RAM Colloquium with Dr Albert Acedo

When social researchers talk about place, they mainly refer to contexts, environments, and social artefacts derived from the cognitive idea of home, neighbourhood, town, city or country. Conversely, scholars from Geographical Information Science (GIScience) often quantitatively read the place-based knowledge through user-generated data embedded in administrative boundaries and other geometric representations. This epistemological disconnection is nourishing the lack of a unified, combined, targeted agenda among related disciplines to formalise place-based knowledge. This talk presents an overview of Dr Acedo’s research developed during the last five years in moving closer social and GIScience fields in the urban context in order to unleash the benefits of formalising and combining both. Moreover, he will discuss his perspective on the big lines ahead to move the topic of place further in GIScience and adjoining areas towards a holistic approach. The understanding of the place-based urban landscape could reveal novel perspectives and mechanisms to advance the knowledge of key socio-spatial urban processes and challenges, and hence provide theoretical end empirical frameworks for the potential development of place-based research in other academic disciplines.