Place Attachment: Advances in Theory, Methods and Applications

Following on from the ground-breaking first edition, which received the 2014 EDRA Achievement Award, this fully updated text includes new chapters on current issues in the built environment, such as GIS and mapping, climate change, and qualitative approaches.

Place attachments are powerful emotional bonds that form between people and their physical surroundings. They inform our sense of identity, create meaning in our lives, facilitate community, and influence action. Place attachments have bearing on such diverse issues as rootedness and belonging, placemaking and displacement, mobility and migration, intergroup conflict, civic engagement, social housing and urban redevelopment, natural resource management, and global climate change.

In this multidisciplinary book, Manzo and Devine-Wright draw together the latest thinking by leading scholars from around the globe, including contributions from scholars such as Daniel Williams, Mindy Fullilove, Randy Hester, and David Seamon, to capture significant advancements in three main areas: theory, methods, and applications. Over the course of fifteen chapters, using a wide range of conceptual and applied methods, the authors critically review and challenge contemporary knowledge, identify significant advances, and point to areas for future research.

This important volume offers the most current understandings about place attachment, a critical concept for the environmental social sciences and placemaking professions.

Lynne C. Manzo is an environmental psychologist and Professor in the College of Built Environments and an Adjunct Professor in the School of Social Work at the University of Washington in Seattle. Her research focuses on people–place relationships, particularly place attachment, displacement, and socio-spatial justice.

Patrick Devine-Wright is a Professor in the Geography department at the University of Exeter, UK. His research combines environmental psychology and human geography perspectives to focus on the role of place attachment in relation to climate change and energy transitions. He is the lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Chair of the Devon Net Zero Task Force.