The Space & Place LAB focusses on questions related to a conceptual understanding of place and corresponding information about places (i.e., platial information). Among other things, we address the following questions:
- Which place concepts exist in the various disciplines, and how do they align?
- How does place relate to socially constructed space?
- What does it mean to represent a place?
- What is the role of platial information in place-making?
- What is the role of places in platial information?
- How can places be handled in information processing systems (i.e., platial information systems)?
Due to the complexity inherent to places and the importance of places for a wide range of disciplines, corresponding research must be multi and interdisciplinary in nature. This is why we utilize a variety of disciplinary lenses and combine these into interdisciplinary approaches. These approaches pose uncomfortable questions to existing attempts and critically scrutinize possible solutions, while establishing novel theory-based and empirically founded insights.
We are currently developing the Corpus of Place Representations in order to create an empirical basis for corresponding research. This corpus is currently in development and will be made available to researchers under an open licence at a later date.