Finding multi-centers: Using crowd-sourcing technologies to define communities of landscape architecture.

摘要

This paper presents findings from website-based analytics identifying social and geographic topic hotspots within the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design. Three crowd-sourced surveys are utilized to record thousands of user's topic interests and pinpoint locations on a global scale. Topics include projects, research, visualization, sustainability, and competitions within architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design. The surveys also identify user locations, topics of interest, day and time of contact, social sharing, and user demographics. The goal of the research is to understand the online social structure and responses of groups involved with developing the built environment. These professionals influence future development on a global scale. Findings from the crowd-sourced surveys suggest that: · The social process of making meanings through social media knowledge exchange facilitates multi-centered geospatial social groupings according to topical interests. · Similar social groups topical interests vary by geo-location suggesting place- based meaning formation · Traditional groups of planners, architects, and landscape architects share degrees of common topical interests related to competitions, projects, and research topics. The paper also provides a series of case studies showing the possibilities of social network analysis for landscape architecture, planning, urban design, and architecture.