Despite the fact that the field of GIScience has been around for two decades, there is still little agreement as to the exact contents and boundaries of the field. Many authors have dedicated several publications concerned with defining the field, yet little consensus has been reached. Because of the highly dynamic nature of the discipline, new areas are constantly added and rigid borders may have a constraining influence on the field. On the contrary, one agreed part of the many GIScience definitions is the search for general principles, but principles for what? Can we define one field or discipline or all potential fields using geospatial information? Probably not. Therefore, rather than attempting to demarcate exact boundaries for GIScience as a discipline or a multidisciplinary field in order to prove its respectability, we herein attempt to analyze the contents of such a dynamic field on the basis of scientific literature and to assess the multidisciplinary and multiparadigmatic nature of GIScience. Such a discussion is not purely of academic nature, but also bears implications beyond academic discourse, in terms of external scientific funding and research grants. We question whether there is a "dominant" paradigmatic approach in GIScience and identify a need for adopting a multiparadigmatic view to accommodate the multifaceted nature of space, spatial representations, and the societal implications of geospatial information.

Although place-based investigations into human phenomena have been widely conducted in the social sciences over the last decades, this notion has only recently transgressed into Geographic Information Science (GIScience). Such a place-based GIS comprises research from computational place modeling on one end of the spectrum, to purely theoretical discussions on the other end. Central to all research that is concerned with place-based GIS is the notion of placing the individual at the center of the investigation, in order to assess human-environment relationships. This requires the formalization of place, which poses a number of challenges. The first challenge is unambiguously defining place, to subsequently be able to translate it into binary code, which computers and geographic information systems can handle. This formalization poses the next challenge, due to the inherent vagueness and subjectivity of human data. The last challenge is ensuring the transferability of results, requiring large samples of subjective data. In this paper, we re-examine the meaning of place in GIScience from a 2018 perspective, determine what is special about place, and how place is handled both in GIScience and in neighboring disciplines. We, therefore, adopt the view that space is a purely geographic notion, reflecting the dimensions of height, depth, and width in which all things occur and move, while place reflects the subjective human perception of segments of space based on context and experience. Our main research questions are whether place is or should be a significant (sub)topic in GIScience, whether it can be adequately addressed and handled with established GIScience methods, and, if not, which other disciplines must be considered to sufficiently account for place-based analyses. Our aim is to conflate findings from a vast and dynamic field in an attempt to position place-based GIS within the broader framework of GIScience.

Around the globe, Geographic Information Systems (GISs) are well established in the daily workflow of authorities, businesses and non-profit organisations. GIS can effectively handle spatial entities and offer sophisticated analysis and modelling functions to deal with space. Only a small fraction of the literature in Geographic Information Science—or GIScience in short—has advanced the development of place, addressing entities with an ambiguous boundary and relying more on the human or social attributes of a location rather than on crisp geographic boundaries. While the GIScience developments support the establishment of the digital humanities, GISs were never designed to handle subjective or vague data. We, an international group of authors, juxtapose place and space in English language and in several other languages and discuss potential consequences for Geoinformatics and GIScience. In particular, we address the question of whether linguistic and cultural settings play a role in the perception of place. We report on some facts revealed by this multi-language and multi-cultural dialogue, and what particular aspects of place we were able to discern regarding the few languages addressed.

Space and place are key concepts for understanding the functionality of social and environmental interactions. Cities are complex social-ecological systems where space-place interactions can be interpreted by means of quality of life. Firstly, we present several quality-of-life concepts that can be linked to space and place concepts. Secondly, we develop an analysis about space and place interactions, and how the social aspects, such as the sense of place, and physical aspects, such as urban spaces, are associated with quality of life and inclusive places. Thirdly, we state how the quality of life definitions of livability and life-ability are linked to the space and place concepts, and how this link can support the understanding of quality of life in cities, considering spatial thinking. Fourthly, we expand geo-information theories to a space-place approach of urban quality of life. Finally, we discuss how the developed conceptual framework can be applied to interpret the smart city. This paper contributes to the construction of new epistemologies that could support a more holistic understanding of the cities and a more social and humanistic use of geo-information and technology.

The rapid global urbanization of the past century poses several challenges for planners and policy makers. In particular, the conflation of social and urban issues must be understood to create sustainable and livable urban places. In this regard, it was our aim to model and understand the relationship between urban characteristics and peoples’ perceived quality of urban life (QoUL) using statistical analysis and geospatial modeling. We selected objective variables representing urban characteristics based on literature and used principal components analysis to develop uncorrelated components. These components served as the independent variables in a multiple linear regression analysis. The subjective, dependent variables were extracted from a QoUL survey. Results indicated that only the Education/Income component is related to QoUL (R2 of 0.46). Using only single independent variables in a linear model explained 46% of the total variance—over 10% higher than any previously determined relationship between objective variables and subjective QoUL. Furthermore, we found that subjective high QoUL and subjective low QoUL were not strongly correlated, indicating that they are affected by different objective variables, respectively. This suggests that future efforts of increasing QoUL need to define their goals more precisely, as measures for increasing perceptions of high QoUL are likely different from measures for decreasing perceptions of low QoUL.