Place Attachment and Sustainable Communities

Abstract

As cities in the developing nations are becoming urbanised at an accelerated pace and intensity, urban planners, design practitioners and policymakers conjoin efforts to satisfy the emergent needs. The design and construction of a sustainable built environment offers adaptive amelioration to the risks of climate change, which ostensibly affects the global South more than the North. Therefore, for developing cities to become sustainably urbanised and planned, socio-economic factors in addition to environmentally devised technological innovations should be comprehensively conceived, to become more consciously assimilated in urban planning and design of residential neighbourhoods in the global South. One of these social factors is place attachment, which has been gaining traction in the last three decades due to the role it plays in understanding the implications of human–place bonding on predicting behaviours, which in turn prepares communities to become resilient and sustainable in the face of possible risks, ranging from climate change displacement to environmental depletion of resources, economic constraints and social tensions. This paper explores the link between place attachment and the creation of more sustainable communities that are civically engaged and environmentally conscientious. As the dynamics of place attachment differ from one context to another, the study employs qualitative methods to mine the place attachment values of several residents of a neighbourhood in Amman, the capital city of Jordan. Through semi-structured interviews with a representative section of the residential communities and photographic documentation, the study analyses the findings from affective and cognitive perspectives, and evaluates their contribution to achieving sustainability. Based on the findings, the research proposes an agenda for future research directions in place attachment studies, providing empirical insight from the context of Jordan.