Place attachment:: Conceptual and empirical questions

One of the limitations in the study of attachment to place has been its restriction to the spatial range of neighbourhood. Apart from some studies analysing attachment to house, there is a gap regarding other spatial environments. In this sense, we do not know to what extent people can be attached to other spatial categories, i.e., to bigger or smaller places, and whether the neighbourhood range is effectively the basic level of attachment, as many studies assume. On the other hand, most studies on attachment to place have viewed places as social environments only. We have found very few references to the physical dimension of place in the definition of the concept and also few regarding its operationalization. In this study, we measured place attachment within three spatial ranges (house, neighbourhood, and city) and two dimensions (physical and social), in order to establish some comparison between them. We did so by interviewing 177 people from different areas of Santa Cruz de Tenerife (Spain). The results indicate that attachment to place develops to different degrees within different spatial ranges and dimensions. Among the results, we can highlight that: 1) attachment to neighbourhood is the weakest; 2) social attachment is greater than physical attachment; and 3) the degree of attachment varies with age and sex. (C) 2001 Academic Press.