Place attachment is the emotional bond between person and place, and one way of describing the relationship between people and spatial settings. It is highly influenced by an individual and his or her personal experiences. There is a considerable amount of research dedicated to defining what makes a place "meaningful" enough for place attachment to occur. Schroeder (1991) notably discussed the difference between "meaning" and "preference," defining meaning as "the thoughts, feelings, memories and interpretations evoked by a landscape" and preference as "the degree of liking for one landscape compared to another." Place attachment is one aspect of a more complex and multidimensional "sense of place" and cannot be explained simply through a cause and effect relationship. Instead, it depends on a reciprocal relationship between behavior and experiences. Due to numerous varying opinions on the definition and components of place attachment, organizational models have been scarce until recent years. A noteworthy conceptual framework is the Tripartite Model, developed by Scannell and Gifford (2010), which defines the variables of place attachment as the three P’s: Person, Process, and Place. When describing place attachment, scholars differentiate between a "rootedness" and a "sense of place". Sense of place attachment arises as the result of cultivation of meaning and artifacts associated with created places. Due to constant migration over the past few centuries, many Americans are thought to lack this type of place attachment, as they have not stayed in a place long enough to develop storied roots. Rootedness, on the other hand, is an unconscious attachment to a place due to familiarity achieved through continuous residence––perhaps that of a familial lineage that has known this place in the years before the current resident. Little is known about the neurological changes that make place attachment possible because of the exaggerated focus on social aspects by environmental psychologists, the difficulties in measuring place attachment over time, and the heavy influence of individualistic experiences and emotions on the degree of attachment. More recently, place attachment is being seen within the grieving and solastalgia linked with climate change induced emotional experiences. Research suggests that engaging with these emotions allows for their inherent adaptiveness to be explored. When emotional experiences linked to place attachment are explored and processed collectively, this leads to a sense of solidarity, connection, and community engagement.
Tripartite model
Person The Person dimension addresses the question of, "who is attached?" When examined individually, places often gain meaning because of personal experiences, life milestones, and occurrences of personal growth. With communities, however, places derive religious, historical, or other cultural meanings. Community behaviors contribute not only to place attachment experienced by citizens of that community as a group, but also to those citizens individually. For example, desires to preserve ecological or architectural characteristics of a place have a direct impact on the strength of place attachment felt by individuals, notably through self-pride and self-esteem. People experience stronger attachments to places that they can identify with or otherwise feel proud to be a part of.
Process The process dimension answers the question "How does the attachment exist?" Similar to other concepts in social psychology, this dimension relies on the collective effects of affective, cognitive, and behavioral aspects. Recent research has also explored the symbolic connotations that are thought to be a part of the process.
Affect Drawing from attachment theory, affective bonds are thought to arise out of relationships that provide for functional needs, like security and wellbeing. The most common emotions associated with people-place bonding are positive, such as happiness and love. Yi-Fu Tuan, a noteworthy human geographer and pioneer in place attachment research, coined the term topophilia to describe the love that people feel for particular places. Negative emotions and experiences are also capable of giving places significance; however, negative emotions are usually not associated with people-place bonding since place attachment represents individuals’ yearnings to replicate positive experiences and emotions.
Cognition Cognition incorporates the knowledge, memories, and meanings that individuals or groups have associated with places of attachment. Specifically, these cognitive elements represent what makes specific places important enough for people-place bonding to develop. Environmental psychologists additionally use the term schema to describe how people organize their beliefs and knowledge in regards to places and has led some researchers to note familiarity as a central cognitive element in place attachment. This idea of familiarity has been used in explaining why people mark themselves as "city people" or why they develop preferences for certain types of homes. Researchers have coined a number of terms based on familiarity, including "settlement identity" and "generic place dependence."
Behavior Behavior is the physical manifestation of place attachment and can represent the cognitive and affective elements that an individual possesses in their person-place bonds. Proximity-maintaining behaviors have been noted as common behaviors among people who have attachment of place, similar to those who have interpersonal attachments. Many individuals unknowingly experience the effects of place attachment through homesickness and will carry out proximity-maintaining behaviors to satisfy their desires to relieve it by returning home or reinventing their current environments to match the characteristics of home. This reinvention of current environments has been coined as reconstruction of place and is a notable place attachment behavior. Reconstruction of place often occurs when communities are rebuilding after natural disasters or war. As counterintuitive as it may seem, trips and even pilgrimages away from places can enhance a person-place bond because individuals grow an increased appreciation for the places they have left behind, contributing to feelings of nostalgia that often accompany attachment and the memories that places evoke.
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