spontaneous descriptions painted a dynamic picture of a city that consisted of both experiences and the physical environment. Over the course of a small interdisciplinary project, we sought to investigate a large number of such place descriptions from different perspectives: linguistics (Wolfgang Kesselheim), corpus linguistics (Noah Bubenhofer), and GIScience (Curdin Derungs). We aimed to utilize these descriptions to develop methods of analysis and visualization that enabled an empirical study, and precise illustration, of the correlations between what was experienced and physical space. In the context of the URPP, our project created connections between approaches that focused on the construction of space and those that considered space to be an objective dimension. Our project was directly affiliated with the interests being researched in Zurich from both linguistic and geographic points of view. Special aspects of our project included that we:

• analyzed oral data,
• worked with data collected on site (which captured and reproduced the immediate impressions of a given space from the point of view of the person describing it),
• took particular note of the textual character of the descriptions (sequence of descriptive elements, narrative sequences, etc.), and
• ensured that the results of the empirical analysis and visualization experiments were reintegrated into the theoretical modeling of the permeation of experienced and physical space in terms of a “theoretical empiricism” (Hirschauer et al. 2008).

Project leadership: Noah Bubenhofer , Curdin Derungs, and Wolfgang Kesselheim.

Funding source: URPP Language and Space.