Breaking Apart the Concept Sense of Place
Between the years of 1995 and 1999, I interviewed a variety of residents in Nevada
County, California about their community attachments (7). In the course of analyzing these
interviews and trying to understand their senses of place, or community attachments, I was
frustrated with the concept sense of place. It was easy for me to understand sense of place for a
person who had a strong bond with one place. I had a much harder time trying to characterize a
sense of place for a person who described strong bonds with one place and very weak ones with
another.
To resolve this dilemma, I examined the different aspects of the concept sense of place.
It seemed to me that sense of place was actually composed of two quite different aspects. The
first aspect, relationship to place, consists of the ways that people relate to places, or the types of
bonds we have with places. The second aspect, community attachment, consists of the depth and
types of attachments to one particular place. Rather than try to describe senses of place that
encompass both of these aspects, I argue that we can create a more meaningful understanding of
people’s attachments to places by thinking about relationships to place and community
attachments as two separate but related aspects of sense of place.
Relationships to Place
Residents of Nevada County described different types of connections with place, which I
have categorized into six types of relationships: biographical, spiritual, ideological, narrative,
commodified, and dependent. This typology should be seen as ideal types, or analytic categories
developed to facilitate understanding. The five types characterize what the people I interviewed
describe as fundamental ways they relate to places. They should not be seen as descriptions of
individual people. Many people are likely to have more than one relationship with a single place,
and those relationships are likely to change over time. Regarding the level of analysis, people