Programme

10:00–10:20

Welcome note

10:20–11:00

Paper Session I: Place and power

Places as social-geographical arenas of participation, resistance, and commons-based transformation
Andreas Koch, Paris Lodron University of Salzburg, AT

This contribution discusses the growing importance of social-geographical places as local arenas of participation, resistance, inclusion, and socio-ecological transformation. Against the backdrop of commodification, political centralization, and territorialization, places are conceptualized not as static containers but as relational assemblages constituted through material, social, and discursive practices. Drawing on theories of the commons, municipalism, communitarianism, and participatory economies, the paper argues that local places can foster collective autonomy, interdependence, and democratic commitment through decentralized, commons-oriented forms of organization. Commons are understood as practices of collective self-management that partially detach social reproduction from market logics while strengthening solidarity and participation. The theoretical framework is empirically illustrated through agritourism initiatives in Albania, which demonstrate how locally embedded yet trans-locally connected networks can contribute to sustainable rural development. The article concludes that places function as micropolitical laboratories in which alternative forms of living, producing, and governing can be experimented with and institutionalized.

Platial divergence in sacrifice zones: between governance-produced and experienced place
Víctor Cobs-Muñoz, TU Dortmund University, DE

Sacrifice zones are territories subjected to severe environmental degradation and social injustice, where harm persists despite the presence of formal governance frameworks. Scholarship on place-based stigma has shown how negative reputations are produced, consolidated, and sustained through representational processes. This paper argues that sacrifice zones involve a different and undertheorised form of platial distortion: governance institutions do not stigmatise affected territories but actively constitute them as governable objects through thresholds, plans, jurisdictions, and categories, rendering harm administratively manageable whilst delegitimising community knowledge of the same territory. Platial divergence is introduced as a concept for naming the structural gap between this governance-produced place and the place as experienced, documented, and contested by affected communities. Drawing on the Critical-realist Environmental Justice framework, the paper demonstrates that four real-dimension structural factors function as place-constituting operations. The argument is illustrated through Quintero-Puchuncaví, Chile, and a mechanism-oriented research agenda is proposed.

11:00–11:20

Coffee break

11:20–12:00

Paper Session II: Platial decision support

From spatial to platial decision support in planning – collecting platial experiences of wellbeing
Dominik Kremer, Leibniz Insitute for Regional Geography, Leipzig, DE
Lisa Lehnen, University of Würzburg, DE
Nils Karges, University of Würzburg, DE
Peter Zeile, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, DE
Richard Lemoine-Rodriguez, University of Würzburg, DE; DLR, DE
Jürgen Rauh, University of Würzburg, DE
Matthias Gamer, University of Würzburg, DE
Marco Schmidt, University of Würzburg, DE
Gunther Gust, University of Würzburg, DE
Birgit Sperlich, University of Würzburg, DE
Ariane Droin, University of Würzburg, DE
Ninja Schulz, University of Würzburg, DE
Carolin Biewer, University of Würzburg, DE
Hannes Taubenböck, DLR, DE; University of Würzburg, DE

This paper proposes a shift toward platial decision support in urban planning by integrating subjective experiences of wellbeing into digital planning frameworks. Building on the concepts of salutogenesis, therapeutic landscapes, and person-place relations, we introduce a methodological framework for a Platial Decision Support System (PDSS) that combines multimodal, place-based data streams. Using the mobile app SpaceLog, we collected geo-referenced text, image, and audio data from 59 participants across several urban locations in Würzburg, Germany. The exploratory study demonstrates how multimodal analysis can reveal nuanced differences in the ways individuals experience and negotiate urban places, even where conventional wellbeing ratings and structural parameters appear similar. Rather than replacing participatory planning, the PDSS framework supports early-stage screening and interpretation by identifying context-sensitive wellbeing dynamics and potential planning conflicts. The approach contributes to more reflexive and human-centred urban transformation processes.

