Factors Influencing Place Attachment
Place attachment is affected by socio-demographic
characteristics of people (Williams and Roggenbuck, 1989,
Altman and Low, 1992, Gustafson, 2001); environmental
experiences including people’s type of involvement with place,
and degree of their familiarity with a place; people’s expertise
or knowledge about place, religion and culture, place
satisfaction, and place itself. Scannell and Gifford (2010)
explained that urban sociologists consider place attachment as a
social procedure and it fundamentally compared to ‘sense of
community’. They elaborately define community based on
Kasarda & Janowitz‘s definition in 1974 as ‘a complex system
of friendship and kinship networks and formal and informal
associational ties rooted in family life and on-going socialization
processes’. Two types of community are quoted by them from
McMillan and Chavis (1986):
1.Community of interest, where members are connected through
lifestyle and common interests that are not always place bound,
and
2.Community of place, where members are connected through
geographical location.
Scannell and Gifford (2010) in an interesting study
proposed a three-dimensional structure of place attachment. As
illustrated in Figure 1, the framework reveals that place
attachment is a multidimensional concept. Moreover, it shows
that person, psychological process, and place are its dimensions.
They explained that person is the first dimension of this
framework and indicates who is attached to the setting? They
clarified that place attachment may happens at both the
individual and group levels. Based on the framework
psychological process is the second dimension: how are affect,
cognition, and behaviour manifested in the attachment? And the
object of the attachment is the third dimension including place
characteristics: what is the attachment to, and what is the nature