Capturing affordances for health and well-being at the city scale [chapter]

Gloria Niin, Peeter Vassiljev, Tiina Rinne, Simon Bell
2021 Urban Blue Spaces  
fine-grained geographic information about different land covers or land uses in many larger urban areas through the Urban Atlas vector dataset provided by the European Union's Copernicus Land Monitoring Service (www.eea.europa. eu/data-and-maps/data/copernicus-land-monitoring-service-urban-atlas#tab-data) or, if the city is not included, through Corine Land Cover, also provided through Copernicus (https://land.copernicus.eu/pan-european/corine-landcover), although this is much coarser grained
more » ... d raster based. Alternatively, we can also pick up detailed information from high-resolution aerial photographs. These datasets can tell us a lot about what kind of blue spaces are present and what the land cover types and water-land interface are. However, while we can observe what goes on at specific sites (see Chapter 6), we need a way of identifying the key affordances as a city-wide pattern, and for this, we need to capture people-based as opposed to territorially based data related to blue spaces. We can refer to the kind of geographic information system (GIS) described previously as "hard GIS", as it deals with objective facts about spaces. If we can capture more subjective values which are also spatially related, by asking residents to tell us about, for example, their favourite blue space or the one which they go to in order to de-stress or to carry out a particular activity at or on the water, then we have the means to capture the affordances associated by different people with specific places. This can help a great deal in urban blue space planning. This "SoftGIS", or, as it is also known, public participation GIS (PPGIS), can be applied top down or bottom up and, depending on the system used, can capture highly detailed information from a large number of residents, which has real value for planners as
doi:10.4324/9780429056161-10 fatcat:njgai5nyxnglramg47bnntcdg4