Integrating platial information into urban digital twins for improved urban decision-making
Garika Ujianik Pristiwati, TU Dortmund University, DE

Urban digital twins (UDTs) are increasingly developed to support urban decision-making and address complex urban challenges. However, UDTs primarily rely on quantitative data and methods to create digital replicas and simulate “what if” scenarios, which is insufficient for urban decision-making. Integrating platial, which reflects human experiences and meanings associated with places, can help address this limitation. This paper examines how platial information can be integrated into UDTs through several ways and diverse place representations, drawing on use cases from the UDT Munich project. The findings identify practical modalities to integrate platial information, including VR, AR, gamification, and multimodal digital participation platforms. These approaches can enhance urban decision-making by enabling more inclusive participation, more focused and effective communication, as well as a richer and better understanding of urban issues.

12:00–13:00

Lunch break

13:00–14:00

Paper Session III: Mediating place

Place distortion begins in the prompt
Ilya Ilyankou, University College London, UK
Stefano Cavazzi, Ordnance Survey, UK
James Haworth, University College London, UK

Conversational interfaces let users ask not just about places but for text set in and about places: stories, jokes, reviews, posts. These requests do not retrieve place facts but commission a representation, with the risk of idealisation, cliché, and stigmatisation. We treat user prompts themselves as platial artefacts, classifying 1,941 place-grounded writing prompts from real user–chatbot conversations along two dimensions: the form requested and the lens it carries. The lens is largely fixed by the form: utilitarian forms (emails, reports, letters) are almost always neutral, while jokes, reviews, and social media posts carry strong idealisation or stigmatisation, set by the form’s purpose. Some of this pattern is built into our scheme, since we read lens from the place-form pairing itself, so the results are indicative rather than definitive; their value lies in showing how often users request non-neutral forms, and which geographies attract each lens. The representational risk of generative geography begins with what people ask for, not only with how models answer.

Place-as-a-Service: a meta-framework for mediation-aware place representation
Vivek Krishnan, Leibniz Institute of Ecological and Regional Development, Dresden, DE

Place is widely held to resist unambiguous definition and is instead operationalized through selective representations that highlight certain attributes while foreclosing others. Such operationalizations are not incorrect but partial by design and they remain incommensurable. This paper introduces Place-as-a-Service (PlaaS), a post-phenomenological meta-framework that treats this partiality as a defining feature to be made legible rather than a deficiency to be solved. This paper presents the first of three phases of PlaaS development: a branch-level classification of place operationalizations drawn from an umbrella review of three systematic reviews in GIScience. The corpus divides into a dominant semantic-ontological core and a separate critical-participatory cluster that bypasses formalization, surfacing the formal-experiential gap that the broader PlaaS framework sets out to bridge.

Urban space through different lenses: comparing large language models and participatory mapping
Markus Schaffert, Mainz University of Applied Sciences, DE

With the growing popularity of generative artificial intelligence, place-based narratives of cities produced by large language models are gaining traction. However, it remains unclear how such algorithmically developed representations relate to human perceptions and experiences of urban space. Against this background, this paper compares “typical places” generated by large language models with data collected through participatory mapping by university students, using the city of Mainz as a case study. The analysis reveals a distinct difference: While large language models tend toward reproducing a stereotypical “postcard city” based on iconic landmarks, the students’ depictions are more grounded in lived experience. Iconic landmarks are also present in their responses, but they appear alongside places shaped by everyday use and socially assigned meanings. These findings underline the need to critically examine algorithmically generated urban images and to explore how they could be more closely connected with lived urban realities. In this way, future applications of AI in the field of city branding could go beyond simplified and selective representations of cities and contribute to a more inclusive urban environment.

14:00–14:30

Buffer and walking

14:30–15:30

Excursion I

Sattler-Panorama, Orangerie, Mirabell Palace

We will visit Johann Michael Sattler’s ‘Salzburg Panorama’, which was painted between 1825 and 1829. The painting, which is 25 metres long and 5 metres high, is a unique representation of Salzburg.

15:30–16:00

Coffee break

16:00–17:30

Workshop I

Place representation
Space & Place LAB, Paris Lodron University of Salzburg, AT

Place is represented in many contexts: when discussing the interior design of our homes or planning a neighbourhood; when reading geographical journal articles, daily newspapers, or crime novels; and when looking at photographs and paintings. There are a number of mechanisms for representing place, but these are neither widely known nor usually reflected upon.

