Modeling Urbanization Perception: Emerging Topics on Hangzhou Future Sci-Tech City Development

The complexity of the study on urban systems poses the challenging problem of developing methodological approaches for analyzing and modeling social data, both from a quantitative and a qualitative perspective. This work presents the research conducted to explore the perception on the urban development of an high-tech zone which has been recently established in China, i.e. Hangzhou Future Sci-Tech City. We conducted field research and collected data to identify which topics, concepts and interpretative categories are embedded in the social discourses about urban development and to derive the network of relations typical of complex social systems. The results of these analyses suggest that the perception of the people interviewed is mostly of great appreciation for the economic development with some concerns on the negative effects of this development on the society and the environment.