Varieties of Place Attachment and Place Identity: Not Only for Old, Uneducated, Little Mobile Residents of Rural Areas

Place attachment and place identity are two concepts most commonly used to describe psychological bonds which people form with places, first and foremost with their places of residence. The relationship between the two concepts are not clear. Sometimes they are used interchangeably, sometimes place attachment is viewed as preceding place identity (it takes longer to include a place into one’s self-definition than to form an emotional attitude towards it), sometimes they are viewed as two components of an overarching concept of sense of place: emotional and cognitive. In this presentation the focus is on both concepts as in the presented study the measures of place attachment and of place identity were found to be correlated (people who were place attached also showed high local, i.e., place, identity). The starting point for the study were findings, also from representative national surveys, that place attachment and place identity tend to correlate positively with age, length of residence and strength of local ties, and negatively with community size, education, and economic development of the region of residence. This may suggest that along with increase in education, mobility, economic advancement and growing urbanization, with the decrease in importance of local ties and territorial belonging, emotional relations which people have with their residence places may wane. An alternative approach would be to suggest that place does not lose its importance in the globalized word, but that the nature of place attachment or place identity changes. In a big representative survey carried out in Poland (n=2550) new measures of relations with places and new measures of identity (both territorial and nonterritorial) were used. Cluster analysis revealed five clusters corresponding to two types of place attachment (passive, traditional attachment and active, involved attachment) and three ways of nonattachment (alienation, place relativity, and placelessness) (for an almost identical typology, see: Hummon, 1992). Further analysis showed that whereas correlates of traditional attachment replicated the pattern known from other studies (e.g., traditional attachment was strongly positively correlated with age and negatively with education), active attachment was related positively to education and curvilinearly to age, with middle aged participants scoring the highest. Whereas traditional place attachment was based on local identity, active place attachment was accompanied by European and non-territorial identity (profession, interests etc.), along with the local one. A number of personality measures differentiated the five types of relations with places. Traditionally attached participants scored high on values of conservatism and self-transcendence, bonding social capital, neighborhood ties, trust, and life satisfaction but low on measures of cultural capital, bridging social capital and social activity. The actively attached participants had the highest scores of all on measures of social capital (both bonding and bridging), social activity, cultural capital, life satisfaction, held most interest in family roots and in city history, and scored high on values of openness to experience and self-transcendence. Of the remaining three types, of particular interest is the group of alienated people (very low place attachment and low local identity along with the lowest measures of social capital, trust, activity, self esteem and life satisfaction). It is concluded that places do preserve their importance in times of intensive urbanization, migration and economic development but that the form of place attachment/place identity changes, the active and selfconscious attitude replacing the traditional one. The presented data also suggest that place identity, whether traditional or active, may contribute to life satisfaction and general well-being.