Paris “overground” and “underground”: social representations and practices of drivers in the city

This contribution is part of a broader research program initiated by de Rosa in the 1980s on “Place-identity and Social Representations of European Capitals in First Visitors of Six Different Nationalities” (cfr inter alia: de Rosa, 1995a, 1997; de Rosa, Antonelli & Calogero, 1995). It has been developed over time in various lines of investigation interrelated between them: “field studies” (de Rosa, 2013c; de Rosa & d’Ambrosio, 2010, 2011) and “media studies” (de Rosa & Bocci, 2014a, 2014b, 2015; de Rosa, Bocci & Picone, 2013; de Rosa, Dryjanska & Bocci, 2017; de Rosa, Bocci & Dryjanska, 2019a and 2019b, in press). As part of the wider research program, this contribution is included in the "field studies", with particular reference to the data collection carried out in 2014 in the city of Paris, focusing some aspects of the follow-up/extension of the research conducted by de Rosa & d'Ambrosio in 2006 on the Paris underground and overground (de Rosa & d'Ambrosio, 2010, 2011).Inspired by the paradigm of social representations (Moscovici, 1961/1976, Jodelet, 1989a), the study focuses on the dynamic relationship between social representations and social practices. Moreover, the “modelling approach” - developed by de Rosa (2013a, 2014) - has been applied as paradigmatic option specific to this research field inspired by the social representation theory, articulating different theory’s constructs/dimensions, other constructs/theories and methods based on verbal/textual and iconic communicative channels. The objective of this contribution is to study, on one hand, the system of attribution of meaning to the different spatial dimensions of the city of Paris, with particular reference to the "underground" and the "overground", and on the other, to analyse the differences in the representations of 50 subjects of different professional groups: • employees in surface transport (trams, buses, taxis); • employees in the subsoil (underground, RER). We expected differences not only in the articulation of the social representations of the city on the surface and the subsoil, but also a different positioning of the professional groups: drivers in surface transport and in the subsoil. In this contribution we will refer in particular to the results obtained through the technique of free associations used to describe/characterize the "surface" and the "subsoil" of Paris in the interviewed drivers. It has been possible to reconstruct the structure and content of the associated representational fields associated to the stimuli “surface” and “subsoil”, performing data analyses (procedures Talex: contingency tables; and Corbit: analysis of latent dimensions) by the software SPAD (Lebart, Morineau & Beçue, 1989). Moreover, contextualizing the study in the light of the terrorist events that hit Paris in 2015, specific attention will be paid to the dimension of risk in the reading of data from a longitudinal point of view. In particular, we will mention some results obtained through the mental maps that indicated the districts perceived as more dangerous, re-read in relation to the tragic events occurred in several arrondissements.