Exploring the Emotional Geography of Kaunas City Center: A Mixed-Method Approach to Understanding Place Identity

Traditional urban analysis and planning often neglect intangible emotional responses, leaving a gap in comprehending and addressing appropriately how urban spaces are experienced by individuals and communities. However, in contemporary urban research, emotional dimensions have increasingly been recognized as integral to understanding place and its identity, although the methods for systematically mapping these emotions and addressing both their qualitative and quantitative aspects remain under development. In order to address this research gap, this study presents an analysis of the emotional geography of Kaunas city (Lithuania) center using a mixed-method approach combining qualitative and quantitative methods to examine public narratives collected from social media posts and comments and open-ended responses from a sociological survey of local residents. A qualitative approach, grounded in the classification of emotions by Plutchik, was applied in order to categorize emotional expressions. Simultaneously, a quantitative sentiment analysis using the NLTK VADER tool was performed in order to assess the polarity of emotions and classify them into Positive, Negative, or Neutral within the collected narratives. The social media posts and comments were then georeferenced and mapped using Geographic Information Systems (GISs), while survey data were manually linked to specific locations. This allowed for the creation of emotion maps that highlight emotional hotspots and spatial sentiment trends within Kaunas city center. The results reveal how varying emotional responses are geographically connected to different areas, providing insights into both emotional responses to qualities of physical space and activities directly and indirectly linked to this space. Furthermore, the study demonstrates the potential of emotional mapping as a tool for urban planning, place-making, and sustainable development.