This workshop aims to
i) provide an idea about place representation,
ii) create the insight that place representation is more than ‘X represents P’, and
iii) learn about the Corpus of Place Representations (COPR) as a methodological tool.

18:45 until late

Symposium dinner at Sternbräu
(address: Griesgasse 23, 5020 Salzburg)

09:00–10:00

Keynote I

Naming, shaming and blaming: the formation and production of place-based stigma
Alice Butler-Warke, University of Reading, UK

The stigmatisation of place has far‑reaching effects on the lives of residents, shaping how communities are understood, governed, and lived. Over the past decade, growing scholarly attention has been paid to the formation of place‑based stigma. Drawing on my research on place-based stigma and the discursive construction of place, this keynote examines how negative reputations are produced, consolidated, and sustained. I begin by exploring processes of naming, showing how practices of ‘eponymisation’ distil complex communities or neighbourhoods into single, unidimensional attributes that become embedded within place names themselves. I then turn to shaming, revisiting my work on how negative social, moral, and cultural attributes come to be attached to particular places and populations. Finally, focusing on blaming, I consider how stigmatised spatial identities are entangled with wider cultural, social, and political–economic contexts, producing places as scapegoats for broader structural anxieties and inequalities. By illuminating the roles of naming, shaming and blaming in the reproduction of place-based stigma, I argue that understanding the depth and durability of platial stigmatisation requires a shift away from temporally fixed conceptions of place. Instead, I propose a more expansive, relational, and temporal framework that situates stigmatised places within longer histories and wider socio-political processes.

10:00–10:20

Coffee break

10:20–11:00

Paper Session IV: Toponyms as narratives

Places as narrative tropes in medieval Persian literature: place names and their connotations in Saadi’s Gulistan
Omid Reza Abbasi, Paris Lodron University of Salzburg, AT
Johannes Scholz, Paris Lodron University of Salzburg, AT

Saadi’s Gulistan (1258 CE) is one of the most important works of Persian literature, and for centuries has shaped how successive generations imagined distant lands, cities, and peoples. Based on 123 toponyms identified through close reading of the original Persian text, we show that Saadi employs 76 distinct place names carrying stereotypes, tropes, and symbolic associations that reflect the mental geography of the medieval Islamic world. Drawing on the distinction between location, locale, and sense of place, we show that most of these tropes operate primarily as sense of place, requiring no direct encounter with the physical location itself. The study connects Persian literary scholarship with works in place studies on how place is constructed and transmitted through narrative media.

Odonymic continuity and platial identity: the “glocal” street names of Attica, Greece
Seraphim Alvanides, TU Dortmund University, DE
Loukas Zonas, independent researcher, GR

We mostly take street names (odonyms) as given and rarely question their origin or even their legitimacy. Past sociological, linguistic, and geographical studies have focused on areas experiencing political turbulence and territorial change, resulting in various ruptures in the spatial and temporal continuity of street names. These ruptures have been extensively studied as they are depicted on the ideological tapestry of many cities and towns. However, few studies have looked into odonymic continuity, the factors resisting change and the potential effect on the platial identity of the areas and their residents. We analyse two municipalities in the western and four in the eastern parts of Attica (Greece) with very strong political identities that have been influenced by local, national, and international events. We conclude that the spatial patterning of street names reflects historical events at the local-global nexus that transcend competing ideologies and result in resilient platial identities for some of these areas.

