PRIVILEGED OBSERVERS TALK ABOUT THEIR LIVING TOWN

• Authors: Marzano Gilberto , Vicedomine Roberta
• Languages of publication: LV EN RU

Abstracts

EN

At the end of 1960s, the French sociologist Raymond Ledrut claimed that a city is not a juxtaposition of parts, but urban areas show reciprocal relationships in the social space, and differences in urban community affect the character of cities. He speaks about the “image of a city” that is not so much a pictorial representation but the way in which people, inhabitants as well as visitors, talk about a place. The notion of the “character of a city” appeared even in the New Charter of Athens edited by the European Council of Town Planners’ Principles for Planning Cities (1998). This article illustrates and discusses the first results of a research carried out during the years 2011 and 2012, which purpose was to investigate if the inhabitants’ talking about their town can help to bring about the identification of relevant aspects that one regards as the character of a city, a term largely used not only in tourism and travel literature, but also in several scientific works. The research is essentially based on open ended semi-structured interviews with 25 elite persons, living in Udine (a city of about 100.000 people in the northeast of Italy) for at least 25 years, all belonging to the medium-high intellectual class. Interviews’ data has been integrated with information gathered from local literature, local newspapers, official statistics, and web analysis. A mixed research approach has been followed, integrating qualitative and quantitative data, these latter in part extracted from the interviews and in part from the Internet applying content analysis techniques. Our hypothesis was that interviews, if suitably constructed and carried out, could reduce the difficulties of large-scale investigations, allowing the gathering of a large amount of data in a relatively short time. The idea of deriving constructs and thematic topics from the interviews is shared by Denis Royer (2013). Our methodological hypothesis is presented and discussed, underlying that, in our research, the interviews have led us to the identification of some relevant aspects that contributed to represent the character of Udine. For example, a questionnaire would hardly have allowed to highlight the compartmentalization of Udine city’s life and unearthed the seemingly tolerant climate that reigns in this city.

Keywords

EN

social anthropology,; urban-life,; town identity perception,; qualitative research,; large-scale investigations.

• Publisher: Daugavpils University, Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences
• Journal: Sociālo Zinātņu Vēstnesis
• Year: 2013
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 32-56

Contributors

author

Marzano Gilberto

author

Vicedomine Roberta

Identifiers

ISSN

1691-1881