General information
Code: V5-1732
Period: 1.4.2018 - 31.3.2019
Project leader at FDV: prof.dr. Marjan Hočevar
Research activity: Social sciences
Abstract
Research into public (people’s) values about the natural and built environment is one of the key contextual instruments for understanding social changes and guiding society’s development. The problems in the environment indeed always reflect the social conditions, while spatial problems per se exist only exceptionally. People’s value patterns about dwelling and their (individual) “opinionated ideas” about land use and environment management should be a guidance principle in the elaboration of spatial strategies and the long-term planning of interventions into space at the local, regional, national, and European levels. During the transition to a post-modern (and globalized) society, society’s complexity constantly increases, intensifying diverse questions about the legitimacy of the interventions into space. Due to the necessary formal procedures, people often perceive spatial planning as out of touch with everyday life and restrictive. Spatial regulations, aimed at creating order and ensuring development as envisaged, can hardly satisfy people’s very diverse interests, in particular their increasingly individualized needs for space and in space. It is therefore necessary to find a kind of modus vivendi between integrative and differential principles in spatial planning. The research project is to continue, update, and complement in contents and methods the longitudinal public opinion monitoring of values, opinions, and ideas about the natural and built environment of a representative sample of the adult population of Slovenia in the 2003-2018 period. The first survey was carried out by the project applicant – the Centre for Spatial Sociology (CSS) of the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana – as part of the Targeted Research Project “Slovenia's competitiveness 2001-2006”. The field research was carried out from March to May 2004. The key question was how to reconcile common social, i.e. public, developmental objectives with people’s individual, personal values. To this purpose, land use and long-term spatial development should correspond as much as possible to the needs of the people, local communities, and the national spatial strategy, as this would facilitate an integrative disposition towards the emerging European spatial order and Europe’s environmental principles of nature-friendly development. The present research, the second public opinion survey of values, focuses on a more detailed identification of the (dis)agreements between the national spatial strategies and the growing reflexivity of individuals concerning environmental opinions and approaches to land use. We will therefore develop a more accurate measurement instrument for analyzing the anticipated changes in the population's preferences for dispersed or contiguous settlement. We further aim to explicitly examine how compatible people’s values about dwelling are with Slovenia’s (and the EU’s) long-term strategic development towards a more contiguous settlement system. The shifts in the value patterns of Slovenia’s population will be examined in relation to the trends of accelerated social differentiation in space, and the newly emerging life styles of dwelling, work, mobility, and leisure. Life styles are directly related to the phenomenon of the spatial contextualization of entrepreneurship and a sharing economy, along with newly emerging patterns of environmental awareness and spatial management. We anticipate changes in people’s value patterns towards a more rational, economical, and flexible use (exploitation) of both their personal as well as public spatial resources, based on the findings of the first research, where we definitely registered powerful traditional, static, and non-mobile principles of territorial affiliation. Simultaneously, we will try to establish how the mobility values of the Slovene population correspond to the European (and global) trends, established in their research projects by researchers elsewhere. Furthermore, we will empirically evaluate recent sociological, conceptual premises about a long-term strengthening of social fluidity and the importance of mobility capital in a risk society.
Research Organisation
http://www.sicris.si/public/jqm/prj.aspx?lang=eng&opt=2&subopt=403&hits=1&id=17078&search_term=V5-1732
Researchers
http://www.sicris.si/public/jqm/prj.aspx?lang=eng&opt=2&subopt=402&hits=1&id=17078&search_term=V5-1732
Citations for bibliographic records
http://www.sicris.si/public/jqm/prj.aspx?lang=eng&opt=2&subopt=400&hits=1&id=17078&search_term=V5-1732
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