11:00–11:20

Coffee break

11:20–12:00

Paper Session V: Place and movement

Towards a discourse analysis of place ballet
Franz-Benjamin Mocnik, Paris Lodron University of Salzburg, AT
Miriam Althammer, Paris Lodron University of Salzburg, AT

Understanding how places form requires analytical tools adequate to its complexity, yet the corresponding methodological repertoire remains underdeveloped. This paper proposes that place ballet – the interweaving of body ballets and time-space routines through which individuals collectively constitute place – can be understood as a discourse. Drawing on established approaches to discourse analysis, we examine the structural parallels between linguistic discourse and place ballet to then argue that discourse-analytical frameworks can be applied to the latter. On this basis, we outline a preliminary taxonomy of analytical dimensions – synchronic, diachronic, and structural – that capture the aspects of place ballet most pertinent to understanding how place is formed and experienced. We conclude by identifying two key questions for future work: the development of appropriate data elicitation strategies and a more precise account of how place ballet and place mutually constitute one another.

Spatiotemporal representations of collective runner sentiment: exploring senses of place through geo-narratives
Stella Harden, Simon Fraser University, CA
Nadine Schuurman, Simon Fraser University, CA

Individual runner experiences provide insight on environmental factors conducive for running. This study demonstrates a novel application of mixed methods to a crowdsourced data set of runners to explore collective sentiment and intimate associations with place. Users of the fitness app Strava (n = 137) were recruited to share activity history, including every run recorded on the platform and associated descriptions. Sentiment analysis quantified the underlying emotion expressed by runners for each activity, where -1 indicated extremely negative affect and +1 indicated extreme positive affect. The most polarised runs (< -0.5 and > +0.5) were aggregated into hexagonal bins and visualised in a GIS environment. Bivariate maps compare concentrations of highly positive and highly negative sentiment during weekday mornings and evenings for men and women, respectively. Selected geo-narratives are displayed alongside aggregated sentiment to contextualise some of the preliminary findings. The methods presented are generalisable to diverse crowdsourced data sets.

12:00–13:00

Lunch break

13:00–13:40

Paper Session VI: Framing place

Emily in Paris or Paris in Emily? On the reflexive relation between places and their portrayal
Jonas Faria Costa, Paris Lodron University of Salzburg, AT
Franz-Benjamin Mocnik, Paris Lodron University of Salzburg, AT

There exist many texts, photographs, maps, and further artefacts that are about places; they represent them. In many cases, such representations do not merely refer to a place but actively frame it, shaping or even co-constituting what the place is understood to be. This is particularly the case when it comes to stereotypical representations. This paper investigates how such back-reference comes into being and how it functions, using the Netflix series Emily in Paris as a central example. We argue that the series reinforces and circulates the stereotype of Paris as a ‘city of romance’, thereby influencing tourism, public discourse, and place-making more broadly. We then argue that the underlying mechanism is facetted and observable across a range of cases, for which we propose four categories, and discuss how this mechanism may be approached using different theoretical frameworks.

The trap of authenticity: factuality as a source of bias in open-air museums
Eugen Unterberger, Paris Lodron University of Salzburg, AT

Open-air museums generate a powerful illusion of historical authenticity through immersive place-making, yet their commitment to empirical factuality poses a critical dilemma. Traditional archives can hardly avoid silencing marginalized groups, given that they reflect historic power structures. Consequently, a strict adherence to archival ‘facts’ inadvertently materializes this erasure within the physical space. To resolve this, this paper proposes a methodological framework bridging Italian microhistory and Hartman’s critical fabulation. Rather than camouflaging structural gaps with unverified fiction or reproducing them through silent compliance, museums must curate the absence itself. By staging verified archival traces alongside transparently speculative narratives, institutions can dismantle systemic biases, transforming static exhibits into inclusive, self-reflexive places.

13:40–14:00

Buffer and walking

14:00–19:00

Excursion II

Salzburg Open-Air Museum

Open-air museums are designed to convey an authentic sense of place and thus house a variety of place representations. We will visit the nearby Salzburg Open-Air Museum, which houses a collection of more than a hundred buildings from the rural Salzburg region and the wider Alpine area.

