Paper short abstract:

In our everyday lives, we mobilise images of places in order to move along in the city and to make decisions. To gain understanding about how an image of a neighbourhood comes into being and how it performs citizens' lives,I use a methodological dispositive based on photo-walk and photo-elicitation.

Paper long abstract:

In our everyday lives, we mobilise images of places - or mental geographies of places we like or dislike - in order to move along in the city and to make decisions (e.g. about where to live, where to walk at night and so on). In this paper, the notion of image refers to a set of features (e.g. visual, emotional, socio-demographic, or functional) and meanings that one can associate with a place (or in this case with a neighbourhood), when it is about identifying its reputation, namely its symbolic value. In order to gain understanding about how an image of a neighbourhood comes into being, particularly when it is negotiated within a group, and how it performs citizens' lives, I use a qualitative methodological dispositive based on photo-walk and photo-elicitation. Therefore, in this research with families living in different neighbourhoods of the city of Geneva, I aimed at tackling the following questions: how do families characterize or qualify the neighbourhoods in which they live? What features or criteria do families use to identify their own neighbourhood with regard to the others? How does their everyday practice of this place play a role in the way they assemble and negotiate an image? What kind of pictures do they want to communicate (to the researcher) through the visual material? And what kind of image do they want to communicate during the interviews?