Place Meaning and Attachment

Authenticity, Heritage and Preservation

Dak Kopec, AnnaMarie Bliss

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000038729
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Revolutions have gripped many countries, leading to the destruction of buildings, places, and artifacts; climate change is threatening the ancestral homes of many, the increasingly uneven distribution of resources has made the poor vulnerable to the coercive efforts by the rich, and social uncertainty has led to the romanticizing of the past. Humanity is resilient, but we have a fundamental need for attachment to places, buildings, and objects.

This edited volume will explore the different meanings and forms of place attachment and meaning based on our histories and conceptualization of material artifacts. Each chapter examines a varied relationship between a given society and the meaning formed through myth, symbols, and ideologies manifested through diverse forms of material artifacts. Topics of consideration examine place attachment at many scales including at the level of the artifact, human being, building, urban context, and region. We need a better understanding of human relationships to the past, our attachments to the events and places, and to the external influences on our attachments. This understanding will allow for better preservation methods pertaining to important places and buildings, and enhanced social wellbeing for all groups of people.

Covering a broad range of international perspectives on place meaning from the United States to Europe, Asia to Russia, and Africa to Australia, this book is an essential read for students, academics, and professionals alike.

1

The Affect of Old Places

Exploring the Dimensions of Place Attachment and Senescent Environments

Jeremy C. Wells

Introduction

Within environmental psychology and many urban planning, geography, and design contexts, place attachment is a well-known concept with useful applications. For instance, in architectural design, data from place attachment studies can help create evidence that helps inform building and landscape design decisions (e.g., Hull 1992; Lies, Kang, & Sample 2017; Severcan 2015). The goal is to use this “evidence-based design” process to create buildings and places that are better for people. In historic preservation/built heritage conservation research and practice, however, place attachment is a largely unknown and underutilized concept. This condition is likely not helped by pervasive misconceptions about this area of practice, which is the smallest amongst the built environment disciplines that include architecture, planning, and landscape architecture. A common stereotype is that built heritage conservation is largely synonymous with the practice of architecture, which is empirically false. Nearly three-quarters of historic preservation practice in the United States most closely resembles the field of environmental conservation and protection, especially in its reliance on rules and regulations to control people’s behavior toward a specific conservation goal (Wells 2018). In comparison, architectural practice focusing on historic buildings only represents about 10% of the employment market. Like environmental conservation, built heritage conservation is undergoing a realignment of its priorities to focus more on people, their meanings and values, and using these data to influence behavior (Mayes 2018). People-centered and human-centered heritage conservation seeks to balance practice between people and building and landscape fabric (Loulanski 2006; National Trust 2017; Wells 2015; Wells & Stiefel 2019).

These people-centered changes in historic preservation/built heritage conservation have resulted in an increasing interest in using applied social science methods to gather data that can be used as evidence to influence practice (Wells & Stiefel 2019). The ultimate goal is to focus on built heritage conservation as a tool for human flourishing (Jensen 2000; Wells & Lixinski 2017) in order to support the statutory goals of preservation/conservation as a public benefit. One promising area of human-centered preservation/conservation is a focus on understanding the individual’s affective relationship with historic places. While place attachment theory and method are not often used in preservation/conservation practice, they hold much promise in assuring that this activity is, indeed, in the public good and does not just benefit architects, archaeologists, and historians. This chapter will review the current understanding about the relationship between place, space, and the individual; the relationship between affect and environmental patina; and how this perspective can benefit practice.

Understanding the Relationship Between Place, Space, Environments, and the Individual

In typical academic or professional books from the built environment disciplines, such as architecture or planning, the words space, place, and environment are often used interchangeably as if they are synonyms. It is important to recognize that these terms mean different things, especially in their relationships to people. Some of this ambiguity is due to the fact that our physical position in and relationship to the world is complicated and mediated, in part, through social, cultural, and psychological meanings and experiences. We also lack a nuanced, vernacular vocabulary to describe how our bodies interface with the world. The way in which I will define these terms—space, place, environment—are therefore through a technical perspective in order to provide a better foundation for the concepts that will follow. Refer to Table 1.1 for an overview of these concepts.

Table 1.1 Basic concepts of space, place, and environment

	Frame	Example
Neutral, undifferentiated, architectural or scientific space	Objective, geometric, scientific	Abstract description of the world around us; description of shape, volume, and measurement of a building.
Social space	Social, Marxist	How the design of the American suburb promotes capitalism.
Place	Psychological, cultural, subjective	The feelings that a group of buildings in a certain context produce; specific cultural characteristics associated with these buildings.
Environment	Scientific, quantitative, objective	Characteristics of the surroundings around people, plants, and/or animals.

