9 Chapter 9 – Place Attachment

The Creation of Nostalgia

During the French Revolution and First Empire period – a period of European history involving roughly 1797 to 1820 – French soldiers were sent further and further from home in pursuit of conquest. Napoleon was not content with the territory he already controlled as Emperor of France and stretched his armies all the way to Russia to control the entire European continent. His efforts required a sizable army and the many conflicts resulted in many casualties. Field doctors that served the army started to notice and document something in the soldiers they treated. The soldiers started to display an extreme form of homesickness. They would discuss distant homelands for hours on end. They would talk about the beauties and wonders of the geography back home, the certain special places that meant something to them, talk about friends and family they missed, and generally think about how much they missed home over and over and over again – a phenomenon doctors call perseveration.

The field doctors became worried about these “symptoms” they were noticing in their patients. The extreme homesickness seemed to be making their patients very sad. And the concern was that very sad patients would not heal as quickly as happy, jovial patients. They were so concerned they adopted a medical term and diagnostic criteria for this pattern of behavior they were seeing. They used the word “nostalgia” combining two Greek words meaning “return home” and “pain”. Nostalgia had been used in this way before, but in a very specific context of Swiss mercenaries fighting far from home. Now, the doctors were describing an overflowing of nostalgia from the wounded soldiers they cared for. At the time, the doctors wanted to stop their patients from engaging in nostalgia because they thought nostalgia was making the patient’s symptoms worse and lengthening their stay in the hospital.

However, we now have a different understanding of nostalgia. We are beginning to understand the importance of nostalgia to improved mental health. Rather than making it more difficult to heal from our hurts and struggles, we find that remembering those special places from our past can be very protective and healing, providing a buffer against increased and prolonged stress. It’s no wonder these soldiers, seeing the horrors of war that were beginning to use firearms and artillery in modern ways were using nostalgia as a way of coping with what they were seeing and experiencing.

Place Attachment

Place attachment refers to an emotional, generally positive, connection to a location or place. That place does not have to be accessible to the person anymore, but it is generally someplace that the person has spent considerable time in the past. When it comes to understanding place attachment, it is generally helpful to break the entire process down into three components 1) the person becoming attached, 2) the process that connects the person to the place, and 3) the place one is becoming attached to.

When it comes to place attachment research, we generally know the most about who tends to become attached to places, then we know something about the places people tend to become attached to, but we know very little about the psychological processes that connect people to places. We will take each of these elements in order but note that the final component will be more in the realm of theoretical predictions than it is confirmed research.

Who Becomes Attached: When it comes to who becomes attached, the general consensus is that people that spend more time in places tend to become more attached to those places. At both the individual and societal levels, measures of mobility correlate negatively with measures of place attachment – meaning that the less people move around the more they become attached. People also tend to attach to the places they spend the most time in. People can become very attached to their homes and not want to leave them, even if remaining in the home is no longer practical. Many families must have difficult discussions with aging family members about leaving a house the elderly family member may be very attached to. They may not be able to navigate the stairs or care for the lawn anymore, but the idea of leaving the house is too emotionally overwhelming for the person to consider leaving. By contrast, people that move around a lot tend to have an easier time with each individual move. They tend to be less attached to the specific place.

Where We Become Attached: The second component of place attachment asks if there are places people tend to become attached to more than others. For this, remember that place attachment is generally a positive emotional state. Thus, it should not be surprising that people tend to attach to places they generally have positive experiences in. Research done in business contexts to see if people will become loyal to coffee shops set up in certain ways has shown that there are indeed elements of the environment that can be changed to improve or reduce place attachment. The businesses studied in this research tend to be coffee shops, but you can think about other businesses or services like libraries, comic book shops, bowling allies, or pool halls in similar ways.  The first element is to foster a sense of belonging. People tend to attach to places that they feel they belong and are welcome. This is generally why businesses that rely on people lingering spend a great deal of time focused on ensuring that their clientele feel that they belong in that place. The businesses may focus on making everyone feel welcome by personalizing drink orders or writing everyone’s name on their cup.

The second component that makes people attach to a place is the ability to relax. The places we tend to attach to are typically places where people let down their guard down and act more than they think. The third component is that people feel the place actively supports the activities they want to do in that space and that people have some control over the total space. Generally, people go to places because that place allows them to engage in actions that they would not be able to engage in were they in a different space. For example, engaging in religious devotion outside of a place of worship may seem strange to the general population. By attending religious services at a specific location people are able to engage in religious practices. People generally feel more positively toward a place when they feel they can exercise agency over the location. This is one element that may be less strongly felt in countries that are not the United States of America. Much cross-cultural work has shown that people from the United States rely on agency for a feeling of happiness much more than people from other countries do. However, no study has specifically shown that agency is more important for American’s place attachment.

