Showing 1 - 2 of 2 Items

Date: 2024-03-20

Creator: Katharine Kurtz

Access: Open access

Cities need more green spaces to adapt to climate change and facilitate community resilience. However, successfully managing green spaces is challenging. City governments consistently employ top-down management practices that limit the benefits, usage, and perception of such spaces as Nature. Further, current management practices overlook socio-cultural factors important to residents. Using the existing categories of urban green spaces (UGS) and informal green spaces (IGS), this article situates the cultural practice prendersi cura as a way to conceptualize successful, bottom-up green space management. The term prendersi cura, meaning “to take care of” in Italian, emerged through interviews in Perugia, Italy, and reflects the socio-ecological value of IGS and the disconnect between residents and city-managed UGS. This study employed mixed methods, combining 10 weeks of participant observation, 13 interviews, and GIS analysis to understand the relationship between Perugians and their green spaces. Results indicate that interviewees did not describe city-supported UGS (i.e. top-down green spaces like parks or historic gardens) as Nature, even if they were areas of dense vegetation and recognized by the City of Perugia in GIS analyses. In contrast, interviewees described IGS (i.e. community gardens, vacant lots, or potted plants) that were unrecognized in city GIS visualizations as Nature, indicating a stronger attachment to green spaces when interviewees had active roles in their management or witnessed community-based management practices. This paper demonstrates the importance of managing green spaces through a socio-ecological framework that considers user perceptions and cultural values. To allow greening initiatives to reach their full potential, it is critical to embrace local values and participation in management practices.

Date: 2023-01-01

Creator: Nothando Khumalo

Access: Open access

The present thesis, written in Italian, explores the emotional psyche and narrative order embedded within the ballads of the Decameron, a renowned literary masterpiece by Giovanni Boccaccio. Leveraging the advancements in stylometry and natural language processing techniques, this research aims to convince medieval Italian literature scholars to produce more on scholarship of the ballads and uncover the intricate patterns of human emotions and narrative organization in the ballads. The study begins by establishing a comprehensive corpus of ballads from the Decameron, utilizing digital libraries and text repositories. Subsequently, using stylometric analysis, the research examines the linguistic and stylistic features that distinguish the brigata’s ballads, focusing on elements such as vocabulary, syntax, and rhyme scheme. These analyses enable the identification of authorial patterns, shedding light on the emotional expressions and narrative techniques employed by Boccaccio. A natural language processing model was used to predict authorship of the ballads using each of the brigata’s novelle as training data. The findings of this research contribute to a deeper understanding of the emotional and narrative purpose of the Decameron's ballads. Results of stylometric analysis allowed for new characterization of Panfilo’s ballad as sad and revealed how similarity in the emotional psyches of the brigata transcends gender. These novel perspectives allowed for unique literary analysis of the ballads. Accurate prediction of ballad authorship demonstrates that ballads fit into the narrative structure of the Decameron and restore order in each of the ten days.