Digital Walking Tours to Assess Place Attachment

From 2021 to 2024, the University Centre of the Westfjords (UW) was part of the international research project called CliCNord (Climate Change Resilience in Small Communities in the Nordic Countries). Our Academic Director, Matthias Kokorsch, was the project leader for the Icelandic CliCNord team. With the funding that the project received, Matthias was able to hire three students in the Coastal Communities and Regional Development master’s program at UW as research assistants. All three master’s students conducted their master’s thesis research within their projects with CliCNord.

While the last thesis was defended in the fall thesis defense season, the two other theses got published as academic journal articles.

One of them is Frances Simmons‘ thesis, which got published in Land, an international and cross-disciplinary, peer-reviewed, open access journal on land system science, landscape, soil and water, urban study, land–climate interactions and more. The article is titled ‘Digital Walking Tours as a Tool for Assessing Place Attachment and Community Responses to Regional Environmental Change’.

In her research, Francis assessed place attachment in a Patreksfjörður during the pandemic and avalanche risk using an innovative method: digital walking interviews. Understanding how a community feels about their surroundings is essential for good land-use planning and managing disaster risks that fit with local needs. Frances' study looked at how researchers can measure these feelings, highlighting the importance of getting meaningful input from the community. Frances faced several challenges when planning her case studies, such as COVID-19 restricting her from meeting people in person and the threat of avalanches made travelling difficult in addition. To work around this, she created “digital walking tours” as a substitute for traditional methods, using tools like online video calls and the Icelandic StreetView. The link to Frances’ research article can be found here: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/land

This project has received funding from the NordForsk Nordic Societal Security Programme under Grant Agreement No. 97229 and from Byggðastofnun – the Icelandic Regional Development Institute