The final component that makes people more likely to attach to a place is that the place contains elements of entertainment and the opportunity for self-growth. Both elements relate to the positive feelings that are generated inside the space. If a place is entertaining, it may provide short-term reasons for continuing to return to the space. Whereas the place offering opportunities for self-growth allows for the person to continue returning on a long-term basis. In both cases, people generally feel very positive toward places that contain either entertainment or self-growth. And those positive feelings tend to be attributed to the space around someone.

How Do We Attach: Our final section in this area is the question of process. What is happening psychologically when someone forms an attachment to a particular space? On this question, very little is known. We have some speculations from other research, but very little directly addressing this question. The primary psychological process implicated in place attachment is mere exposure. Mere exposure is a theory of attitude formation and means that people tend to feel positively toward things that they have seen more often. Many results have indicated that people appreciate things they have seen before, even if those things have no meaning for the person. For instance, researchers showed a set of 12 Chinese characters to English speakers with no knowledge of the Chinese written language. Characters were presented very quickly, with little time in between in which to generate preferences based on appearance. The set of 12 was divided into one set of 6 that was shown very frequently and another set of 6 that was shown less frequently. After a time delay, researchers showed these same English speakers the 12 Chinese characters again and asked them to rate how much they liked each character. The researchers showed that the 6 characters that were shown more frequently were also liked more by the participants.

In the context of place attachment, mere exposure implies that people will attach to places more if they spend more time in those places. And indeed, we see this exact situation in a novel study of baseball team fandom. Oishi and colleagues (2010) observed the relationship between attendance at baseball games and the team’s winning percentage. It was generally expected that people like to watch their team win and so, when teams were winning it was expected that their attendance would be higher. And indeed, that general result was found. However, Oishi and colleagues looked further into the data. They examined each team individually, looking at what percentage of the team’s potential fanbase had been born in the area versus had been born somewhere else and had moved to the area in adulthood. This information is available from census records and is generally referred to as residential mobility. In our context, residential mobility means that people have spent more time in the city and had longer to develop attachments to the team through mere exposure. And so, when we look at each team, we see that the connection between winning percentage and attendance is more true for teams that are in cities with high residential mobility. Phoenix, which has a large percentage of residents that were born in different places and moved to Phoenix, sees a big increase in attendance at Arizona Diamondbacks games when the team is winning and sees a drop-off in attendance when the team has fewer wins. However, for teams that are in cities with a large percentage of immobile residents, this relationship is greatly reduced. The cities of New York and Pittsburgh have some of the highest percentages of population that was born in the city and still live there. Attendance at New York Mets games does not fluctuate very much at all based on the winning percentage of the team. In fact, for the Pittsburgh Pirates, the relationship is reversed. More people attend Pirates games when they have a lower winning percentage than when they have a higher one.

All in all, the research on baseball attendance provides a nice example of how lack of mobility can lead people to attach to different elements of a place. If you are interested in baseball and remain in a location for a long period of time, you are likely to attach to the local team. And if you become attached to the local team, it may not matter to you what their record is on the day you want to attend the game. Instead, you might be attending the game to relive positive memories, experience the positive elements of the stadium that you have experienced before, or expose a child to the positive experience that you once had. None of those things require the team to have a winning record to attend a game.

Third Places

The research on place attachment can be summed up very nicely in the concept of Third Places. Third places were originally named and described by Ray Oldenberg in a 1982 article, but the concept goes back much further. A third place is a place that is not your home – this is your first place – and is not your workplace – this is your second place. Third places are all those other places that we go to regularly that aren’t home or work. Oldenberg noted that, while third places can be wildly different from one another, they all tend to share similar functions for the people that attend them. These similar functions give third places their societal value and Oldenberg argued that society should be protecting third places from disappearing. The important functions of third places are as follows

