Being involved in the neighborhood through people-nearby applications: a study deepening their social and community-related uses, face-to-face meetings among users, and local community experience

People-Nearby Applications (PNAs) social and community-related uses could represent an alternative way to live urban spaces and sociability when citizens experience offline constraints in doing so in their city or neighborhood. Indeed, the features of PNAs suggest that they could represent reliable tools to glue local social fabrics, enhancing their local community experience. Thus, this study aims at deepening whether PNAs social (i.e., for friendship/network) and specifically community-related (i.e., for location-based searching of new people to meet) uses can improve citizens’ local community experience through fostering face-to-face meetings with other users nearby and a more involved way of living their neighborhoods at last. An online questionnaire was administered to 302 Italian PNAs users. The results show that only PNAs the community-related use associates with more frequent face-to-face meetings with other users nearby and with a more involved way of living one’s neighborhood via this frequency. Conversely, no significant association emerged for PNAs social use. These results suggest that PNAs can improve users’ local community experience as they seem able to enhance local social relationships and their users’ feeling of involvement in their neighborhood through fostering new local acquaintances and interactions and further opportunities to live local common places and socialize. Moreover, this supports the insights about PNAs role and potentialities as an alternative path to rely on for users having unmet aggregative needs yet experiencing constraints in straightly living their neighborhood through enjoying urban spaces and local sociability.