Environmental psychology: theory and applications

¶ … Mah (2009), entitled Devastation but also home: Place attachment in areas of industrial decline.

Mah (2009) analyzes research regarding the phenomenon of place attachment to an individual's home, in two neighborhoods in economic decline -- Walker, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, United Kingdom and Highland, Niagara Falls, New York, United States. Both of these locations meet Mah's context of disruptive post-industrial change, where homes and the communities are under threat of demolition or toxic contamination. These locations were chosen to explore the concepts of 'place identity' and 'place attachment'. Mah notes that place attachment theorizes that there is a relationship between the individual and a place, and that this is a form of individual socialization as a port of a collective identity. Mah specifically takes this theory of place attachment and explores it in relation to today's sociological material culture, focusing on the social relationships between individuals and artifacts.

There are several questions that Mah (2009) explores in her research, when discussing place attachment in areas of industrial decline. Why do people still place great value on their homes and neighborhoods when they are in economic decline, including: low employment opportunities, physical dereliction, and depopulation trends? How does the value of place attachment change when comparing individuals, families and communities? What do individuals lose when having to be mobile?

Interestingly, Mah (2009) notes that it isn't mobility or fixity that causes individuals to lose something in the process, but instead loss occurs when people have limited choice. This theory is based on the economic structures involved as well as the individual's conflicted feelings concerning place attachment of their home vs. The economic reality of industrial decline in the area they must leave. Mah found that for the neighborhood of Walker, it was the citizen's attachment to their homes that was a barrier to proposed neighborhood regeneration. In the neighborhood of Highland, it was the environmental and economic factors, as the neighborhood is located close to heavily contaminated abandoned industrial sites, that presented challenges in redevelopment of the neighborhood, despite the community members' attachments. There are social and psychological impacts due to place attachment in communities in industrial decline. These impacts include: disruption, uncertainty and stress from living through difficult economic transitions.

To better understand these impacts, Mah (2009) discusses what the concept of 'home' means. The author notes that home is closely tied to the concept of 'community', but also has contested and contradictory meanings. The concept of home is multidimensional. It can encompass a place, a feeling, practices, and even a state of being in the world. Home is often related to self, family, a haven, gender, and even journeying. The home can even be political terrain, as Mallett (2004) notes,, where there are struggles over gender roles and domestic expectations. The relationship, in America, of 'house' and home is reflective of a capitalist culture that is based on home ownership. Likewise, the association between 'family' and home is reflective of conservative belief systems and the desire to preserve traditional family values.

Mah (2009) further notes that there are several definitions regarding the concept of place attachment, in previous literature. However, most of these definitions center on an affective bond between an individual and landscape. Low (1992) describes a distinction between the cultural and psychological definitions of place attachment. Low states, "Place attachment is the symbolic relationship formed by people giving cultural share emotional/affective meanings to a particular space or piece of land that provides the basis for the individual's and group's understanding of and relation the environment" (p. 166). Mah uses this cultural definition of place attachment, and then relates it to the social and economic processes.

Mah (2009) found that in Walker, the community members were proud of their community's strength, as it had endured through socioeconomic decline. This was something the members would fight to preserve, battling to prevent their physical houses from being demolished when efforts to regenerate the community were made. These community members, however, were very aware of the social and economic deprivation their community was suffering from. They understood the social issues that were affecting them, including drug and alcohol abuse and crime. The residents faced dislocation from their homes, with the regeneration, and as such suffered from anxiety, depression and stress.