• No attendance obligation – Simply put, you do not have to be at your third place if you don’t want to be. This is very different from home, where you may have family obligations or curfews to follow, and work, where you may be required to clock in and out at very specific times. Instead, at the third place, you can be there one day and not there the next. No one will come around demanding that you show up (or if they do, they won’t have any authority that you need to listen to behind them). You can simply be in the space when you want to and not be in the space when you don’t want to.
• Has “regulars” – This point follows on with the previous point. Even though there is no obligation to attend, third places have people who show up on a regular basis at similar times and conduct similar activities. This might be a book club showing up at the same reading room in the library every Tuesday to discuss the book everyone is reading. Or it might be a group of friends sitting at the same table in a bar for a weekly gathering. Whatever the reason, most third places have sets of people that show up on a regular schedule.
• Limited status separation – third places tend to compress status differences among those that are there. Or, at the very least, status markers mean less when people are interacting in the third place than they might at other places. At the doctor’s office, someone might feel that the doctor’s word is law and everything the doctor says must be followed exactly. However, if one were to run into that same doctor at the gym, suddenly those status differences don’t mean as much in this place.
• Relaxed mood – third places are generally places people go to relax and enjoy themselves. In this way, people can often develop the positive feelings necessary to develop place attachment to that specific place. These are places that people go to “let their hair down” and be less concerned with impression management than they may be at work.
• Accessible and accommodating – Similar to the mood, but more about how the audience is served, third places are very accommodating to the people that use them. Many proprietors are willing to change the space to fit the needs of the people that want to use is. However, there is often an informal “qualification” system that needs to be met before accommodations will be given. Such qualification systems generally follow the sometimes reasonable, sometimes messy, and sometimes cruel ways that humans tend to interact with one another. Some people that visit a third place are viewed as never being able to “qualify” for access to the space because of gender, race, social class or whatever other factor the proprietor wants to impose. However, those that are seen as qualified users often receive special perks and benefits not available to the general customer base.
• Conversation is primary activity – most third places have a function that gets people in the door. For example, the comic book store sells comic books, super hero merchandise and maybe board games or collectible card games. People go to the barber or beauty shop for haircuts. The library has books to check out. But very often, these functions are a façade. They get people in the door, but that’s not why people are actually there, nor is it why those people choose to stick around. Humans are some of the most social creatures on this entire planet with one of the most robust systems of communication. That’s a very academic way of saying that we like to talk to each other…a lot. People go to third places because there are people there to talk to and the place lets them linger and talk to one another. The comic book store isn’t a destination because they have comic books and super hero merchandise. You can get all that stuff off the internet – and probably for cheaper than what a brick-and-mortar store will sell it do you for. The comic book store is a destination because other people who like comic books are likely to be there and you can strike up a conversation with those people about comic books. Similarly, there were many videos that appeared online during the COVID-19 pandemic in which people were very upset that their hairdresser had been forced to close down. But the upset wasn’t about not being able to get a haircut. The upset was entirely about not being able to connect with other people through conversation.

Third places generally follow the above list of features. I listed a few example places of third places, but there are many more including malls, religious institutions, social clubs, bowling alleys, movie theaters, etc. Oldenburg argues that third places should be protected by society because of the important role these places have in maintaining the social fabric.

Function of Third Places: Since the primary activity in a third place is conversation, it stands to reason that the primary function of third places is to help build human relationships. These can be acquaintanceships, friendships, common interest groups, romantic relationships, or just about any other form of human connection. This is incredibly important in modern society as we are seeing a dramatic increase in loneliness among people living in western societies. For example, one study reports that among Americans in their 40’s, 1 in 7 men and 1 in 10 women report having 0 close friends. Another study from the UK reports that 40% of residents over the age of 65 report that the television or a pet is their primary source of companionship. Relationship building has become very difficult in the modern world.

Along with helping to build relationships, third places can also help support identity development. These are places where people can feel supported and welcomed by similar others to help nurture and foster an identity. Perhaps that identity is centered around a love of books, a genre of entertainment, or around religion or devotion to community service. Regardless of what the identity is, third places help people develop social connections inside that space which help them explore what the identity is and how it fits within their personal life.

The last important function that third places provide is though idea exchange. Third places are places where people can talk and discuss various elements of their lives and exchange whatever ideas might be important. We can see many examples of this in popular media. Ted Lasso has his “Diamond Dogs” group, the cast of Friends meet at Central Perk, while the Avengers can let their hair down over shawarma. All of these are instances where they characters involved share ideas about what is going on in their lives and often ask for advice on what course of action would be best. And in many cases, the people around them offer contradictory advice about what would be best. And through that conversation, ideas can become moderated and less extreme. In this way, the conversation tends to coalesce around more mainstream views that are more socially acceptable.

All these functions are generally good things as they help to maintain a societal fabric. They tend to bring people toward social relationships that they have an interest in maintaining and away from more socially destructive and damaging courses of action. It is therefore a terrible thing that we have seen a dramatic reduction in the number of third places available to people since the COVID-19 pandemic. I would argue that the primary reason why lockdown was so difficult for people to deal with is that many of the locations that were required to shut down to slow the spread of the virus were third places. Suddenly, the places that people went to for connection with others, relaxation, destressing, and advice suddenly were unavailable to them in the name of public safety. It’s no wonder that some people had a very negative reaction to messages proclaiming shutdowns had to be maintained in the name of safety.

Summary

Place attachment is a positive emotional connection to a location. People generally attach to places that they spend a great deal of time in and people that tend to stay in the same place tend to attach more to the places they are in. We speculate that the primary mechanism of place attachment is mere exposure, but more research is needed to confirm this. By observing the important function of third places, we can see why place attachment is so necessary for developing a cohesive social fabric.