Social networks, social cohesion, and place attachment are positive social impacts that can stimulate people’s quality of life. High-rise apartment buildings are often criticized for their negative social impacts, such as social isolation and low levels of interaction and social cohesion. However, there is still insufficient empirical evidence on the relationships between neighborhood social networks, social cohesion, place attachment, and loneliness of high-rise apartment residents and how they are affected by the physical environment and neighborhood satisfaction. This study uses structural equation modeling (SEM) to investigate these relationships using data collected in four high-rise apartment complexes in Hanoi, Vietnam. While the number of neighbors in someone’s social network is found to stimulate social cohesion, which can foster neighborhood attachment and reduce feelings of loneliness, the possibility of improving these social impacts is affected by urban contexts, site properties, and the ability to provide communal spaces within and surrounding the buildings.
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This chapter investigates the deeply mediatized experience of place and space within the lived practice of events by studying two annual Dutch cultural events as cases: Oerol Festival (2017) and 3FM Serious Request (2017). Drawing on substantial datasets containing online and offline participant observations, both short in situ interviews and longer in-depth interviews with a total of 248 interviewees and large datasets from Twitter and Instagram, this chapter demonstrates that media concurrently de-spatialize, in the sense that they diminish spatial borders and overcome distance, and affirm embodied experiences of being-in-place. I argue that it is liveness - the potential connection, through media, to events that matter to us as they unfold - that creates the closeness between the near and the far elements within the “eventsphere” and binds it all together into one event-space.
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This book is the account of teaching practice linked to research projects, a practice that is able to create new, unexpected values in the complex patchwork of the city through experimental and strategic interventions with greenery. That the interventions involve greenery is obviously linked to the fact that the Van Hall Larenstein university of applied sciences specializes in nature and agriculture, but there is also a practical reason. Green spaces act as a cohesive force, as is shown again and again in the Netherlands and in the Lively Cities programme. Particularly in the urban context, green spaces have a distinctive and perhaps even emotional value that encourages people to pause there and makes them think about their appreciation of a place. Greenery triggers people to take part in social experiments. But that is just the beginning.
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Bij de ontwikkeling van kinderen speelt de omgeving waarin zij opgroeien en de wijze waarop zij zich verbonden voelen met hun buurt een belangrijke rol (Owens, 2004; 2016). Om als basisschool goed bij te kunnen dragen aan de ontwikkeling van kinderen is het van belang dat scholen de omgeving en de buurt waarin hun leerlingen opgroeien kennen en kunnen benutten voor hun onderwijs. In het bijzonder gaat het daarbij om de betekenis die deze omgeving voor hun leerlingen heeft. Voor basisscholen in wijken met een grote diversiteit aan inwoners kan de betekenis van eenzelfde omgeving voor verschillende leerlingen ook zeer verschillend zijn. Naar de wijze waarop kinderen zich verbonden voelen met de fysieke en sociale ruimte is nog weinig onderzoek gedaan (Tani, 2016). Naast inzicht in de bestaande verbinding van kinderen met hun omgeving is het voor het onderwijs belangrijk om inzicht te verkrijgen in de wijze waarop kinderen in staat kunnen worden gesteld om zich te binden aan een plek en om deze plek te benutten bij hun ontwikkeling. De capability approach (Nussbaum, 2014) en een perspectief op de veerkracht van kinderen (Enthoven, 2007) bieden een kader om naar dit vraagstuk te kijken. Het onderzoek richt zich op wat het primair onderwijs kan doen om de aan de omgeving gerelateerde vermogens van kinderen te ontwikkelen. Onderwijs waarin de leefomgeving van kinderen wordt betrokken of waarin de leefomgeving op enige wijze een rol speelt kan hiertoe een middel zijn. Dit vanuit de notie dat door het ontwikkelen van een ‘sense of place’ (Dolan, 2016) de kennis, persoonlijke verbondenheid en verantwoordelijkheid voor de lokale omgeving versterkt kunnen worden. Het onderzoek zal na een verkennende fase een ontwerpgericht karakter krijgen, waarbij op onderzoeksmatige wijze materiaal wordt ontwikkeld dat bruikbaar is op basisscholen en lerarenopleidingen basisonderwijs.
The ongoing environmental changes in the Arctic call for a deeper understanding of how local communities experience and adapt to these transformations. This PhD examines sense of place and how this shapes future climate imaginaries within riverine communities, focusing on the Altaelva community in northern Norway. In northern Peru, the community has long experienced alternating environmental changes due to the El Niño Southern Oscillation, nowadays intensified by climate change. By examining how these communities adapt to cyclical environmental shifts, this case study provides comparative insights relevant to the Arctic, where climate change presents a more linear, continuous impact.Utilizing qualitative methods, I explore how individuals and groups form emotional and cognitive attachments to the environment while living in a changing climate. This PhD investigates locally rooted visions of climate futures that are informed by the community's sense of place, so-called “emplaced climate imaginaries”. By focusing on how the community’s attachment to the river influences their perceptions of future climate scenarios, I aim to identify the ways in which these imaginaries contribute to sustainable adaptation strategies.The study’s focus on the intersection of emotional bonds to place and anticipatory climate futures offers insights into how communities cope with and adapt to environmental change. These findings will contribute to broader discussions on climate resilience, emphasizing the importance of integrating local narratives and experiences into climate adaptation policies. The research not only provides a lens into Arctic futures but also underscores the role of local, place-based attachments in shaping responses to climate change.
In the coming four years, the Hedwige-Prosperpolder in the Schelde estuary will be reopened for nature restoration. This creates opportunities, within a binational Dutch-Belgian consortium, to experiment with the existing dike and to perform targeted dike breach experiments and breach monitoring. We will exploit this opportunity to investigate a newly described, potentially valuable contribution of vegetated foreshores to flood safety: the restriction of dike breach extent, and thus of flooding volume, in the case of failure of the dike. Fostering marsh development in front of realigned dikes could improve safety more than hitherto thought. Not only does it reduce dike failure probabilities, it may also restrict the consequences of failures. Even though this is not the primary goal of the HPP realignment, in this Living Lab we will study how management realignment can be used as a nature-based solution for flood safety. We will model the contribution of vegetated foreshores to breach development, calculate its contribution to reduction of risks, and validate the model using the breach experiment. We will also study the conditions for, and rates of, vegetation and soil strength development in front of realigned dikes. We will explore novel designs and maintenance schemes for realigned dikes connected to a vegetated foreshore. Finally, we will study how people experience physical changes in the landscape in terms of place attachment: will they be reconnected to the changed landscape when properly informed on the new role of this landscape in ecosystem development and safety enhancement? The project consortium is composed of engineers, ecologists and social scientists with a strong track record in multidisciplinary co-operation. It is externally supported by national and regional water authorities, contractors and engineering companies. It is ideally situated to translate new knowledge into operational procedures, and incorporate this into the education of future coastal professionals.
