Digital Place Narratives and Content Analysis in Tourism Research

The aim of this article is to introduce content analysis in the field of social research on tourism. Among other techniques, content analysis has undergone a revitalisation and acceleration in recent years, especially following a process of digitalisation and the spread of blogs, websites, social media, online reviews and digital spaces in which it is possible to comment, release content and express one’s own opinion, making the information available directly on the web increasingly numerous. On the basis of these premises, the aim of this article is to provide the reader with a definition of the technique by tracing, some specificities and useful characteristics. Subsequently, it will outline the difference between the quantitative and qualitative approaches to content analysis by examining the digital scenario and its particularities, especially the kind of digital data of which it makes use. Finally, it will offer a practical example of its application to the analysis of tourism narratives in digital spaces, centred on Quartieri Spagnoli in Naples. The example will be used in order to show how this technique could be a solution for specific cognitive objectives that are increasingly fitting in the production of tourism studies which adopt digital data in even more articulated designs that may involve a combination of different techniques

Tensions between Top-Down and Bottom-Up Processes in the Renewal and Regeneration Interventions in Naples

This paper provides some insights contributing to the governance processes toward the creation of a future urban agenda of the city of Naples. In line with this purpose, the paper focuses on the phenomenon of urban renewal and regeneration and how top-down or bottom-up processes interact through the shaping of empty spaces, here generically defined urban voids. The transformation processes that would affect urban and social processes inevitably have to face up with some tensions that consist of claims about a range of socio-spatial “rights to the city” (Lefebvre, 1996). It is, more generally, the right to experience the spaces of the city, to feel part of them, to feel themselves responsible for them, and above all to manage these spaces. However, the set of urban and social conflicts, which generally involves citizens, inhabitants, movements, governments, but also other institutions, generate specific clusters that fight on oppositional goal in the ultimate aim of revealed or undermined the legitimacy of local city governance. In this sense, urban and social conflicts can be both understood as a negotiation of authority, prevalence, and strength of the images of cities and the development trajectories that emerge from the vision assessed by the different groups that experience the city life. Since Naples is a large and complex metropolitan city—transgressive and full of conflictual dynamics—it is difficult to talk about its dynamics in manage the local governance of spaces and way of experience life in these spaces. Taking into account this reflection, with the intent to understand some complex phenomena that modify appearance and character of the city space, the aim of this paper is to give a sense, a shape and a dimension to specific urban and social processes that directly affect local city governance. These phenomena are renewal and regeneration experiences—both in urban and social sense—linked to the actions of a multiplicity of actors that implements top-down and bottom-up interventions on the city space interact through the shaping of empty spaces here generically defined urban voids. For return the considered complexity, this study uses a visual methodology to investigate the fragmented space of mining behind the analysed processes. The implemented technique go through the collection of data on renewal and regeneration processes by mapping these starting from a series of interviews to key informers involved in these processes and from them particular perception of events, dynamics and use, reuse and meaning attributed to the city space. Through this technique, it is growing a general spatial reasoning about the images of the city that the multiplicity of local actors have in mind. What arise from this way of reasoning are contrasting and very different points of view of city perceived as fragmented in many specific sections affected by dissimilar degree of urban void connotation. The collected result allows us to conceptualize a typological scheme of future development trajectories for the city. In addition, a step forward to the constituted typology is to go in depth on a specific part of the city, in order to understand more closely the local dynamics shaping local governance: the Old Town. After the presentation of this specific case, what it is reached are open questions rather than real conclusions that helping in shape the research lines on which forthcoming attention is needed in the desire to develop a more articulated discourse aimed at creating a Future Urban Agenda for Naples. Moreover, all these elements can become useful instruments through whom it can be possible to learn from the urban and social conflicts and dynamics, from the practice of governance and from the struggles of everyday urban and social life

