Mapping Landscape Features & Values in Coastal Australia

Places encompass the physical setting, as well as human experience and interpretation. Although sense of place definition nominally includes the physical environment, most research has emphasized the social construction of sense of place and neglect the important contribution of the physical environment to place meanings and attachment. On the other side, theoretical and technological developments during the past decades resulted in significant sophistication and power of analysis, display, and interpretation of spatial information applied in landscape analysis. This development, however, remains disconnected from the socio-political realities of the communities and regions which are the subject of these studies. There is a research need to integrate public perceptions and attitudes with the type of information typically found in a landscape assessment. A challenge of GIS is whether or not Cartesian space can be adapted to incorporate a more humanistic sense and understanding of distance, direction, and position. Using the Greater Geelong Region and the data from peoplemap project, we address in this paper the following question: Can we map landscape features and landscape values in an integrated manner into a GIS to achieve a better understanding of resident’s perceptions on their geographies? This paper presents the preliminary findings of the research on mapping into a GIS platform different landscape values/perceptions associated to the same landscape feature “the ocean”. Although being very specific and still limited in terms of its application to planning purposes, the exercise developed here demonstrated the potential of GIS to represent not only cartographic space, but also the sense of place of a region.