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Place Attachment, Sense of Belonging and the Micro-Politics of Place Satisfaction

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Handbook of Environmental Psychology and Quality of Life Research

Part of the book series: International Handbooks of Quality-of-Life ((IHQL))

Abstract

This chapter tackles the political dimension of place satisfaction, both as a psychological experience and as a conceptual approach to people-place bonds in environmental psychological research. In the first section of the chapter, we locate place satisfaction within a broader set of concepts traditionally used to account for how people feel, think and act towards places, stressing in particular the relationship between place satisfaction, place attachment and place identity. In this frame, we review some theoretical and methodological approaches to place attachment and place identity research, highlighting recent contributions that deepen into the interdependence, if not confusion, between concepts.

In the following section, we argue that a possible way of overcoming conceptual confusion is shifting from cognition-centred approaches towards a pragmatic-constructionist perspective. Here, conceptual boundaries allegedly mirroring psychologically differentiated “internal” feelings, attitudes and preferences towards places, are less insightful than the meaning-making practices through which people actively create variable versions and evaluations of self-in-place. We argue that this epistemological shift offers many analytical advantages. First, it puts in context place-based accounts of attachment, belonging and satisfaction, treating them as social practices that often carry moral, relational and political implications and material consequences. Second, it reinforces a dynamic view of people-place relations, as it focuses on the ongoing, function-driven and contested nature of people’s place-evaluations. And third, it provides suitable methodological resources to empirically broach this dynamic, context-bound practice of place-bonding.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/

  2. 2.

    http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics

  3. 3.

    http://www.qualityoflifeproject.govt.nz/built.htm

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

    Andrés Di Masso

  2. Open University, Milton Keynes, UK

    John Dixon

  3. Universidad de La Laguna, San Cristóbal de La Laguna, Spain

    Bernardo Hernández

Authors
  1. Andrés Di Masso
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  2. John Dixon
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  3. Bernardo Hernández
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Correspondence to Andrés Di Masso .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Psychology, University of Nantes, Nantes, France

    Ghozlane Fleury-Bahi

  2. Department of Social Psychology, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

    Enric Pol

  3. Faculty of Psychology, University of Nantes, Nantes, France

    Oscar Navarro

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Di Masso, A., Dixon, J., Hernández, B. (2017). Place Attachment, Sense of Belonging and the Micro-Politics of Place Satisfaction. In: Fleury-Bahi, G., Pol, E., Navarro, O. (eds) Handbook of Environmental Psychology and Quality of Life Research. International Handbooks of Quality-of-Life. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31416-7_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31416-7_5

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