Urban Voids: renewal and regeneration experiences in Naples

City and society, by definition unstable, constantly redefine the relation between places and actors, generating frequently critical circumstances that are addressed by only temporary solutions. The unexpected and uncontrolled social conditions and lifestyles build new geographies and centres. The activities of dismantlement, degradation, reuse, abandonment, and land use, continuously blend materials and relationships and requires rethinking the methods of describing the city and defining a new grammar of representation closer to the contemporary space, materials, actors, and relationship. Focusing on experiences of renewal, regeneration and recycle, the objective of this exploratory study is to investigate their different impacts in a well-known complex urban system as Naples. The study emphases on the urban and social dimensions, favouring a descriptive and visual perspective from those who experience life in the city, considering the processes implemented by local actors and the reactions of inhabitants to these processes. In fact in Naples, despite its critical conditions, it is possible to trace signals indicating small informal practices of reuse in vacant or ruined areas, as well as existing small-scale clustering processes to re-adapt single buildings or spaces for new uses. So, this study uses an innovative methodology to investigate this emerging implied writing as a set of latent questions and needs expressing renewal, regeneration and recycle phenomena. Through this technique, we will focus on the images of the city and its development trajectories

Editoriale - Abitare la crisi della casa: strategie e significati dell’informalità abitativa in Italia.

L’abitare informale è da tempo un tema di particolare interesse per il dibattito accademico sulla città e lo sviluppo urbano – tanto da diventare oggetto di numerosi studi nell’ambito delle scienze sociali che ne discutono a partire da lavori sulla povertà, le condizioni di vita e i meccanismi di esclusione sociale, fino a far esplodere queste argomentazioni in ricerche su temi come la (ri)produzione di marginalità abitativa, i modelli spaziali di frammentazione socio-economica legati alla casa e l’accesso diseguale al welfare abitativo (Waibel, 2016). In modo particolare, gli studi sulle forme e i significati dell’abitare informale in Italia si sono tradizionalmente concentrati sull’autocostruzione abusiva di immobili considerata un elemento strutturante dello sviluppo urbano del paese e un canale informale di accesso alla proprietà (Coppola, 2013; Cellamare, 2010; Cremaschi, 1990). Di più recente formazione è, invece, il dibattito sulle occupazioni di alloggi e stabili a fini abitativi che sembrano disegnare le geografie di un fenomeno altrettanto consolidato dentro il sistema di welfare abitativo italiano (Grazioli & Caciagli, 2018; Belotti & Annunziata, 2018). Intermini generali, potremmo definire il fenomeno delle occupazioni abitative come un insieme di pratiche di ‘auto-abitazione’ – non solo devote alla auto-costruzione fuori dall’iter legale, ma anche relative a pratiche di auto-appropriazione a fini abitativi – messe in atto da quote di popolazione soggette a dinamiche di espulsione dal mercato (pubblico e privato) della casa che assumono la forma tanto di azioni collettive che di iniziative promosse da singoli soggetti (per sé stessi o per i loro nuclei familiari)

Europa e nuove direzioni di welfare tra autonomia e convergenza: il modello mixed method nell'analisi delle politiche sociali

The contemporary scene of European social policies identifies two precise lines of development. The first is the convergence with the tendency of national contexts towards a unitary system, the European welfare, that comes from the Europeanization process and from the rules of subsidiarity and activation rules concerning the elaborations of the social sciences. As for the second, if we could penetrate deeply into the micro-dimension we could recognize the need to observe the welfare conformations in their local connotation. A European welfare scission, as a unitary system, is what occurs, under the pressure of autonomy and the push to a locally governed welfare system, the local net welfare. The purpose of the work is to outline a new welfare system typology, macro-oriented, but without underestimating the micro dimension, which continues to be very important as concerns the tendency toward communitary integration and the different forms that it wears assumes in different countries and in the local contests of the 27 countries of Europe. We talk about a new model that does not diminish the classifying ability of traditional ones, but attempts to reveal their hard to detect details

Ethnography and the digital scenario: a typological scheme of differences and evolutionary trajectories

