Emotive facets of place meet urban analytics

Abstract

The lack of a well-established and unified place theory across disciplines is decelerating its formalization, evolution, and especially its pragmatic implications and applicability. In this article, we identify research gaps in the emotive facets of place scholarship. We found that it: (1) rarely joins physical, social, and individual variables in the same model; (2) omits the immediately perceived and sensory dimensions; (3) disregards the analysis of how individual–place emotive relationships vary across time; and (4) overlooks the difficulties of reducing multifaceted emotive facets of place into geographic features. Next, we examine these research gaps through the lens of technology-based advancements in urban analytics. Finally, we discuss the need to combine social-oriented research and (spatial) data-driven disciplines to enrich and expand the research area of emotive facets of place and connected disciplines.