Sense of Place and Place Attachment : an
analysis of two journal articles
Scannell, L., & Gifford, R., (2010)
Defining Place Attachment : A tripartite organising framework in Journal of
Environmental Psychology, vol 30, Issue 1, March 2012, pp1-10
Summary
Place attachment
is defined as a bonding between the individual and a meaningful environment. It
is multifaceted, with many definitions, and Scannell and Gifford attempt to cram
it all into a framework based on Person/ Psychological Process / Place. The
person is “who”; the process is the “psychological drivers” the place is the
“object of attachment” .I don’t propose to summarise the whole framework, but
rather here I pick out the points most salient to my own research.
A place, and one’s
experience in that place, make it meaningful to you, and the personal
connection helps engender a stable sense of self. The authors posit attachment
to a place as a fundamental human need; the “attached” place (my term for it) gives
security and comfort. The attachment comes about via memories, beliefs and
meanings, implying that one’s past and heritage are of significance when
attaching to a place. Each individual has a “schema” of knowledge and beliefs
about that place, which make it their ”own”. The place can contain the essence
of important events. Elements of place can also come to represent elements of
who you are.
Place includes
social and physical aspects : connection via community, bondedness to
neighbourhood, aspects that are not-place specific e.g. religion. Ties created
by the broader social system give rise to homogeneous communities. Civic place
attachment may occur by a group as symbolic, e.g. attachment to a city, pride
in the county. To summarise, drivers of place attachment can include :
amenities, personal friends/family, memories, good experiences, security, fit
between yourself and place.
Analysis
On reading this
rather difficult paper, I could immediately see a great overlap between the
person and the psychological process. I am unsure that these can be separated,
although this is in a psychology-based journal, so I have to assume that
psychology classifies your “person” as different from the way you interact with
any given thing.
Overall a lot of
the points made seem like, well, good old-fashioned common sense. You connect
with a place because it’s familiar, your family lived there, you’ve always had
a good time with your mates there. However, I have to acknowledge that I’ve
lived in the same place for most of my life, so I wear my place attachment very
lightly.
Looking deeper
into the points that the authors make, they argue that attachment comes about
via memories, beliefs and meanings. Therefore I can conclude that heritage and
history contribute to place attachment, and place attachment contributes to
identity. Thus the construct of place is important in heritage – the heritage
occurred in a place, and that place then becomes a site of attachment. This then
contributes to the idea of the contingent heritage of individuals and groups
who may or may not know each other but who have a shared attachment to a place,
and again the shared attachment may or may not be known to each other. So we
have elements of heritage and identity that are shared with strangers and vice
versa. The authors’ idea of symbolic civic place attachment is a nice one,
particularly speaking as a Yorkshirewoman, but I think it is an
over-simplification and easily glosses over the multi-cultural make-up of many
cities today, with all the benefits and problems that may bring.
The over-riding
message I took from this was “Self as place and place as self?”. If you have
spent a long time in a place, it becomes inseparable from your identity. It gives a whole new meaning to the football
chant “We are Leeds”.
Beidler, K., & Morrison, J., (2016)
‘Sense of place: inquiry and application’ Journal
of Urbanism : International Research on Placemaking and Urban Sustainability,
9, (3), pp205-215
Summary
Beidler and
Morrison’s article is a literature review-based paper which also proposes a
framework for investigating and defining sense of place. Their model is four dimensional, bsed on the
self, the environment, the social interaction and an all-important fourth
dimension, time.
They acknowledge
that “at the center of all experience is the individual who is engaged in that
experience”. The self converts a ”space” to a “place”. They quote Cross (2001,
p10):’To some degree we create our own places, they do not exist independent of
us’. The environment is the physical setting of the place, but enlarged to
include such constructs as the town’s character. Within this element they also
allude to the power constructs with which city planners try to make us use the
city in a certain way. The social interaction brings into play the shared
experiences of those people who use a place, and the relationships they build
with other people as well as the place. Regarding the time dimension, the
authors acknowledge the concept of “rootedness”, living in a place for a long
time, and this giving you an intuitive understanding of your surroundings. They
quote Relph: ‘An authentic sense of place is above all that of being inside and
belonging to your place [original
emphasis] both as an individual and as a member of a community and to know this
without reflecting upon it’ (Relph, 1976, p65). However, they point out that
different groups may be using the same space in different ways.
Analysis
Beidler and
Morrison effectively argue the idea of sense of place as a discourse between
the four elements of their framework. This inherent sense of fluidity in their
argument makes a good deal of sense to me. Their centring of the framework on
the self, narcissistic as that may seem, also appears completely logical. In a
lot of the reading I’ve done, it has appeared that the authors frame their
arguments based around an amorphous mass of people who just happen to share
some characteristic (e.g. they live in the same place) without acknowledging
that this mass is composed of individuals who are trying to make something of
their lives.
The elements of
the town’s character and the social interaction inevitably overlap, but it is
the social interaction element that is most pertinent to my research. They
state that ‘Phenomenological research stemming from cultural geography [in the
1980s] argued that ‘lived experience’ was central to place interpretation’.
This fits exactly with my own argument of understanding a place because you’ve
lived there for a long time, and can also be extrapolated to liking a place
you’ve only visited once because you really enjoyed your day there. They stress
the significance of memory, experience and social relations in the construction
of the meaning of the place to the individual.
Regarding the time
dimension, this appears to me as a kind of ”vessel” which contains or underpins
all the other points. I couldn’t agree more with the Relph quote – I know this
to be true intuitively. Their descriptions of the different groups using the
same place give rise to the idea of any one person’s different identity and
role within a place; different individuals, roles and communities within one
place will have different degrees of and different experiences of place
attachment.
Comparison
Beidler and
Morrison’s article is much more accessible to me as a
non-psychologist/geographer than Scannell and Gifford’s, but there are some
common themes between the two. They both agree that place attachment and sense
of place has some construction by the individual and by groups. In Beidler and
Morrison’s case they attribute this to groups who physically interact, whereas
Scannell and Gifford’s argument can be extrapolated to refer to strangers with
contingent histories.
Both papers agree
that memory is important to place construct. However, neither of them touch on
the idea of nostalgia, despite both papers skirting around this. It seems
reasonable to infer that place attachment via, say, the memory of a nice day at
the seaside can turn into nostalgia with the passage of time. Scannell and
Gifford’s paper says much less about this physical environment, but both papers
agree that social constructs and human relationships are important in the
construction of place. Buried within both articles are implications of
heritage, history and identity and their complex entanglements with place.
Beidler and
Morrison’s overt use of time as a “fourth dimension” in their paper seems to crystallise
some of Scannell and Gifford’s arguments about memories and the essence of
important events. Their acknowledgement that time spent in a place contributes
to the construction of place attachment and sense of place seems self-evident
to me, yet it lacks in Scannell and Gifford’s paper. Again this appears to me
to flag up my individual experience and to underline once more the general
academic treatment of the individual as an amoeba in an amorphous mass. Overall
I found Beidler and Morrison’s article the much more helpful of the two.
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