Mapping Urban Residents' Place Attachment to Historic Environments
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Wang, Yang (2021) Mapping urban residents’ place attachment to historic environments: a case study of Edinburgh. PhD thesis. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/82345/ Copyright and moral rights for this work are retained by the author A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge This work cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Enlighten: Theses https://theses.gla.ac.uk/ [email protected] Mapping Urban Residents’ Place Attachment to Historic Environments: A Case Study of Edinburgh Yang Wang BE, MArch Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of Social and Political Sciences College of Social Sciences University of Glasgow May 2021 Abstract Place attachment refers to the positive emotional bonds between people and places. Disrupting place attachment has a negative impact on people’s psychological well-being and the health of their communities. Place attachment can motivate people’s engagement in civic actions to protect their beloved places from being destroyed, especially when buildings and public spaces are demolished or redeveloped in historic places. However, the UK planning and heritage sectors have made only limited attempts to understand people’s attachment to the historic environment and how it may influence planning, conservation and development that affects historic places. This draws attention to the lack of empirical studies on place attachment to the historic environment, and thus a need for place attachment research to develop methodologies that might address this gap. The research presented in this thesis sets out to explore urban residents’ attachment to the historic environment they experience in their daily lives and to apply a mapping approach to visualise this attachment. A sequential explanatory mixed-methods approach, with a built-in mapping component, was used to pursue this aim. Edinburgh was selected as a single case study. A map-based PPGIS (Public Participation Geographic Information System) survey was designed and circulated among members of Edinburgh’s local civic associations and a Facebook interest group. The cross-sectional data collected during the fieldwork was analysed using various computational and spatial statistics. Twenty-five survey participants also took part in semi-structured follow-up interviews. The interview data were analysed using thematic coding. The employment of a mapping approach originated from the intention to visualise historic places to where people form attachments. In the course of the research, it has developed into an EGIS (Emotional GIS) methodology for place attachment research, which the author proposes for use by other researchers, whereby spatially referenced emotional data are collected via map-based surveys, interrogated by spatial analysis and made visually explicit with maps. This study provides a quantitative analysis of the author’s own self-reported measure of attachment to the historic environment, whereby a measurement i theory of attachment to the historic environment was developed. The findings indicated that residents’ attachment to the historic environment can be described by a three-dimensional construct, comprised of an intellectual, an autobiographical and a nostalgic dimension. Qualitative findings then provided deeper insights into the nuanced ways in which people develop these three attachment dimensions. More specifically, people can develop intellectual attachments to the historic environment as the consequences of aesthetic appreciation, imagination and self-reflection. They attach to their ‘lived-in’ and ‘remembered’ historic places and ‘reflect’ on such attachments as the result of growing a sense of ‘autobiographical insideness’. They also tend to yearn for historic places that have disappeared and for the happy moments in their lives. Attachment to the historic environment was spatially operationalised as ‘special historic place’ and its spatial distribution was visualised. A spatial relationship between special historic place distribution and places that people use in their daily lives was then confirmed using spatial point process modelling, which highlighted the unconscious developmental process of attachment to the historic environment. Two types of special historic places stood out: historic open green spaces such as gardens and parks, and popular visitor attractions like Edinburgh Castle, Arthur’s Seat and Calton Hill. The underlying reasons, revealed in the qualitative findings, suggested two other attributes that make historic places emotionally significant — restorative potential and visual magnitude. The nature of attachment(s) to the historic environment was also highlighted by examining the associations of those three attachment dimensions with sociodemographic variables through quantitative analysis, as well as probing the more latent social and cultural factors through qualitative coding. The thesis therefore highlights the need to create an additional designation category alongside current ‘Listing, scheduling and designations’ in Scotland that appreciates, legitimises and protects the emotional values of historic places that are used, experienced and loved by people, and demonstrates the value of using a mapping approach for such an endeavour. ii Table of Contents ABSTRACT .................................................................................................................................................... I TABLE OF CONTENTS .................................................................................................................................. III LIST OF TABLES ......................................................................................................................................... VII LIST OF FIGURES ......................................................................................................................................... IX ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................................................... X AUTHOR’S DECLARATION .......................................................................................................................... XII 1. CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................. 1 1.1 CONTEXT ................................................................................................................................................. 1 1.2 ACADEMIC RATIONALE ............................................................................................................................... 3 1.3 AIMS AND QUESTIONS ............................................................................................................................... 6 1.4 STRUCTURE OF THE THESIS .......................................................................................................................... 7 2. CHAPTER 2: PLACE ATTACHMENT AND THE HISTORIC ENVIRONMENT............................................. 10 2.1 INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................................................................... 10 2.2 DEFINING PLACE ATTACHMENT: THE STRUCTURAL INTERPRETATION FROM ENVIRONMENTAL PSYCHOLOGISTS .......... 11 2.3 FACTORS THAT INFLUENCE ATTACHMENT TO RESIDENTIAL PLACES .................................................................... 14 2.3.1 Factors at Person Level ............................................................................................................. 15 2.3.2 Factors at Place Level ............................................................................................................... 19 2.4 ATTACHMENT TO THE HISTORIC ENVIRONMENT ............................................................................................ 23 2.4.1 Overview ................................................................................................................................... 23 2.4.2 Attachment to the Historic Environment in Residential Settings: Four Hypothesised Dimensions ............................................................................................................................................. 25 2.5 SUMMARY ............................................................................................................................................. 30 3. CHAPTER 3: PLACE ATTACHMENT MAPPING .................................................................................... 32 3.1 INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................................................................... 32 3.2 PLACE ATTACHMENT AND CIVIC ENGAGEMENT: THE IMPORTANCE OF UNDERSTANDING ATTACHMENT TO THE HISTORIC ENVIRONMENT FROM A PRACTICAL PERSPECTIVE .................................................................................................... 33 3.2.1 Enthusiasm and Attachment .................................................................................................... 34 3.2.2 Place Changes, Attachment and Civic Engagement