Explorations in Place Attachment

Jeffrey Smith, Jeffrey Smith, Jeffrey S Smith, Jeffrey S Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367887124
• eBook ISBN: 9781351746625
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

The book explores the unique contribution that geographers make to the concept of place attachment, and related ideas of place identity and sense of place. It presents six types of places to which people become attached and provides a global range of empirical case studies to illustrate the theoretical foundations. The book reveals that the types of places to which people bond are not discrete. Rather, a holistic approach, one that seeks to understand the interactive and reinforcing qualities between people and places, is most effective in advancing our understanding of place attachment.

Part I
Secure places

1
Influence of memory on post-resettlement place attachment

Michael Strong

Despite broad attention to place attachment by environmental psychologists over the past 40 years (Lewicka 2011) and the emergence of useful ways to organize studies of place attachment (see: Scannell and Gifford 2010), the interrogation and interpretation of the place dimension within place attachment has been woefully under-theorized. To be fair, environmental psychologists acknowledge the contributions of select humanist geographers, especially Relph (1976) and Tuan (1974), but they often promote a study of psychological affect, cognition, and behavior within place at the expense of studying the nature of the places to which their subjects become attached. Despite this, the intersection of psychology and geography can be fruitful in the pursuit of better understanding people’s emotional ties to place.

Individuals are most likely to develop strong emotional ties to a place where they feel safe and secure (Scannell and Gifford 2010). Home is a quintessential example. As people are confronted with a new location, they evaluate the new place by making unconscious comparisons to their home. Should a community find itself forced to relocate to a new place, a case explored in this chapter, members of the community seek opportunities to transform the new place into something that resembles the place they lost. This suggests that place attachment cannot form until an individual sees the place as home. Interestingly, this does not have to be a physical transformation.

In Mozambique’s Tete Province, residents have been forced to relocate from ancestral homelands near the Moatize River because the Mozambican government granted permission to an international coal mining company to exploit local deposits. This forced relocation has offered an opportunity to examine how resettled residents have responded to life in a new location. Through storytelling and political action, many residents have found ways to bring images of their old home to the new location. This chapter seeks to explain how memories of home can offer a sense of safety and security in an environment that differs substantially from the place lost. By doing so, I call attention to the power of the place. In other words, the relationship one has with past places can influence how one interacts with present and future places. In this chapter, I first situate place and memory within the literature on toponymy and resettlement before describing the study’s methods. After presenting the results, I conclude with some thoughts on the power of place (operating through memories) to influence the outcomes of resettlement.

Literature

Place, memory, and place attachment

Geographers describe place as bounded space that is meaningful to its user (Relph 1976; Tuan 1974), but place is more than its location; it is also the product of an emotional connection to the landscape and environment (Cresswell 2004; Relph 1976; Trigg 2012), such that place transcends its mere spatial location to connect humans to space as “the center of felt value” (Tuan 1974, 4). Given the importance that a place plays in the shaping of a person’s identity, it is easily discernible how a disruption to a person’s relationship to place can be traumatic.

The power of place permeates popular culture. Nowhere is this more evident than in the 1939 classic film, The Wizard of Oz. Despite Kansas as a black-and-white landscape of desiccated, tornado-prone flatness where an evil neighbor wants to kill her dog, Dorothy learns – through her adventures in Oz’s Technicolor dream-world – that there is no place like home. Each new encounter with talking trees and winged monkeys, with dancing scarecrows and melting witches, presents Dorothy with an opportunity to compare her home in Kansas to the many diverse but quite different places of Oz. Dorothy learns this lesson alongside all those who view the film such that the message resonates not just with the protagonist but also with the audience.

Dorothy’s experience is not unfamiliar. In his Poetics of Space, Bachelard (1957/1994) posits that places follow a person from location-to-location, predis-posing future encounters with similar locations to be unconscious comparisons of prior experience(s) within the places of one’s past. Encountering a place for the first time is both novel and not. The various aspects of the place (e.g., doors, windows, trees, sidewalks, train tracks, etc.) are unique yet also notably familiar (Heidegger 1996). A really comfortable chair is only comfortable when compared to all the uncomfortable chairs of one’s past.

In a way, places exhibit a characteristic resembling Soja’s (1989) spatiality. Just as people interacting with space can change both into something different, the interaction of place with memory can result in the outcome of place memory (Casey 1987). Places, as meaningful space, hold special significance for individuals, but places also hold individual and collective memory (Casey 2004). Particularly poignant encounters with place become embedded within the spaces of the brain’s neural networks available for recall when the appropriate connotative signals draw them from the recesses of memory into the here-and-now of experience. Imagine a young graduate arriving late for an important job interview because a commuter train was undergoing repairs at a busy station. If she believes that the repairs cost her the job, it is possible that every future encounter with that same train station will prompt a recall of that negative experience.

Sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1980) empowered place as the repository of collective memory, stating that in places “the collective thought of the group of believers has the best chance of immobilizing itself and enduring … [by] sealing itself within their confines and molding its character to theirs” (presented in Casey 2004, 44). Monuments, memorial plazas, landmarks, placards, and other public structures collect the past and influence the development of shared memories – even for events participants have never personally experienced. Some of these repositories of place memory (e.g., monuments) are tangible while still others have only a fleeting pseudo-tangibility. Place names comprise this latter category of place memory.

Memories of the places where one lived in the past provide opportunity to “situate [oneself] in an idyllic social and physical landscape” (McMichael 2003, 95). Thus, it becomes possible to compare and contrast present places with those of the past through the nostalgic lens of memory. Nostalgia involves constructing memories by filtering out negative experiences while honing in on positive ones (Davis 1973). In a way, nostalgia promotes a longing for the past because the present is so disconcerting (Dann 1994). Feeling nostalgic, though, can evince positive change by using the positivity of the past as a means to alter the environment in some way as to construct a better present and future (Spitzer 1999).

One such way is to rename an undesirable place with a desirable name invoking positive place memories. However, naming decisions are not apolitical. Toponymic approaches to geographic study stress the embedded power struggles and social relations present in naming decisions (Berg and Kearns 1996; Berg and Vuolteenhaho 2009). Social change and political revolution often result in pushes to rename places in a way that erases their troubled past or commemorates individual and collective identity (Light 2004; Guyot and Seethal 2007). Reuben Rose-Redwood et al. (2010) call specifically for greater attention to how places are assigned names to ensure the name represents the social identity and collective history of the place’s inhabitants. This is especially important in Mozambique where, as João Baptista (2010) explains, it is very difficult to separate the story of the place from the story of the group living there.

Thus, it makes perfect sense as to why a resettled population would seek to rename the place to which it has resettled. Names are a form of pseudo-tangible collective memory imbued with the social relations, cultural identity, and history of the society that inhabits the place associated with the name. But, what happens when a group’s new home does not reflect the same social and physical features of the place associated with the name? The memories of the past place can conflict with the realities of the present place to hinder the establishment of place attachment for some members of the resettled community. This is worthy of our attention. Individuals without the ability to form an emotional attachment to place experience anxiety (Casey 2009) and distress (Fried 1963), not to mention it can lead to an entire generation of placeless individuals (Strong 2016). Unfortunately, in Mozambique, the potential for placeless populations to arise following resettlement is quite common given that state’s propensity to employ resettlement under a wide variety of situations.

Resettlement in Mozambique

Development-induced displacement and resettlement (DIDR) directly impacts more than 15 million people each year worldwide (Bugalski and Pred 2013). In early 2015, Jim Yong Kim, President of the World Bank, described DIDR as an inescapable reality if countries are to meet demand for infrastructure and predicted that the number of displaced individuals will continue to rise (Donnan 2015). This is troubling news. Resettled populations frequently face a number of risks that can lead to even more impoverishing conditions in the post-resettlement community than had previously existed (Cernea 1997). This is a significant burden for developing countries and funding partners to bear, notwithstanding the potential impact on the lives of so many already impoverished people.

Resettlement has a long history in Mozambique. Prior to independence, the Portuguese government embarked upon a villagization program to solidify control over rural communities (Borges Coelho 1998). During the civil war, the government concentrated rural residents in villages as a means to ensure their protection (Lubkemann 2008). Today, resettlement continues to be a routine practice of the government: to mitigate risk following flooding (Stal 2011; Artur and Hilhorst 2014), to promote conservation efforts (Milgroom and Spierenburg 2008), and to permit mining companies to exercise mining concessions (Kirshner and Power 2015; Lillywhite et al. 2015). Although the Resettlement Decree provides for compensation to address losses (Republic of Mozambique 2012), the Mozambican government has failed to adequately compensate resettled populations for the invisible...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Introduction: putting place back in place attachment research
• PART I Secure places
• PART II Socializing places
• PART III Transformative places
• PART IV Restorative places
• PART V Validating places
• PART VI Vanishing places
• Epilogue: methodologies of place attachment research
• Index