QUALITATIVE GIS AND SOCIAL JUSTICE IN THE URBAN MANAGEMENT

Multiculturalism and multi-ethnicity are increasingly transforming European cities: in this complexity, making right policies to guarantee the social justice and the quality of life is really difficult. More generally it’s an ethical problem. Society isn’t uniform, and to safeguard the multiplicity, giving all the citizens (women, children, strangers, young or old people) the same rights, we must change the way of making knowledge. Planners should adopt mixed methods (quantitative and qualitative) to analyse the urban context, and also representations should include all the citizens’ points of view, through new mapping systems. Traditional maps could be integrated with new typologies of drawings, like mental maps or similar, to be more inclusive and more representative of the reality. ICT and digital mapping systems like Geographical Information Systems (GIS) can represent a valid support for this new geographical vision: for example, touch screen devices could be used in the participatory processes to draw collective digital maps, as an interactive document for the local governments and for planners. The citizens’ needs can be expressed with the map’s language, as well as the political spatial decisions are drawn on the master plan. International researches about this theme have produced some interesting experiences of “qualitative GIS”, forced the traditional instrument’s limits, using mixed methods to include a multi-level interpretation of spatial context. In this way it’s possible to build a new territorial image, influencing the spatial perception and the hypothesis of future about the urban and regional development.