Appraisive Imagery of Liberec-City (North Bohemia, Czech Republic)
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IGU 2014 Book of Abstracts IGU2014 – 1400 Appraisive imagery of Liberec-city (North Bohemia, Czech Republic) Svobodová E., Hynek A., Kubíček P., Dítětová V. Masaryk University in Brno, Faculty of Science, Department of Geography Political change after November 1989 in former Czechoslovakia caused intra-urban movement in Liberec-city and also new housing configuration from housing public sector restructuring. New housing submarket operates on the base of commercionalization with increasing social polarization: new elites partly privatized inner-city art noveau luxurious villas built by German manufactures at the time of Austria-Hungarian monarchy when Liberec-city was the heart of industrial development and partly developers started building new suburbia for upper class. As P.Knox and S.Pinch (2010, 6th ed., p.225) distinguish personal experiences and values in cognition and perception associated with images, inner representations, mental maps and schemata of urban environment reality. They make distinction between the designative aspects of people´s imagery and the appraisive one reflecting their feelings and activities within the urban environment. People evaluate their place in the city with respect to everyday practices, the role of materiality, functions, participation, emotions, events, meanings, and symbols in their condition of living. The debate above the proposal of master plan of the city of Liberec clearly revealed strong differences between urban planners and the residents depending on visions, perspectives of urban spaces. It starts with sensory experiences, embodied senses of place, and continues with spatial practices ( de Certeau, 1984) of urban living, city´s meaning, policy and politics, understanding the city. That is the challenge for geographers and cartographers to do deeper study of urban processes, especially in urban social geography. We compiled the questionnaire accepting ´the extract from an environmental quality assessment schedule´ (Knox and Pinch, 2000, 4th ed., p. 91) and replenished to maximum 100 penalty points (Hynek et al., 2004) covering traffic, visual quality, access to public open space/ schools/shops/public transportation/walking/playground and recreation, air pollution, privacy, noise, safety, place identity, landscape quality, place attractiveness, greenery, housing quality, social environment and community, encounters, street maintenance for 36 census tracts representing 32 districts of Liberec- city. The field survey was performed by the students of Geography Dept. at Technical University Liberec in the years 2011 and 2013. Sampling procedures included only residents, equal men and women, under/above 30, each census tract with 10 persons that means 36 districts x 10= 360 respondents per a year, altogether 720 ones. The results were further geocoded and assigned to particular spatial units (districts). Each district is thus represented by a set of environmental quality variables assessed by penalty points. There exist several types of visualization techniques for multivariate spatial patterns onto the same map like trivariate choropleth maps (Brewer 1994), or multivariate point symbol maps (glyphs) (Chernoff and Rizvi 1975, Dorling 1994), but not all are appropriate because of the combination of spatial units organisation and number and variability of environmental attributes. Therefore we further tested several multivariate visualization techniques in order to visually explore unknown data and reveal possible trends of spatial differences in citizens’ perception of quality of life. .