What makes a place healthy and sustainable? Green spaces, GPs, transport? How about the feeling that you actually belong? A case for place attachment.
Since starting my PhD, I’ve become increasingly interested in the tension between the concept of place and the demands of geospatial analysis. Human geography has a long tradition of using quantitative methods, particularly GIS, to study space. The discipline has also been effective in adapting to new methods (e.g GeoAI) and utilising emerging big data sources. Despite this, quantitative geographical approaches have often struggled to engage meaningfully with place, which is inherently vague, subjective, and messy.
My research sits at this intersection, exploring how to adapt and extend geographical quantitative methods to better engage with the lived experience of place. This means trying to capture and analyse individuals’ perceptions and experiences of place, and developing methods to integrate these subjective elements into spatial data.
This research is important as these dimensions are difficult to incorporate into quantitative spatial analysis and are rarely foregrounded in policy-relevant metrics. When geographers or urban planners assess whether a place is thriving or left-behind, the focus tends to be on physical features (e.g., housing quality, access to green space) or population factors (e.g., income, health outcomes). Yet these metrics often overlook the dynamic interactions between people and place, and how individuals interpret and experience their environments. Concepts like belonging in a neighbourhood, or the identity tied to one’s place of birth, are central to how place is lived. My work aims to show how these aspects of place can be modelled quantitatively and can be used to support more inclusive and responsive urban policies and planning practices.
What is place attachment?
One such people-place relationship I have been exploring in-depth is place attachment. Place attachment is defined as the emotional bonds formed between people and places. It is more than just ‘living somewhere for a long time’; it is built through feelings of belonging, connection and identity with a place. People can attach to places of varying spatial scales and can change over time. It may be the neighbourhood you grew up in, the city where your career started or a particular street you have fond memories of.
Why is place attachment important?
Research has shown that place attachment is undoubtedly important for people’s own wellbeing and health. It can boost mental health, improve life satisfaction and feelings of belonging, and reduce loneliness. For example, a large survey in Southern Norway found a strong positive association between levels of place attachment and quality of life, highlighting the relevance of place attachment for public health (Friesinger et al., 2022).
Positive effects of place attachment also carry over to the wider community and neighbourhoods. It has been well documented that place attachment contributes towards improving pro-environmental and sustainable behaviours. This association has been studied more often in parks and areas of natural beauty, however there are examples within an urban context. Place attachment was shown to be effective in promoting pro-environmental behaviours among urban residents in Beijing (Song & Soopramanien, 2019). Additionally, feeling more bonded with a place can enhance civic participation. A study in Seoul, South Korea found high levels of place attachment increases the likelihood of residents engaging in urban projects, and becoming actively involved in community development (Shin & Yang, 2022).
However place attachment can also be detrimental to the development of a place. For example, there may be decreased mobility for the population as people decide to stay in places they feel attached to, thus potentially restricting their life opportunities. In addition, place attachment can lead to communities being resistant to change and opposing new projects. This may lead to opposition to infrastructure projects that are important nationally, but may disrupt the local area.
What makes people feel more attached to a place?
The most consistent predictor of attachment is length of residence (Lewicka, 2011). That is, the longer the time of residence, the more attached to a place you may feel. However there are other important socio-demographic factors, including age, social status, and education, home ownership, size of community, having children and mobility (Lewicka, 2011). Place attachment is also influenced by social factors, particularly communities ties. This relates to how strong and extensive neighbourhood ties are, as well as involvement in informal social activities.
Physical conditions of the built and natural environment are also important for place attachment, such as the presence and quality of green spaces or the cleanliness of the streets. More deprived areas often suffer from degrading physical appearance and lack of services, therefore affecting levels of place attachment (Bailey et al., 2012). Low socio-economic status, high population turnover and social mix in these areas also can contribute to lower attachment (Bailey et al., 2012).
While it’s important to understand what drives place attachment, it’s equally important to recognise that these factors are interconnected and can operate differently depending on the type and scale of the place. For example, people can feel strongly attached to places that are in decline, not because of their physical condition, but because of personal memories or cultural meaning tied to that place. This has important implications for urban regeneration and development projects. Efforts to ‘revitalise’ or reshape a place’s identity can unintentionally disrupt these emotional bonds. If such projects overlook the significance of existing place attachments, they risk alienating local residents who feel connected to the place as it was.
Do people feel attached to places in the UK?
There are increasing concerns about the undermining of place attachment in a UK context of growing social and economic issues. These include increasing housing instability and decreasing affordability, loss of public and community spaces, declining local trust in government, and the cost-of-living crisis.
