Identifying Troubles and Expectations of the Citizens Towards Their Habitat Based on PPGIS Approach

Citizens’ participation in evaluating the quality of the urban environment has recently gained momentum in urban planning practice. One of the promising approaches to address this task is the participatory mapping approach and one of the most established tools - public participation geoinformation systems (PPGIS). Based on the data coming from the study on the historic local area in St. Petersburg the paper shows the indicators to grasp citizens’ subjective perception of the habitat, their troubles, and their expectations. The results session presents the mapping of the items of the habitat which have subjective value - everyday places and routes, favorite and disliked places, places to change and to preserve, spatial analysis of their distribution and its objective environmental characteristics, and correlation analysis of their colocation against each other. Besides the analysis of the typology of the citizens’ expressed expectations towards the changes in their habitat is considered and interpreted. The conclusions section sums up the methodological advantages of exploring the subjective quality of the habitat with PPGIS as well as findings on the discovered items of the habitat. The discussion section reflects upon the constraints in using PPGIS toolkit for the studies on the habitat and outlines its further perspectives.