Being-in-the-city: higher education students representations of everyday spaces and places

Abstract

Social groups lead to the emergence of different subjective territorialities, based on heterogeneous territorial representations and alternative ways of enjoying and relating in these multi-nodal spaces. The activities evolve side by side with people's aspirations in a context of the vastness of possible universes, mediated by technology networks and social structures. As a result the dynamics in the constructed space, and the activities, both associate with new forms of ownership and social urban living, which are expressed in various forms of territorial representation. Here, the forms of symbolic representation of the everyday spaces of higher education students assume particular relevance, since they function as indicative references of their origins, affinities and sociabilities, in a testimony to matrixes of the social and symbolic relations that are relevant to and indicative of their daily participation. In this paper, we will present and discuss some symbolic representations of space as disclosed by a group of students from a higher education institution in Porto, Portugal. The aim is to present a theoretical and methodological framework of social representations that explains the routes, social networks, spaces of belonging and sociability that are key indicators of youth reinterpretation and enhancers of civic participation strategies of the students in the city and the reference place.