Beyond house and haven: toward a revisioning of emotional relationships with places

Abstract

An extensive and ever-growing body of literature exists that explores the nature and nuances of people's emotional relationships to place. This includes writings on sense of place, place attachment and place identity. A review of this literature suggests that while these concepts are broadly defined and discussed in theory, their application in research does not fully embrace all of the important dimensions they suggest. Empirical research, influenced by the notion of ‘home’, consequently focuses on residential settings, positive affect and a depoliticized view of individual experiences. This has limited our understanding of a complex and multi-faceted phenomenon. Recent literature demonstrates a need to better incorporate the full magnitude of human experiences into the current discourse on people–place relationships. Recent research that works toward this end is discussed here. Consequently, this paper focuses on several strengths in the literature that warrant further investigation: First, people's emotional relationships to places encompass a broad range of physical settings and emotions. Second, people's relationships to places are an ever-changing, dynamic phenomenon, and as such, they can be a conscious process in which people are active shapers of their lives. Third, people's emotional relationships to places exist within a larger socio-political milieu.

Introduction

For decades, scholars from a variety of disciplines have explored people's emotional relationships. Several key concepts have emerged in the literature, particularly ‘sense of place’ (Buttimer, 1980; Tuan, 1980; Steele, 1981; Hay, 1998), ‘place attachment’ (Altman & Low, 1992; Hidalgo & Hernandez, 2001) ‘place dependence’ (Stokols & Shumaker, 1981) and ‘place identity’ (Proshansky, 1978, Sarbin, 1983; Proshansky, Fabian, & Kaminoff, 1983; Twigger-Ross & Uzzell, 1996). These concepts are rather broadly defined. For example, sense of place is described as ‘an experiential process created by the setting, combined with what a person brings to it’ (Steele, 1981, p. 9). Place attachment is considered ‘the bonding of people to places’ (Altman & Low, 1992). Meanwhile, place dependence is described as the perceived strength of association between a person and specific places (Stokols & Shumaker, 1981). Finally, place identity has been defined as dimensions of the self that develop in relation to the physical environment (Proshansky, 1978).

While all of these concepts address people's relationships to places, the exact connection between them remains unclear. Some argue that sense of place, place dependence and place identity are forms of place attachment (Williams, Patterson, Roggenbuck, & Watson, 1992; Bricker & Kerstetter, 2000). Others contend that sense of place is broader than place attachment (Hummon, 1992; Butz & Eyles, 1997; Hay, 1998). Still others feel that place attachment focuses on evaluations of places, while place identity is more concerned with the way in which places form identity (Moore, 2000). It has also been suggested that place attachment develops and supports place identity (Twigger-Ross & Uzzell, 1996). Insofar as these concepts address affective relationships to places, writings in these areas are reviewed here in that regard.

While these concepts are broadly defined, their application in research does not fully embrace all of the important dimensions of people's emotional relationships to places suggested by their definitions. To begin, the empirical research in this area has emphasized residential settings. For example, sense of place has been studied in terms of the residence (Hay, 1998; Jorgensen & Stedman, 2001), and the cost–benefit analysis involved in place dependence is based on comparisons between one's current residence and alternative places (Stokols & Shumaker, 1981). Further, while original definitions of place identity extend ‘beyond a conception of identity in which the home and its surroundings are the necessary and sufficient component referents’ (Proshansky, et al., 1983; Kaminoff, 1983, p. 61), subsequent research has studied it in relation to the local neighborhood (Twigger-Ross & Uzzell, 1996). In particular, place attachment has been operationalized and researched mainly in relation to residential places (Guiliani, 1991; Bonaiuto, Aiello, Perugina, Bonnes, & Ercolani, 1999; Nanistora & Mesarasova, 2000; Hidalgo & Hernandez, 2001). It has been measured in terms of rootedness in a neighborhood based on length of residency (Taylor, 1996) as well as the level of personalization and expression of territoriality, all of which have been connected to the residence (Williams et al., 1992; Kattenborn, 1997). However, some of the most recent studies of place attachment focus on nature and wilderness experiences (Bricker & Kerstetter, 2000; Steel, 2000; Wickham, 2001; Vitterso, Vorkinn, & Vistad 2001). These studies, along with research on public space (Low, 2001), provide a more diversified perspective that warrants further investigation.

The literature also has tended to focus on place as a source of rootedness, belonging and comfort, and has not explored the role of negative/ambivalent feelings and experiences as fully (McAndrew, 1998). For example, an earlier review of the place attachment literature notes that it commonly refers to positively valenced affective bonds (Guiliani & Feldman, 1993). Subsequent work on place attachment also has focused on positive affect, describing it as a ‘mutual caretaking bond between a person and a beloved place’ (Fillilove, 1996, p. 1516). And while place identity was originally considered to be made up of a ‘cluster of positively and negatively valenced cognitions of physical settings’ (Proshansky et al., 1983, p. 62), the negative aspects of the phenomenon have been less explored in research (Dixon & Durrheim, 2000). This review of the literature will examine the roots of this focus and provide an updated perspective on the role of negative feelings and experiences in places.

Scholarly discourse on people–place relationships also indicates that this is a dynamic phenomenon. This perspective can be traced from earlier theoretical treatments of dialectical processes such as dwelling/journey (Jager, 1974), habit/consciousness (Merleau-Ponty, 1962), insideness/outsideness (Relph, 1974), rootedness/alienation (Hummon, 1992), as well as research on relationships to place through the lifecourse (Rowles, 1983; Chawla, 1992; Hay, 1998; Cutchin, 2001). This literature demonstrates the complexity and malleability of people's relationships to places by revealing how, as dynamic relationships, they would necessarily include an array of places, feelings and experiences. This is a perspective that recent research is further emphasizing.

Finally, current literature suggests that relationships to place can have a collectively shared, conscious and contested political nature (Devine-Wright & Lyons, 1997; Dixon & Durrheim, 2000). This literature pushes past earlier approaches that see relationships to place as ‘individualistic, mentalistic and apolitical’ (Dixon & Durrheim, 2000, p. 31), demonstrating that these relationships are more than individual or local community phenomena. This work on what Keith and Pile (1993) call ‘identity politics’ connects place meaning with power relations and ideology, providing a broader, more contextualized view (Hayden, 1995; Yeager, 1996; Groth & Bressi, 1997; Massey & Sarre, 1999).

In sum, this paper documents developments in the scholarly discourse that illustrate our evolving understanding of people's emotional relationships to places. Beginning with an exploration of the theoretical foundations of this work, this review discusses recent research that challenges the emphasis on residential settings and positive affect, and takes a broader perspective. In doing so, this paper demonstrates how affective relationships to places (1) encompass a broad range of physical settings and emotions; (2) are an ever-changing, dynamic phenomenon; (3) are both unconscious and conscious; and (4) exist within a larger socio-political milieu.