Place Attachment

Advances in Theory, Methods and Applications

Lynne C. Manzo, Patrick Devine-Wright

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135016050
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Recipient of the 2014 EDRA Achievement Award.

Place attachments are emotional bonds that form between people and their physical surroundings. These connections are a powerful aspect of human life that inform our sense of identity, create meaning in our lives, facilitate community and influence action. Place attachments have bearing on such diverse issues as rootedness and belonging, placemaking and displacement, mobility and migration, intergroup conflict, civic engagement, social housing and urban redevelopment, natural resource management and global climate change.

In this multidisciplinary book, Manzo and Devine-Wright draw together the latest thinking by leading scholars from around the globe, capturing important advancements in three areas: theory, methods and application.In a wide range of conceptual and applied ways, the authors critically review and challenge contemporary knowledge, identify significant advances and point to areas for future research.

This volume offers the most current understandings about place attachment, a critical concept for the environmental social sciences and placemaking professions.

Part One

Theory

Chapter 1

Place Attachment and Phenomenology

The Synergistic Dynamism of Place

David Seamon

As a phenomenologist, I face a dilemma in contributing to a volume on place attachment, which can be defined as the emotional bonds between people and a particular place or environment.¹ An important phenomenological question is whether place attachment is a phenomenon unto itself or only one dimension of a more comprehensive lived structure identified as place and the experience of place.² In this chapter, I consider place, place experience, and place attachment as they might be understood phenomenologically from three different perspectives: first, holistically; second, dialectically; and, third, generatively. I argue that each of these three perspectives points to a spectrum of complementary experiences, situations, actions, and meanings that remain faithful to the lived comprehensiveness of place and place experience. I suggest that these holistic, dialectical, and generative perspectives provide a range of useful ways for thinking about and understanding place attachment.

Phenomenologically, place can be defined as any environmental locus in and through which individual or group actions, experiences, intentions, and meanings are drawn together spatially (Casey, 2009; Relph, 1976). In research relevant to place attachment, a place can range in scale from a furnishing or some other environmental feature to a room, building, neighborhood, city, landscape, or region (Creswell, 2004; Lewicka, 2011, p. 211). Phenomenologically, place is not the physical environment separate from people associated with it but, rather, the indivisible, normally unnoticed phenomenon of person-or-people-experi-encing-place. This phenomenon is typically multivalent, complex, and dynamic. It incorporates generative processes through which a place and its experiences and meanings, including place attachment, shift or remain more or less the same. One phenomenological aim is descriptions and generalizations that respect the specificity of particular places, place experiences, and place meanings but also provide them a fair voice in broader conceptual frameworks, including those grounded in the holistic, dialectic, and generative aspects of place.

Wholeness, Body–Subject, and Place Attachment

As suggested by my definition of place, a central ontological assumption in phenomenology is that people and their worlds are integrally intertwined (Moran, 2000; Finlay, 2011). As one descriptive means for understanding this existential interconnectedness accurately, phenomenologists have increasingly turned to the phenomenon of place.³ As a phenomenological concept, place is powerful both theoretically and practically because it offers a way to articulate more precisely the experienced wholeness of people-in-world, which phenomenologists call the lifeworld—the everyday world of taken-for-grantedness normally unnoticed and thus concealed as a phenomenon (Finlay, 2011; Graumann, 2002; Seamon, 1979).

As a phenomenon integral to human life, place holds lifeworlds together spatially and environmentally, marking out centers of human meaning, intention, and comportment that, in turn, help make place (Relph, 1976; Casey, 2009). For research in place attachment, the lived fact that human being always necessarily involves human-being-in-place (Casey, 2009, pp. 15–16) suggests that any emotional bond between people and environment requires a descriptive language arising from and accurately portraying this lived emplacement (or displacement in the case of negative place situations such as domestic abuse or neighborhoods of social dissolution). To interpret place attachment in the subjectivist terms of affective or cognitive representations, or in the objectivist terms of external social, cultural, political, or environmental factors is, from a phenomenological perspective, a reductive rendition of the wholeness of the relationship (Malpas, 1999; Seamon, 2012b).

