The Lisbons Within Lisbon: Participatory GIS for Identifying Urban Landscape Perception Patterns
Year: 2026
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Urban transformations are often measured through indicators such as housing prices, land use change, tourism pressure or demographic variation. These measures are essential, but they do not fully capture how people recognise, interpret and spatially experience change in the city. This thesis addresses that gap by developing and testing a participatory WebGIS methodology for collecting, structuring and analysing spatialised urban perceptions in Lisbon. The research asks how different social groups perceive Lisbon’s urban landscape, and where these perceptions converge or diverge across the city. The thesis brings together urban cognition, Public Participation GIS, Volunteered Geographic Information, platial information and social indicators research. To operationalise this framework, a custom WebGIS platform was developed to collect participant profiles and mapped perceptions across three themes: local identity, cultural decharacterisation and perceived cost. Participants could select features or draw free polygons, allowing the system to register both recognisable urban references and diffuse vernacular spatialities. The final analytical dataset consists of 100 valid participants and their participant-theme-geometry records. The spatial workflow connects the participatory interface to reproducible GIS analysis. Participant-generated geometries were transformed into complementary centroidbased and area-based measures on a hexagonal grid. Centroid-based outputs capture recurrence and spatial anchoring, while area-based outputs capture territorial extent and broader perceptual fields. These measures were analysed through KDE surfaces, Getis-Ord Gi* hotspots, Local Moran’s I clusters and outliers, and exploratory group comparisons. This design makes it possible to move from individual mapped inscriptions to interpretable collective geographies without severing the link between perception, theme, geometry and participant context. The results indicate that identity, cultural decharacterisation and perceived cost form overlapping but analytically distinct perceptual geographies. Historical and central Lisbon recur across the three themes, but the spatial patterns suggest different interpretative roles: identity is more closely associated with symbolic centralities and heritage references; cultural decharacterisation appears more spatially selective; and perceived cost tends to produce broader territorial patterns. Exploratory group comparisons further suggest that perception is socially mediated, although all contrasts are interpreted cautiously within the limits of a non-probabilistic sample. This research demonstrates how a transparent participatory WebGIS can bridge lived urban experience and spatial analysis. Its contribution lies in articulating theoretical framing, platform development, spatial database modelling and empirical GIS analysis into a reproducible protocol for treating urban perception as analysable spatial evidence.
Author: Corrêa, Raphael da Silva
Language: English
Subfield: Geography, Planning and Development
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7171761964