The Community Life Survey (2023/2024) provides some recent insight into feelings related to place attachment in the UK:
- 59% reported that they were proud to live in their local area
- 41% reported that many people in their neighbourhood can be trusted
- 61% reported that they belonged ‘very strongly’ or ‘fairly strongly’ to their immediate neighbourhood
The findings also show significant spatial variation in levels of place attachment, with low reported levels of belonging in London and the South East.
(Department for Culture, Media and Sport, 2024)
How can we further capture place attachment?
Whilst national surveys are useful to provide a broad overview of place attachment, they are often unable to provide insight into the scale of place or how attachment evolves through time. Additionally, surveys may only reflect the way people think they are attached to place, rather than how they actually act and discuss place in everyday contexts.
Urban data sources could be leveraged in order to address these gaps. Social media data provides real-time and ‘unconscious’ perspective on how residents feel and connect to places in their interaction with them, which traditional research methods cannot capture. For example, Jia et al. (2025) uses Weibo check-in data to explore the relationship between emotions and behaviours from the text, and the quality of the urban built environment in Jinan, China. It was found that places with greater density of urban amenities and more diverse urban land use encourage more place attachment in residents. By using these data sources, researchers can uncover patterns of attachment at scales that align more closely with people’s lived experiences rather than broad administrative areas.
My own research explores how people describe and relate to places in everyday, online conversations. I focus on Reddit as a source of rich, place-based text data, where users talk about places in informal and emotionally expressive ways. Using natural language processing (NLP) techniques and large language models, I am extracting references to place names, the relationships between places, how places are characterised, and the emotions people associate with them.
Rather than starting with a fixed definition of what counts as a ‘place’, I am taking a bottom-up approach, letting the data reveal which places matter to people. This allows for the identification of places that are perceived as important or meaningful. The findings are then modelled into a knowledge graph that reflects how people experience and organise places within an urban environment. This provides a tool to explore the lived experience of place and offers new ways to analyse concepts like place attachment.
Final Thoughts
Place attachment can be overlooked when considering how to create healthy and sustainable places. Urban regeneration projects can fail to consider how perceived positive physical changes may have the opposite effect on the attachment to that place from the local residents. Encouraging urban developments, like 15 minute cities or making neighbourhoods greener and more walkable, must also protect or strengthen the meaningful and emotional bonds people have to place. Utilising urban big data sources, such as social media, offers new ways to understand place attachment from the ground up. If planners and policymakers fail to engage with the lived experiences and attachments of communities, they risk building places that are functional, but not loved.
Recommendations to read
1. Jia, J., Zhang, X. and Zhang, W., 2025. Between place attachment and urban planning in Jinan: Does environmental quality affect human perception in a developing country context?. Land Use Policy, 148, p.107384.
2. Lewicka, M., 2011. Place attachment: How far have we come in the last 40 years?. Journal of environmental psychology, 31(3), pp.207-230.
3. Manzo, L. and Devine-Wright, P., 2013. Place attachment: Advances in theory, methods and applications. Routledge.
References
Bailey, N., Kearns, A., Livingston, M., 2012. Place Attachment in Deprived Neighbourhoods: The Impacts of Population Turnover and Social Mix. Housing Studies 27, 208–231. https://doi.org/10.1080/02673037.2012.632620
Department for Culture, Media and Sport. (2024) Community Life Survey 2023/24: Background and headline findings. [online] 4 December. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/community-life-survey-202324-annual-publication/community-life-survey-202324-background-and-headline-findings [Accessed 9 May 2025].
Friesinger, J.G., Haugland, S.H., Vederhus, J.-K., 2022. The significance of the social and material environment to place attachment and quality of life: findings from a large population-based health survey. Health Qual Life Outcomes 20, 135. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12955-022-02045-2
Jia, J., Zhang, X., Zhang, W., 2025. Between place attachment and urban planning in Jinan: Does environmental quality affect human perception in a developing country context? Land Use Policy 148, 107384. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2024.107384
Lewicka, M., 2011. Place attachment: How far have we come in the last 40 years? Journal of Environmental Psychology 31, 207–230. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2010.10.001
Shin, J., Yang, H.J., 2022. Does residential stability lead to civic participation?: The mediating role of place attachment. Cities 126, 103700. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2022.103700
Song, Z., Soopramanien, D., 2019. Types of place attachment and pro-environmental behaviors of urban residents in Beijing. Cities 84, 112–120. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2018.07.012