09:00–10:00

Keynote II

Where culture takes place – perspectives from cultural geo-analytics
Andrea Ballatore, King’s College London, UK

Place and culture participate in a symbiotic exchange. Museums, festivals, libraries, and other cultural venues increasingly frame their work in terms of placemaking, participation, and local engagement. At the same time, places are continuously represented, compared, circulated, and imagined through pervasive digital media platforms, from Netflix series and travel vlogs, to search engines and large language models. Drawing on work carried out at the Cultural Geo-Analytics Lab at King’s College London, I will follow two complementary lines. Firstly, I will discuss how cultural and creative institutions influence place identities, attachments, perceptions, and economies, shaping highly uneven geographies between central hubs and vast peripheries. Then, I will turn to cultural representations of place in media, considering how places are depicted, ranked, and retrieved across platforms. Case studies from place ratings and search technologies illustrate how these dynamic, biased, and emergent media representations are essential in the construction (and contestation) of images of places at all scales, from entire continents to individual streets and cafés we frequent in our daily lives.

10:00–10:20

Coffee break

10:20–11:00

Paper Session VII: Overlooked people and places

Algorithmic backgrounding and platial distortion: how vision-based detection systems misrepresent informal urban places
Aveline Thomas, independent researcher, IN

Vision-based object detection systems increasingly shape how urban places become legible in planning and design contexts. In informal environments, the spatial configurations that give places their social meaning fall outside what such systems can register. This paper introduces algorithmic backgrounding to describe this condition: socially significant place configurations remain visually present yet analytically absent in machine vision outputs. The outcome is a specific form of platial distortion, one produced not by bias or misclassification but by the structural limits of object-based vision. A four-stage framework responds to this condition by repositioning detection outputs as partial place readings requiring community-informed interpretation. Two cases, Istanbul and Bengaluru, show how gaps between detection outputs and community-recognised place significance become productive entry points for analysis.

Wildfire evacuations and opioid overdose events in British Columbia: a spatial investigation of intersecting public health emergencies

Ashley D. Tegart, Simon Fraser University, CA
Nadine Schuurman, Simon Fraser University, CA
Kevin Hu, University of British Columbia, CA
Amanda Slaunwhite, University of British Columbia, CA; Provincial Health Services Authority, CA

People who use drugs are among the populations most vulnerable to the intersecting impacts of natural disasters and the ongoing overdose crisis. Wildfires and evacuation events may compound overdose vulnerability through displacement, disrupted access to harm reduction services, and psychological distress. Reliance on unfamiliar or increasingly toxic drug supplies during and following evacuation may further increase overdose risk, particularly within rural and remote communities with limited healthcare and harm reduction infrastructure. This study examined the spatiotemporal distribution of opioid overdose events associated with the 2021 wildfire evacuations across 28 municipalities in British Columbia, Canada. Results identified increases in overdose events following evacuation in seven communities, with most events clustered in urban centres. These findings suggest that wildfire evacuations may amplify existing overdose vulnerabilities and highlight an important intersection between the climate and overdose crises. Overdose increases were primarily urban but also observed in smaller communities, highlighting place-based variation.

11:00–11:20

Coffee break

11:20–12:00

Paper Session VIII: Meaning and semiotics

Resonance and its placial dimension: why meaning in life goes beyond agency
Joey Pexa, Paris Lodron University of Salzburg, AT

In analytic philosophy, definitions of what constitutes meaning in life have traditionally centred around agency. This article, in contrast, argues that putting emphasis on projects, contributions and similar acts of either shaping the world according to specific values or understanding the world’s intelligible structure, overlooks at least one fundamental type of meaning-making which is best understood by reference to place. Following German sociologist Hartmut Rosa, I reframe slightly the concept of resonance, accounting for non-agential yet meaningful human-environment interactions and thus bringing attention to a previously neglected matter. Moreover, to illustrate this point and show its placial dimension convincingly, I discuss the decisive influence Tipasa exercised on Albert Camus’s life trajectory when he visited its Roman ruins. Acknowledging these moments may, in addition to their intrinsic value, help narrative theories concerned with meaning-making and those who are interested in concepts like anti-meaning gain an interesting puzzle piece capable of filling some gaps in-between.

