Exploring Evocative Places and their Characteristics

The main goal of this article is to study how people describe emotions related to places and to improve understanding of evocative places, their locations and characteristics as described by the citizens. Evocative places are places that evoke an especially emotional response in terms of images, memories and/or emotions. We aim to contribute to a better understanding of emotions in relation to places. Our study concentrates on Ames, a small university town in the Midwest in North America. The collected 192 locations show two areas with high concentrations of evocative places, specifically the university campus and Ada Hayden Heritage Park. This study opened up challenging research questions related to fuzzy or non-existing boundaries of places, a variety of shapes of places, and questions related to the challenges of modelling emotions as objects or attributes in a geographic information system. We conclude the article with main findings and further research directions.