GEOGRAPHIES OF PLACE ATTACHMENT: A PLACE-BASED MODEL OF MATERIALITY, PERFORMANCE, AND NARRATION

ABSTRACT

Attachments are intrinsic to the human condition. Geographers and related scholars are especially interested in place attachments and how they shape everyday routines (e.g. routes to work, shopping, social interactions), major life choices (e.g. places of residence, education, vacations), and identities (e.g. civic, national, religious). This article explores the complexity and richness of place attachment as researched across multiple disciplines while also outlining how geographers can make a more pronounced contribution. To that end, this article surveys place attachment research and in the process demonstrates the recent dearth of explicit research on the topic in geography compared to other disciplines, especially psychology. Subsequent sections show how geographers implicitly engage place attachment as a theme, even if by other names, and identify areas of possible synergy with cognate disciplinary approaches. In an effort to reinvigorate interest among geographers and emphasize the need for a multi-dimensional consideration of place as integral to understanding place attachment, this article provides a model of place attachment as an assemblage of materiality, performance, and narration. Rather than being static or deterministic, this model points to people’s varied capacities to make and remake place attachments, and in doing so reasserts the power of place in place attachment.

Keywords:

• place attachment
• place identity
• territorialization
• environmental psychology

Notes

¹ The Journal of Environmental Psychology published seven papers containing the term “place attachment” before 1990, 18 between 1991-2000, 45 between 2001-2010 (Lewicka 2011), and 184 between 2011-2020.

² Elsevier offered fewer options of specificity in its search tool, which resulted in 152 articles referencing place attachment anywhere in their respective texts. Wiley/Blackwell’s and Science Direct’s journal search functions overlap with others, so we opted not to employ these in the search.

³ Top journals publishing articles with “place attachment” in the title among Taylor & Francis journals are, Journal of Leisure Research (10), Society & Natural Resources (9), Studies in Pscyhology (9), PsyEcology (8), Tourism Geographies (7), Asia Pacific Journal of Tourism (7), and Journal of Tourism Marketing (6).

⁴ It should be noted that the Dictionary of Human Geography discusses place attachment under the heading of “place” on pages 582-583 and the AAG volume Geography in America at the Dawn of the 21st Century includes several references to place attachment.

⁵ Searching the Oxford Reference database for the term “place attachment” results in 1,366 entries in various disciplinary dictionaries, encyclopedias, and companions, only some of which are geography specific works, like Oxford Dictionary of Geography.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Kansas General Research Fund.