Bijouification of coal mining semiotics in the gentrified south of Essen
Isabelle Buchstaller, University of Duisburg-Essen, DE
Evelyn Ziegler, University of Duisburg-Essen, DE
Maida Kosatica, University of Duisburg-Essen, DE

Our project explores coal mining semiotics in the public landscape of Essen, in the Ruhr Area. We focus on a process of material preservation we refer to as “bijouification”, the artistic reproduction of industrial semiotics into chic and aesthetically appealing objects in rarified spaces of consumption. Photographs of such memorabilia as well as interviews with shop owners and customers lead us to conclude that commemorative tokens of the industrial past, via their indexical semiotics, serve place-making purposes. Owning, consuming and gifting tokens indexical of the heavy industry is a way to keep alive and celebrate the local industrial heritage. Engagement in bijouified commemoration seems to be especially relevant for people whose family histories contain no credible ties to Germany’s Ruhr Area, allowing wider publics to claim a place in the collaborative commemoration of local heritage while semiotically affirming their belonging in the ideological landscape of the here and now.

12:00–13:00

Lunch break

13:00–14:30

Workshop II

Can images be read as spatial evidence? Giant Saint Christopher and the construction of place in the medieval Alps

Michal Ozeri, Tel Aviv University, IL

How can visual culture help us reconstruct the spatial organization and lived experience of the premodern world? While spatial humanities have increasingly drawn on historical sources, medieval images remain an underutilized form of spatial evidence. This workshop proposes an art-historical methodology for reading images not simply as representations, but as documents that encode information about place, movement, visibility, landscape, and human experience.

14:30–15:00

Coffee break

15:00–16:00

Paper Session IX: Place experience

Children’s lived experience of place: insights from the Lle Llais Project on the Isle of Anglesey, North Wales
Paula Wood, Wrexham University, UK
Alec Shepley, Wrexham University, UK

This paper examines how the Lle Llais (Place of Voice) project contributes to place-based research by focusing on children’s lived experiences of place, contrasting them with dominant narratives that often depict idealisation, clichés, or stigmatisation. Through mixed-methods data from 253 children on the Isle of Anglesey, it investigates how children perceive place across cultural, linguistic, environmental, and social aspects. The results show that children develop complex, emotional understandings of place, highlighting feelings of belonging, safety, happiness, and a sense of quietness inside, which challenge overly simplistic external portrayals. The research highlights the importance of social and cultural capital, demonstrating how trauma-informed approaches through arts, and nature-based activities foster connection, friendship, wellbeing and collective identity. By integrating creative expression and place-based analysis, this study positions children as active contributors to platial knowledge and calls for more socially inclusive and grounded ways of representing place.

Stickiness: diasporic placemaking and the moving image as scribe
Jaeah Lee, Paris Lodron University of Salzburg, AT

Diasporic place has predominantly been theorized in spatial terms, as a gap negotiated between homeland and host society. Whether place is fixed to a ground or set in motion between grounds, such framings remain spatial, depending on coordinates given in advance to fix its meaning. This paper reframes diasporic place through time rather than space, proposing stickiness: a singular, unset adhesion in which the diasporic individual makes a place by holding to a world already made, present only as it is performed. The moving image, an art of duration rather than of instant, is shown to be the medium proper to this account. Through Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Mouth to Mouth and Pedro Costa’s In Vanda’s Room, the paper traces how cinematic operations embalm stickiness in time.

A photographic look into place experience by depicting place settings: a case for photo elicitation
Liudmila Slivinskaya, TU Dortmund University, DE

The paper presents reflections on the use of a photo elicitation method in our empirical study on place activities in a large prefabricated housing estate (‘Großwohnsiedlung’). We conducted walking interviews with long-term residents of Marzahn housing estate, located in Berlin, Germany, and collected pictures taken by the residents in the course of our walks. Our participants were asked to take pictures of physical settings linked with their activities in places. We share our conceptual and methodological reflections of using pictures to talk about place activities, and our notes on interpreting pictures together with open responses from the participants based on our experience of conducting the empirical study. We make a case how place experience can be approached through visual depictions of place settings, and how such depictions can be used in a methodologically sound way in qualitative in-depth studies on place experience from a phenomenological perspective.

16:00–16:20

Closing of the event