What Role Do Urban Parks Play in Forming a Sense of Place? Lessons for Geodesign Using Social Media

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

I found this research on the role of urban parks in shaping a sense of place exciting and clearly explained. Generated information is used from a specific social media platform that could be easily accessed by other researchers who would like to perform the same research for their locations. The methodology is properly defined to reach the aim of the paper and to reveal multiple facets of the sense of place associated with urban parks, as well as to underscore the significance of diverse park features, accessibility, and size in bolstering place attachment. This research also demonstrates the potential for geoinformation analysis in a geodesign process as a cost-effective and scalable approach for understanding the person-place connection. Results presented that social media data offers a valuable resource for geodesign by providing insights into the people-place bond and territoriality in urban areas. Conclusions are properly developed, suggesting possible further research.

The English language is easy to understand. Minor editing of the English language would be good.

Author Response

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Reviewer 2 Report

This is an interesting and informative paper: overall it merits publication.  I feel that the most substantive amendment might be reviewing the literature review section to enhance the critical/analytical commentary on the papers identified: at present this seems to be more a descriptive identification of relevant literature.

The methodology might also contain more commentary on the issues relating to using social media data, including possible self selection bias relating to those who choose to use - or not - such media, and overall characteristics (eg age, socio-economic grouping) of users.  Some of this is mentioned in the later discussion of limitations, but surely this is a methodological issue.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

On the whole this is well written and clear.  I have only minor comments and suggestions, contained on an annotated text which I have emailed to the MDPI editors.

Author Response

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Reviewer 3 Report

The paper addresses the problem of urban parks and their role in forming a sense of place – here the urban parks of Chicago. The authors have focused on its 3 dimensions: ‘person’, ‘place’ and ‘process’ reported by park users.

In their analysis the authors wanted to replace the traditional, well described methods (surveys, interviews and on-site observations) with low-cost, faster to obtain source of information – social media data-mining. They have arbitrarily chosen one of the social media platforms – Twitter.

The aim of the study was to verify the effectiveness of social media data in identifying a sense of place and to assess the role of urban parks in its forming.

The authors have chosen 30 parks out of the total 300 parks of Chicago, based o their popularity according to Yelp reviews (why this platform?) but they claim that they cover a full diversity of parks. Neither in the Methodology nor in the Results section there is a characteristic of these parks. In the Results section information appears that there are 6 types of parks in question. Their definition is not to be found in the Methodology section as well as a number of parks of each type.

The first information would be useful to better understand green space structure of Chicago and it would enable comparison from an international perspective. The second is important when interpreting statistics.

The manuscript is correctly structured. However, I have few suggestions which may help to improve it.

The parts of the Results section (e.g. lines 373-382, 408-411, 450-456) fit better to the Discussion.

The figures are incorrectly signed (it is figure number 7 but not again number 6).

 

As far as the Results section is concerned, the figures 6, 7 and 8 lack the p-values. The authors only mention that the differences are significant (e.g. line 338).

In the Discussion section there is the statement: ‘regional parks show a relatively positive association with expression o the sense of nature (p=0.17)’ - this data are not to be found in the Results.

 

The authors correctly identified the study limitation, namely demographic bias or no distinction possible between local inhabitants’ opinion and visitors’ from other regions or abroad opinion, which may be of importance when talking about a sense of place. So they declared that their method of data obtaining is a supplementary tool to gain information for geodesign.

 

The conclusions contain the answers to the questions posed as the aim of the study.

The manuscript is correctly referenced.

Author Response

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