Sense of place in the coastal town of Tipaza in Algeria: Local-community’s socio-cognitive representations

Abstract

This study explores the sense of place in the small coastal Algerian town of Tipaza. The town is famous for its world archaeological sites, but its inhabitants and the local community in general seem to appreciate more its exceptional landscape than the universal archaeological values conferred to it by UNESCO. The particular townscape clearly delimited by the Mediterranean Sea and the Chenoua Mountain seems to have strongly influenced people’s mental images and attachments to their town. Based on the concepts of environmental representation and place attachment, local-community’s sense of place is investigated at three territorial scales: the town centre, the town as a whole and the region. Since the sense of place is defined as a multidimensional attitude including cognitive, conative and affective aspects, the proposed paper examines the socio-cognitive dimension through the structural approach of social representations where shared socio-cognitive meanings are assumed to constitute the central core of environmental representations. On the other hand, the conative component has been investigated through the analysis of expected activities in favourite places. Moreover, place attachment, an affective bond between people and environmental setting, is explored through two sub-concepts: place identity which refers to the cognitive level and place dependence which refers to the conative level. By exploring shared local community’s meanings and their impact on place preferences and appropriation, the research aims at showing the value of townscapes and particularly coastal ones in urban development projects. Natural features such as the sea are powerful landmarks and have strong impact on people’s perceptions of environmental settings.