Tracking Technologies, GPS, Social Network, ICTs, Big Data: innovation in tools and methods for qualitative surveying at urban and regional scale

The research analyzes general issues related to qualitative surveying procedures, used to investigate and visualize urban and territorial phenomena, giving personal considerations about recent methods, that are developing in the field of information technologies and that start to be used also in the actual operations. The wide spread of new survey tools and techniques needs to develop real “methodologies” and “procedures”, that are able to fix a system of codified actions that, in the studies of complex phenomena at regional scale that often include heterogeneous data, should go beyond issues related to geometric representation. Particularly two fields of investigation seem to be very interesting compared with traditional surveying methodologies; the first one is about the use satellites able to georeference accurately places, people, activities, both in a static and dynamic way (GPS, Location Based Services); the second aspect concerns with the big amount of information given by all users in the territory that are interested in it and deals not only with physical characteristics of places but also with the same users that perceive places according to social issues.