Traditionally, space is understood as a way to describe what is around our bodies in an objective, geometric way. In this sense, we can describe space in terms of the distance of things to a body or to each other, or through descriptions of volume, form, and massing. Lefebvre (1991), however, defines space socially; the cultural, political, and economic activities within space also help to define it. Moreover, each culture produces its own unique spaces that are layered in complex ways so that space influences society. This definition infuses space with social power, order, and control. Those who have the power in society to influence the production of certain spaces are therefore able to exert control over other people. For Lefebvre, space is not a static, neutral “thing” that simply exists. Instead, individuals and groups use their social power to manipulate space in order to produce predetermined social and political outcomes. Thus, there are two definitions for space: (1) neutral space as a kind of “natural” space independent of sociocultural or psychological contexts, and (2) socially produced space. The latter definition, however, does not usually consider psychological perspectives, which “place” does.

Much like Lefebvre’s social definition of space, place is not a neutral concept. But rather than taking on social meanings, place is usually understood through a psychological perspective, especially in terms of how someone feels about a space or how, through interpretation, the characteristics of space become known objects of value to individuals (Tuan 1977). Places can also have deep meaning to a culture, such as places of religious pilgrimage (Low 1990), but this meaning originates in an individual’s relationship with and valuation of this place. A key concept of place is specificity, not only in geographic qualities, but also particular experiential and cultural experiences. A place is therefore seen, known, and felt in discrete ways, while space is abstract.

As opposed to space and place, “environment” is a word more often encountered in the context of technical jargon than in the discourse of everyday people. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “environment” is defined as “The surroundings or conditions in which a person, animal, or plant lives or operates.” As a concept, environment therefore shares much with space, but the most important difference is that the former term is always associated with living entities. Natural environments privilege plants and animals; built environments privilege people. Because our focus is on built environments, we are interested in how people perceive and are affected by both place and space. Or, in another sense, an environmental focus assumes people are embedded in place; place can be something “over there” while the environment always surrounds us.

If our goal is to understand the relationship that people have with social space, place, and the environment, it is essential to focus on people’s emotions; feelings are what fundamentally makes us human. This goal is similar to understanding relationships between people by recognizing feelings and how to communicate them more effectively. While it is entirely possible (and sometimes desirable) to understand our surroundings objectively, such as when designing a structurally-sound building, abstract ideas, such as quality of life, require understanding the subjective qualities of people. This requirement exists because social space, place, and the built environment are defined by people; in other words, their essential nature can only be described through human meanings, values, and experiences. Without people, social space, place, and the built environment cannot exist. What are the ways that we can understand the human-centered aspects of our surroundings?

While there are many ways to understand social space, place, and the built environment, the focus here is on the three major concepts most commonly found in both academic and professional built environment literature: spirit of place, sense of place, and place attachment. Note that these are place-based definitions because all of them are focused on the specific qualities of a particular place and not the abstract qualities of space. Place attachment, however, because of its explicit use of concepts and theory from environmental psychology, contributes an environmental perspective.

One of the oldest concepts to address the intersection of people and place, which originates from Roman religious culture, is genius loci or spirit of space (Brook 2000; Walter 1988). Romans literally believed that specific “spirits” (beings in incorporeal form) lived in and guarded certain places, which lent these areas a particular feeling. Thus, when a human being visited these places, the feelings he/she experienced were understood, in part, to be due to the particular spirit that inhabited the area. While this perspective is uncommon today, the term still lives on as a way to describe the overall feeling that a place instills in people who experience it. Spirit of place is often used interchangeably with sense of place and, at times, it is difficult to articulate the specific differences between the two, although spirit of place is more commonly used in architectural, artistic, and literary discourse, whereas sense of place is more common in planning and geography circles. In heritage conservation practice, UNESCO uses “spirit and feeling” as an official criterion for listing World Heritage sites and the Québec Declaration, which guides international conservation practice, explains that “spirit of place” consists of “elements that give meaning, value, emotion and mystery to a place” (ICOMOS 2008). Thus, in international practice associated with World Heritage, spirit of place is associated with the concept of authenticity. A simpler way of describing authenticity in this context is that it seeks to answer the question: does an older or historic place feel real (Plevoets & Van Cleempoel 2019: pp. 79–95)?

