PLATIAL’21: International Symposium on Platial Information Science

15–17 December 2021
Online / hosted by ITC, University of Twente, the Netherlands

Places Across Cultures

People “live” and constitute places every day through recurrent practices and experience. Both agency and experience are rooted in cultural embeddings that vary across different world regions. The complexity this entails requires researchers to investigate the concept of place through a variety of cultural lenses. The formal representation of place in GIScience is no exception and can only be successfully addressed if we consider geographical, psychological, linguistical, sociological, cognitive, and other perspectives taking account of cultural specificities.

How can we represent not only place but also its cultural aspects? How can we be more inclusive when conceptualising place to also include marginalised communities? Is it even possible to find structures of place that extend beyond cultural anchoring? These and other related questions will be addressed at PLATIAL’21 and have led us to this year’s motto “Places across cultures”. We hope to bring together place-based researchers from different disciplines to discuss the current state of theoretical and applied platial research.

We welcome submissions of papers on the following topics:

  • Which approaches of place representation exist in various disciplines?
  • How can existing theoretical approaches of platial representation from different disciplines be integrated towards a unified notion of place?
  • How can we move forward the integration of platial information with GIS?
  • What are suitable strategies for addressing the subjectivity inherent to platial information?
  • What roles should uncertainty and fuzziness play in platial theories?
  • In which ways can places be visualised, in particular at multiple scales?
  • Which novel perspectives (e.g., with respect to academic progress, practical applications, methodological frameworks) does place-based analysis provide?
  • How can we demonstrate the practical usefulness of place-based information by means of examples and in comparison to spatial information?
  • (Further topics are welcome if they fit the overall theme of this symposium.)

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