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Abstract
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This study derived from the desire for a
better understanding of the challenges faced by planners, designers, and
decision-makers aiming at creating better urban open spaces, and
especially those in public housing areas where the development of decent
open spaces usually was assigned with low priority and their benefits to
residents and the community have not been fully explored and addressed.
The concept of place attachment emerges from place literature as a very
important aspect of people-environment relationship and a construct that
is of crucial pertinence to the ultimate goal of the design practice of
architectural profession: creating place.
Despite the increase of place attachment studies across a wide range of
contexts and the accumulation of the insights gained from place
attachment studies to the practice of environmental planning and
management, there is a lack of effort to investigate this phenomenon in
public housing context, where the positive emotional bond between
residents and the environment in which they live is regarded as one of
the most important objectives of planning, and where the validity of
open space development needs to be justified from a non-utilitarian
perspective. What is more urgent is the status of the field of research
of place attachment itself, which is characterized by a lack of
consensus on the underlying theoretical framework and agreements
regarding the answers to the questions: What is place attachment? What
are its sources? How does it develop? and What are its impacts?
With these research gaps in mind, the objectives of this study were
formulated: to develop a theoretical framework to guide the
investigation of the phenomenon of place attachment and empirically
examine the derived research hypotheses concerning the nature, sources,
mechanism, and impacts of place attachment in the context of nearby open
spaces in public housing areas. It is hoped that this study will
contribute to place research, advance our understanding of the
people-environment relationship, and provide insightful suggestions to
the endeavor of place-making that lies at the heart of design
practitioners’ work and the decision-making processes related to
environmental planning.
A tripartite theoretical framework, grounded on review of place
literature, was proposed that formed the basis upon which the current
study was built. The framework delineated the key components comprising
the phenomenon of place attachment and the relationships between them.
Based on this framework, three groups of research hypotheses were
proposed that were concerned with the dimensional structure of place
attachment, its relationships with other predictor variables and the
mechanism underlies its development, and its impacts on place-related
attitudes and behavioral intentions, respectively. A survey was
conducted and three neighborhood parks in the public housing new towns
in Singapore were chosen as the research settings based on their
representativeness of landscape design. Residents living around the
three parks were interviewed at their doorstep through a stratified
sampling process. Data were collected from March to May in 2007 with the
help of trained student assistants. The survey instrument was a
self-administrated questionnaire containing both written questions
designed to probe residents’ use, perceptions, evaluations, feelings,
thoughts, and other aspects of their relationships with neighborhood
parks, and a photo preference rating task. A total of 400 residents took
part in the survey and 368 qualified questionnaires were collected. Data
were recorded and analyzed in statistical programs SPSS 14.0 and AMOS
6.0.
By providing substantial empirical evidence to support the hypothesized
three-dimension (i.e. place caring, place dependence and place identity)
structural model of place attachment, this study advances our
understanding of the multidimensional nature of this construct and
raises concerns over the validity of unidimensional theorization and
operationalization of this multifaceted concept. More importantly, this
study tested and confirmed the crucial role place meaning plays in the
mechanism underlying the development of place attachment by providing
evidence to support the notion that place attachment is a meaning-based
concept in that identification with place meanings not only has strong
and significant direct contributions to all the attachment dimensions,
but also mediates the effects of other predictor variables of place
attachment, either partially or completely, thus emphasizing the
importance of understanding people’s responses to the meanings held by a
place in understanding their attachment to that place.
The findings here offer important practical implications by suggesting
that open space planners, designers, and managers should pay more
attention to older people’s recreation needs, and balanced landscape
design strategies are needed to respond to people’s appeal for
naturalistic landscape and their longing for signs of human intention to
care for the landscape. The results also stress the need to shift from
the current facility-provision-oriented approaches in open space design
to experience-creation-oriented ones. This study also provided evidence
to confirm the validity and utility of neighborhood parks in
community-building and neighborhood revitalization in public housing
areas and questions the soundness of the current new town planning model
in Singapore. Finally, the results highlight the necessity of public
involvement in neighborhood open space planning and the advantages that
place attachment study can bring to the process of public consultation.
It is suggested that direct involvement of residents in the design and
management in the form of community garden may feature an effective way
to strengthen the emotional connection between residents and
neighborhood parks and further, sense of community.
It is also emphasized that caution must be taken when interpreting and
generalizing the research findings here. Based on understanding of the
limitations of this study, directions for future research are also
suggested, such as refining sampling procedures and measurement
instrument, testing alternative structural models, examining the
temporal dimension, investigating new research contexts, and
incorporating qualitative methods.
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