Among heritage conservation organizations, however, UNESCO and ICOMOS are rather unique in their emphasis on aspects of spirit of place in helping to understand the value of historic places; in the United States, which largely operates outside of the influence of these two organizations, spirit of place is mostly absent from historic preservation scholarly and practice literature. Even in World Heritage contexts, “spirit and feeling” are typically given little consideration, as is evident in a review of World Heritage Nominations. The reason for this situation is due, in part, to a lack of a consistent methodology for enumerating the qualities of spirit of place found in historic places (Wells 2014). Conceptually, however, especially as embodied in the Québec Declaration, the way spirit of place is defined has much more in common with sense of place, especially in the emphasis on perception and experience and its relationship to authenticity.

To be sure, where there is a concrete difference between spirit of place and sense of place, the former is understood more as an intrinsic quality while the latter relates to the experience one has in a place and how it is perceived (Brook 2000). Sense of place is widely credited as originating in the work of the humanistic geographers of the 1970s that explored the relationship between place and affect (or emotional states) (Rodaway 2006). In the 1980s, environmental psychologists informed their place-based theories with this work, helping to understand the importance of experiencing a place in relation to its perception and meaning (Altman & Low 1992). In other words, places have little meaning (and value) to people unless an individual can have bodily sensations (e.g., sight, sound, smell, touch) while being embedded in a particular geography (Buttimer & Seamon 1980). Through this research, there developed the idea that people can become emotionally attached to certain places, much like we can become attached to certain people. Thus, well-being is related to being in certain places, especially for long periods of time—a concept known as “rootedness” (Tuan 1980). The removal (especially permanently) of individuals from such places can result in place disruptions (Brown & Perkins 1992). An individual’s identity is also related to long-term associations with certain places (Proshansky, Fabian, & Kaminoff 1995).

Lastly, the built environment encompasses ideas from both spirit of place and sense of place with “environment” simply meaning the surroundings of people within a context of buildings, structures, and human-modified landscape elements. When used to focus on the relationship of people to their surroundings, “environment” assumes a psychological dimension. Sometimes referred to as “environmental psychology,” this particular focus on people and places is often quantitative as opposed to the qualitative aspects of spirit of place and sense of place. Within environmental psychology, there are four common, measurable aspects of an individual’s emotional attachment to places: general place attachment, place identity, place dependence, and place rootedness (Williams et al. 1995; Williams & Roggenbuck 1989; Williams & Vaske 2003). It is important to note that there are many other possible definitions, including topophilia, urban identity, sense of community, and community attachment (see Manzo & Devine-Wright 2014), but for the sake of brevity, this particular review will only focus on these widely known and time-tested concepts and concepts that can be measured. All of these aspects of attachment describe a transactional relationship between places and people, or the bi-directional way in which the environment influences people and people influence their environment (Gifford 1987).

General place attachment, or simply place attachment, is an overarching category of many types of bonds (e.g., emotion, cognition) ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Contributors
• 1. The Affect of Old Places: Exploring the Dimensions of Place Attachment and Senescent Environments
• 2. Socioeconomic Factors that Affect Place Attachment in Europe
• 3. Soviet Era Architecture and the Meaning It Holds for People of Lithuania
• 4. Soviet and Non-Soviet Interiorities: The Construction of the Significance of Place Through the Architecture of Nowa Huta
• 5. The Framing of the Port Arthur Historic Site
• 6. The Oneida Community: An Examination of Place Attachment in a Utopian Society
• 7. Mistaken Places: Mesoamerican Meaning in the Sixteenth-Century Catholic Courtyards of Mexico
• 8. Dead Space: Place Attachment and Cemeteries
• 9. Heritage and Urban Development in Pakistan: Lessons from Boston’s West End Neighborhood
• 10. Implication of Displacement, Loss of Identity, and Sense of Belonging: Iran’s Revolution and the Means to Retain Persian Identity in a Home Away from Home
• 11. Human Sustainable Interaction with Nature in Kashan Heritage Context to Preserve Lifecycle
• 12. Displacement and Attachment: Examining Relations in the Production of Post-Apartheid Buildings in ‘Black Spaces’
• 13. Troubled Waters and Place Attachment: A Spring in Cape Town and Loss of Place
• 14. Hong Kong’s Early Composite Building: Appraising the Social Value and Place Meaning of a Distinctive Living Urban Heritage
• 15. Living Heritage Versus Dead Relics? Place Meanings and Boundary-Making in the Politics of Heritage in Postcolonial Hong Kong
• 16. The Social Construction of Koreans’ Intergenerational Place Attachment to the Royal Palaces in Seoul
• 17. Homunculi and Agencies: Inhabiting Synthetic Worlds and Wilderness
• Index