In this sense, one cannot, on one hand, readily identify and measure some degree of place attachment, and then, on the other hand, look for correlations with so-called predictor factors like age, social status, physical features, time spent with place, and so forth (Lewicka, 2011, pp. 216–219). Rather, place attachment is interdependent with other aspects of place—for example, geographical and cultural qualities, relative rootedness in place, degree of personal and social involvement, quality of life, environmental aesthetics, individual and group identity with place, and so forth. Place attachment is part of a broader lived synergy in which the various human and environmental dimensions of place reciprocally impel and sustain each other (Seamon, 2012b). One phenomenological aim is to provide a range of conceptual and real-world perspectives from which to view the synergism of place and to clarify the relative role of place attachment within that synergistic dynamic (Graumann, 2002; Seamon, 2012a).

One phenomenological thinker who has made a preeminent contribution toward better understanding the lived synergism of place is French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962). One of his foundational concepts is body–subject, which refers to the pre-cognitive, normally unnoticed, facility of the lived body to smoothly integrate its actions with the world at hand. Body–subject is the pre-reflective corporeal awareness manifested through everyday gestures and behaviors and typically in sync with the spatial and physical environment in which the action unfolds (Seamon, 2012a, pp. 205–206). Drawing on the concept of body-subject, phenomenological researchers have pointed to its environmental versatility as expressed in more complex bodily routines and ensembles extending over time and space and contributing to the lived dimensions of place, including attachment grounded in habitual regularity (Allen, 2004; Seamon, 1979; Toombs, 2001).

Perhaps most pertinent to research on place attachment is the possibility that individuals involved in their own bodily routines can come together in time and space, thereby contributing to and participating in a larger-scale environmental ensemble that can be called a place ballet—an interaction of individual bodily routines rooted in a particular environment that may become an important place of interpersonal and communal exchange, meaning, and attachment. Examples include a well-used student lounge, a lively urban plaza, a robust city street, or a thriving city neighborhood (Fullilove, 2004; Oldenburg, 1999; Seamon, 1979, 2012a). In regard to place attachment, place ballet may be significant in that everyday habitual routines regularly happening in place are one important foundation for long-term involvement and identity with place, which in turn sustain and are sustained by feelings of attachment to that place (Oldenburg, 1999; Seamon & Nordin, 1980). In other words, attachment to place may be sustained by regular environmental actions and routines that, in turn, are maintained and strengthened through that attachment (Fullilove, 2004; Seamon, 1979).

Place and Place Attachment as Lived Dialectics

If place can be portrayed phenomenologically as an environmental whole in which people and place are intimately interconnected, it can also be described in terms of lived dialectics that arise from that wholeness. Partly, phenomenologists are interested in dialectical aspects of place because environmental and place experiences often involve some continuum of lived opposites—for example, inside and outside (Harries, 1997; Relph, 1976); dwelling and journey (Bollnow, 2011); and so forth (Casey 2009). Here, I highlight two lived dialectics and consider their relevance for place attachment: first, movement and rest; and, second, inwardness and outwardness.

1. Place Attachment as Involving Movement and Rest

In considering how bodily dimensions of our human constitution contribute to the nature of human experience, one immediately realizes that our existence as physical bodies involves the typical situation of moving, on one hand, and remaining in place, on the other (Bollnow, 2011; Casey, 2009; Seamon, 1979). Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s work, one can argue that, at their most basic lived level, movement and rest are founded in pre-reflective awareness and actions of body-subject: Everyday movement patterns and places of rest are part of a habitual time–space lattice composed in part of bodily routines often intermingling in places of rest and paths of movement (Merleau-Ponty, 1962; Seamon, 1979). Because of the unself-conscious facility of body–subject, life just happens, and we follow a more or less regular regimen of actions, experiences, situations, and occasions all grounded in particular places and the paths of movement among those places (Casey, 2009; Rowles, 2000; Moores, 2012; Seamon, 2013).

