Place Attachment Theory

Place attachment has consistently been used to describe the phenomenon whereby people form emotional bonds to physical environments (e.g., Altman & Low; 1992 ; Giuliani & Feldman, 1993 ; Hidalgo & Hernandez, 2001 ; Lewicka, 2005 , 2010 ; Low & Altman, 1992 ), despite the high variability of conceptualisations of place attachment across various disciplines of the social sciences (e.g., Lewicka, 2011b ). Indicative of this variability is the range of labels that has been used to refer to the emotional bond between person and place, such as place attachment, root­ edness, sense of place, and urban attachment ( Hernández, Hidalgo, & Ruiz, 2014 ). Due to the interdisciplinary nature of the subject, various epistemological and theoretical influences have been drawn on, leading to disagreement on how to define, conceptualise, and assess place attachment (e.g., Giuliani, 2003 ; Hernández et al., 2014 ; Lewicka, 2011a , 2011b ; Patterson & Williams, 2005 ; Scannell & Gifford, 2010 ; Turton, 2016 ). For example, definitions of place attachment vary by the focus; either the focus is on the quality of the people–place bond (e.g., Altman & Low, 1992 ; Low & Altman, 1992 ), on the outcome associated with those bonds (e.g., state of psychological well-being, Giuliani & Feldman, 1993 ; psychological and behav­ ioural investment, e.g., Hummon, 1992 ), or on related constructs, such as place identity (e.g., Moore & Graefe, 1994 ; Speller, 1996 ). As a result, no accepted overarching theoretical frame­ work has been agreed on to date ( Lewicka, 2011b ; Turton, 2016 ). Regardless of theoretical disagreements, the significance of the research on people–place bonds becomes apparent by its popularity in various social science disciplines and its application in numerous research contexts, such as ‘social housing policy’ ( Manzo & Perkins, 2006 ), neighbour­ hood design ( Hester, 1984 ; Romice & Uzzell, 2005 ), health and well-being ( Bogdan, Rioux, & Negovan, 2012 ; Wilson, DeJoy, Vandenberg, Richardson, & Mcgrath, 2004 ), natural resource management ( Kil, Holland, Stein, & Ko, 2012 ; Lee & Shen, 2013 ), tourism ( Cui & Ryan, 2011 ), regional planning ( Kruger, 2008 ), and pro-environmental engagement ( Devine-Wright, 2011 ; Jones, Orr, & Eiser, 2011 ; Scannell & Gifford, 2010 ; Turton, 2016 , p. 20; Vaske & Kobrin, 2001 ). Several models of people–place relationships have been put forward, including the ‘structural alternative model’ ( Gerson, Stueve, & Fischer, 1977 ), the ‘model of place dependence’ ( Stokols & Shumaker, 1981 ), and the ‘place identity model’ ( Proshansky, 1978 ). Based on limited empirical