The ethnographic method has been a feature of the social sciences since its inception, and for some disciplines, it is markedly characterised by a strong aptitude for physical field research over extended periods in circumscribed communities. However, with the advent of the digital age, this process has undergone further acceleration, upsetting and partly undermining the solid assumptions on which the ethnographic method had been formed, precisely because in the digital scenario, the assumptions of boundaries of contexts, the agency of scenario and the need for a long-term field investigation change radically. This conceptual analysis aims at providing an overview of the trajectory of the evolution of ethnographic studies in social sciences by trying to trace the main pillars of change and the future direction of the method

European Integration and Europeanization Processes in Welfare Systems: A Comparative Analysis with Typological Purpose

European Integration and Europeanization processes in social field are the focus of the analysis here proposed. Starting from the social implications and from the effects that the different European welfare regimes have on them, it will be shown a possible re-arrangement of the differences within the various regimes, as well as of their relationships and their new characterizations. The aim is highlight the dual thrust between Europeanization and decentralization of social policy in some European countries, which are considered as a guidance of specific welfare regimes, in order to understand at what level of governance the decisions that shape this area can be attributed. However, the analysis involved five Nations (Italy, Germany, France, Spain and United Kingdom) and ten local contexts, two for each Nation (Milan and Naples, Berlin and Munich, Paris and Rouen, Barcelona and Vigo, London and Liverpool). What result is a comparative geographic and policy analysis based on a mixed methods approach intended as a merge of quantitative and qualitative approaches, techniques and tools. The analysis contemplates jointly the study of supranational, national and subnational directions, but also the study of local dynamics concerning the spread of specific: models of implementation, kind of decision-making processes in social policies and type of regimes that this decision generates. The structure of the study is growing both in macro perspective (through multivariate and multi-level analysis of social indicators and subsequent cluster analysis) as well as in the micro perspective (through the analysis of projects in different local contexts and in particular by applying impact, implementation and comparative network analysis). The conclusion was the realization of a general model of interpretation and classification of the changes occurred in the different European welfare regimes

Russian-Ukraine war and institutional use of memetic communication: methodological opportunities and challenges

The paper aims to explore the contents conveyed by internet memes (IM) in relation to the Russia-Ukraine conflict, analysing their ability to widely spread the message through forms of communication including irony, satire and denigration. The analysis of memes raises important epistemological and methodological challenges ranging from data collection to automatic or semi-automatic analysis techniques

Tourism Planning and Tourism Development in the Italian Inner Areas:Assessing Coherence in Policy-Making Strategies

The purpose of this chapter is, thus, to contribute to the extant studies on tourism development as a component of local development policies, through amixed research strategy, at the intersections of the qualitative and quantitative traditions.More specifically, we contribute to this debate by constructing a theoretical space on which the planning documents produced by SNAI’s 22 pilot inner areas can be properly classified in order to assess the coherence with respect to their goals. This theoretical space was built on the basis of a literature review carried out through an anthropological lens, highlighting the role of communities and their cultures in bottom-up, placebased, and participative policy-making strategies. This review stresses the necessity of studying policy narratives to effectively categorise planned tourism interventions within the intersections between different policy approaches (spatially bling vs. place-based) and tourism development possibilities (based on emergent or existing resources). Hence, within the tradition of socio-statistical methods, we perform a content analysis of the planning documents using textual statistics techniques

The Digital Role in Building Public Profiles of Political Actors

In the middle of an era characterized by continuous electoral campaigns and by the personalization of politics contained in the better-known platform society, our paper aims to shed light on the planning dynamics and practices carried out inside and outside the Net by those political actors in charge of the local election arena. Which factors related to political networks push individuals to run for a political position? What are the biographies, cultural and local relations of the territories they run for? What are the differences between political competitors in terms of the digital competence needed for campaign communication and promotion? The research design focuses on a specific case study shaped on the last local election in Naples. Through the study of the political biographies of the candidates, a framework analysis was conducted on press releases, aiming to understand the inferred narration of the election and a content analysis conducted on their official social media sources to comprehend the self-building political narratives of the observed candidates. This study aims to create a clear categorization of candidates, to understand the current digital customs adopted by political actors to draw and define their own political strategies