Place Attachment: Advances in Theory, Methods and Applications

PLACE ATTACHMENT: Advances in Theory, Methods and Applications. Edited By Lynne C. Manzo and Patrick Devine-Wright, xii and 217 pp.: diagrs., ills., bibliogs., index. London and New York: Routledge, 2014. $44.95 (paper), ISBN 9780415538213. Geographers borrow extensively from other disciplines and other disciplines borrow on occasion from geography, but this exchange does not mean that geography's cognate disciplines necessarily ask similar questions or speak a familiar language. Place Attachment is a perfect demonstration of the occasionally disconcerting disconnect between geography and its cognate disciplines. Over half of its twenty-eight contributors are trained in social and environmental psychology, while the remainder represents a smattering of other disciplines including geography, sociology, architecture, landscape architecture, and natural resource management. The strongest theoretical current in the book therefore flows from psychology. For this reason, geographers interested in place will find the parameters of the discussion about place attachment to be surprising at times despite a handful of chapters that traverse relatively familiar theoretical terrain. The book consists of fifteen chapters grouped into three sections plus an introduction. The sections quite reasonably consist of Theory, Methods, and Applications. The Theory section is the longest, with six chapters. These address mobility, memory, community and discourse among other topics. The Methods section contains only four chapters and is the weakest owing to length and the fact that two of these chapters address theory as much as methodology. Here is also where the psychological approaches contrast most jarringly with the approaches more familiar to geographers. The Applications section contains five chapters and for many readers it should be the most enticing since its constituent chapters treat questions of environmental change and social contestation, territorial struggle, conflict, displacement, uneven development, disinvestment, and urban planning. The author of the first chapter is none other than David Seamon. Frequently cited in connection with geography's phenomenological response to the quantitative revolution, it is gratifying to see that Seamon's contribution to the scholarly study of place continues. Other than Seamon, geography is represented by one of the book's co-editors, Patrick Devine-Wright, professor of human geography at the University of Exeter. Five other chapters speak to interests of sociology, resource management, and the design professions. A careful read reveals geography's epistemological and methodological kinship to these areas of inquiry. Finally, as indicated above, the majority of the chapters, eight in all, are by authors trained in psychology or psychiatry. Reading these chapters can at times be frustrating, not merely because of the use of unfamiliar vocabulary and concepts, but more crucially because the most pertinent questions may seem narrow and mechanistic in light of three decades of geographical research framing the issue of place more broadly and holistically. The crucial divide is between place as an integrative phenomenon, deeply social and symbolic, best understood through qualitative methods (the perspective taken by geographers inter alia), and place as a particular kind of mental bond determined by functional attributes that can be measured and quantified. The latter, if not the dominant psychological perspective, remains a very attractive model for the social and environmental psychologists. Despite the sense of having strayed into an unfamiliar city with a familiar name, the book reveals the lineaments of geography's view of place from the outside, as it were, by showing what place attachment means to nongeographers. The alternative understanding of the theoretical challenges of studying place attachment suggests just how broad the common ground is for geographical discussions of place. …