Through conscious decision, including self-reflective awareness of body–subject, human beings can shift habitual patterns of movement and rest. They can act in, encounter, and reshape place in new, intentional ways. On one hand, therefore, the habitual regularity and routine often associated with place does not negate individual choice, environmental change, or a good amount of flexibility and freedom in personal, group, and place dynamics. On the other hand, this habitual regularity contributes to environmental, social, and personal order and continuity. Relph (1976, p. 55), for example, identifies the deepest mode of place experience as existential insideness: A situation where one feels so completely at home and immersed in place that the importance of that place in the person’s everyday life is not usually noticed unless the place dramatically shifts in some way—for example, one faces a progressively debilitating illness (Toombs, 2001); or one’s home and community is destroyed by natural or human-generated disaster (Million, 1992; Cox & Holms, 2000). In these instances, one suddenly realizes how integral habitual regularity and routine are to his or her day-to-day life. In addition, because the taken-for-grantedness of one’s place has changed in some way, he or she may experience some degree of emotional distress ranging from momentary annoyance to sadness, regret, worry, depression, anger, fear, or grief (Fried, 2000; Fullilove, 2004; Klinenberg, 2002; Simms, 2008). I have termed this immediate, normally unself-conscious field of emotional presence and awareness feeling–subject—a matrix of positive (and sometimes negative) emotional intentionalities extending in varying intensities to the places, spaces, routes, and typical routines comprising a person’s lifeworld (Seamon, 1979, p. 76).

For research on place attachment, the phenomenological interpretation of movement and rest is important because, in everyday life, the emotional ambience and resonance of places, routes, and routines typically run beneath the lived surface of the lifeworld and are thus pre-reflective and unnoticed most of the time. Many studies of place attachment ask respondents to describe or evaluate their environmental feelings explicitly through words, drawings, or measuring instruments (Lewicka, 2011). If much of the emotional fabric soldered to place is pre-reflective and thus typically beneath the level of conscious awareness, then developing a language and methodology for self-conscious elicitation is a formidable task.

One essential methodological component for gaining accurate, explicit accounts of place attachment is bringing deeper, more empathetic attention to the research process. For example, urban planner John Forester (2006) considers practical ways whereby interviewing can become “astute listening” and a more potent vehicle for comprehensively understanding “situations full of conflict, ambiguity, posturing, and differences of culture, class, race, gender, and values” (Forester 2006, p. 126). In phenomenological research, one approach for gaining explicit accounts of place attachment is narratives of individuals and groups who have come to realize firsthand the importance of place attachment in their lives because they have experienced loss of or dramatic shifts in place—for example, the forced displacement of Albertan ranchers because of dam construction (Million, 1992); the disruption of an Australian rural community by bushfires (Cox & Holms, 2000); or the post-World War II destruction of African-American neighborhoods in major American cities because of urban renewal (Fullilove, 2004; Simms, 2008). In addition, one can explore and compare how specific modes of movement and rest as experienced vary individually, environmentally, socially, and culturally—for example, mobility (Morley, 2000); migration (Moores, 2012); exile (Naficy, 1999); homelessness (Moore, 2007); homes of divorce (Anthony, 1997) and domestic violence (Goldsack, 1999); lived-place differences for lifestyle groups living in the same physical place (Seamon, 2008; Sowers, 2010); and lived differences between real and digital places (Erickson, 2010; Horan, 2000; Relph, 2007; Seamon, 2012a).

2. Place Attachment as Involving Inward and Outward Aspects of Place

Besides movement and rest, places typically involve a dialectic incorporating inward and outward aspects (Seamon, 2013). On one hand, place is a world unto and within itself. For example, the typical home in contemporary Western societies is a realm of personal and familial privacy mostly insulated from the larger public world; its occupants are typically in control of what aspects of that larger world have entry into the home (Blunt & Dowling, 2005; Donohoe, 2011; Seamon, 2013). On the other hand, the home requires relationship with that larger public world in terms of basic needs and wider social and communal relationships (Moore, 2007; Morley, 2000). The inward aspect of any place relates to its being apart from the rest of the world, while its more outward, externally oriented aspects relate to the larger world of which it is a part. These two significances of place are often different and may even contradict each other, but both are integral aspects of most place experience. One way phenomenologically to explore the inward/outward dialectic of place is to examine situations that “overstate” one lived pole over the other—for example, the inhospitable home that turns its back to the world and thereby exaggerates the inward dimension of place exp...