Place attachment

Place attachment is the emotional bond between person and place, and is a main concept in environmental psychology. It is highly influenced by an individual and his or her personal experiences. There is a considerable amount of research dedicated to defining what makes a place 'meaningful' enough for place attachment to occur. Schroeder (1991) notably discussed the difference between 'meaning' and 'preference,' defining meaning as 'the thoughts, feelings, memories and interpretations evoked by a landscape' and preference as 'the degree of liking for one landscape compared to another.' Place attachment is the emotional bond between person and place, and is a main concept in environmental psychology. It is highly influenced by an individual and his or her personal experiences. There is a considerable amount of research dedicated to defining what makes a place 'meaningful' enough for place attachment to occur. Schroeder (1991) notably discussed the difference between 'meaning' and 'preference,' defining meaning as 'the thoughts, feelings, memories and interpretations evoked by a landscape' and preference as 'the degree of liking for one landscape compared to another.' Place attachment is multi-dimensional and cannot be explained simply through a cause and effect relationship. Instead, it depends on a reciprocal relationship between behavior and experiences. Due to numerous varying opinions on the definition and components of place attachment, organizational models have been scarce until recent years. A noteworthy conceptual framework is the Tripartite Model, developed by Scannell and Gifford (2010), which defines the variables of place attachment as the three P’s: Person, Process, and Place. When describing place attachment, scholars differentiate between a “rootedness” and a “sense of place”. Sense of place attachment arises as the result of cultivation of meaning and artifacts associated with created places. Due to constant migration over the past few centuries, Americans are thought to most commonly have this type of place attachment, as they have not stayed in a place long enough to develop storied roots. Rootedness, on the other hand, is an unconscious attachment to a place due to familiarity achieved through continuous residence––perhaps that of a familial lineage that has known this place in the years before the current resident. Little is known about the neurological changes that make place attachment possible because of the exaggerated focus on social aspects by environmental psychologists, the difficulties in measuring place attachment over time, and the heavy influence of individualistic experiences and emotions on the degree of attachment.