Place Attachment: Why Nowhere Feels Like Home

Many of us have had the experience of feeling closely connected to a place – it might be your bedroom, your school, your neighborhood, or even your entire city. Feeling attached to a place can come with feelings of peace, safety, and belonging; but is it possible to be insecurely attached to a place? Can attachment theory, which outlines how we relate to people, map onto how we relate to places?

In this article, we’ll talk about what researchers have found on place attachment so far, how it might relate to attachment theory, and what you can do to develop healthier attachments and a sense of safety in your own important places.

DISCOVER YOUR ATTACHMENT STYLE

Understanding Place Attachment

Place attachment is defined as a “cognitive-emotional bond that forms between individuals and their important settings“¹. In other words, it’s a real, felt connection to a place that matters to you. Research on place attachment is still relatively new, but a few different theories and frameworks have been suggested.

One popular model suggests that our attachment to a place depends on 3 interactions²:

1. Person – the meaning given to the place by you or other people.
2. Process – the psychological processes involved in the connection, such as thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
3. Place – the physical and social characteristics of the place itself.

If you feel particularly attached to a place, it’s likely that it holds a special meaning to you, has an important community or environment, and you have warm thoughts, feelings, and experiences there.

Some researchers think we bond with places as part of our evolutionary survival behavior – in the environment we evolved in, if we found a place with lots of resources like food, shelter, and water, and we spent enough time there to learn how best to make use of them, we had a much better chance of survival than if we wandered².

Others have made more direct comparisons to attachment theory, which states that comfort and emotional security is more important in forming attachments than meeting physiological needs². If we have a place we feel safe to return to when things go wrong, we might be more likely to venture out where we might find better resources – just not too far from our safe place. This is directly compared to having a secure attachment with a caregiver.

The Benefits of Place Attachment

Having an attachment to a place has lots of benefits – studies have found that place attachments bring us feelings of belonging, security, and relaxation, as well as supporting our sense of personal identity and growth¹.

But can you be too attached to a place? Can attachments to places be defined in the same way we define attachments to people, with measures of anxiety and avoidance playing into our feelings and behaviors?

What Is Attachment Theory?

Attachment theory describes how we relate to ourselves and others. As children, we develop attachments to our caregivers differently based on how they look after us. If they’re consistent and reliably attuned to our needs, we develop a secure attachment style and trust in others. If our caregivers aren’t reliably attuned to us, we develop insecure attachment styles marked by either high anxiety or high avoidance.

These attachment styles tend to follow us into adulthood, where we measure attachment based on the anxiety and avoidance domains. This means that a fourth attachment style emerges in adulthood: the fearful-avoidant attachment style, high in both anxiety and avoidance.

Your attachment style can affect your self-esteem, your relationships, and even your work – if you don’t know your attachment style yet, take our free quiz to find out.

DISCOVER YOUR ATTACHMENT STYLE

Attachment Theory and Place Attachment

Some place attachment researchers have drawn close parallels between place attachment and attachment theory: notably, that attachments to both places and people give us a sense of a secure base, “proximity-seeking” behaviors (or actions taken to stay close to the attachment figure/place), and feelings of distress when the connection is disrupted³.

However, mapping attachment theory onto place attachment hasn’t been as simple as translating one domain onto another. Instead of using adapted versions of relationship attachment tests, like the Experiences in Close Relationships scale, place attachment researchers often use several different measurements.

Does Your Attachment Style Impact Place Attachment?

Place and person attachment share some common brain areas – notably, the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex⁴. It’s been theorized that, since our personal attachment styles can be related to different activity in these brain areas, this pattern of activity can impact our place attachments in the same way.

In one study, people with secure attachment styles were more likely to have more than one place attachment, and their attached places were more likely to be outdoors than those with insecure attachment styles⁵. People with secure attachment styles are more likely to experience intrinsic benefits from place attachment, like a sense of connection and happiness, while people with attachment avoidance are less likely to experience these benefits. People with attachment anxiety, on the other hand, are more likely to experience extrinsic benefits, or material benefits, like amenities and physical comfort.

How to Improve Place Attachment

If you don’t feel particularly attached to the place you live, you might be missing out on all of the positives that come with place attachment. There are a few ways you can strengthen your place attachment to develop a closer connection to your environment and your community:

1. Get involved in the community – social ties and community contribution are important in feeling connected to our places. Look online or in community places like libraries for local groups, activities, or volunteering opportunities.
2. Use augmented reality (AR) games to get out and about – in one study, people who used AR games (such as Pokemon Go) to explore their local area had higher place attachments, regardless of how much time they spent doing it⁶.
3. Build a secure attachment style – it’s possible to build a more secure attachment style over time. This could literally rewire your brain, supporting stronger place attachment and greater intrinsic benefits. For more information about building a secure attachment style, check out our attachment repair course.

Closing Remarks On Place Attachment and Attachment Theory

Place attachments work a little differently to attachments to people, but attachment theory can still give us an insight into our attachments to places. Building place attachments can help us to get more out of our environment, whether materially or internally, and we may be able to do this by learning a more secure attachment style.

If you don’t know your attachment style yet, and therefore don’t know how it might influence your place attachment, try our free attachment quiz to find out.

DISCOVER YOUR ATTACHMENT STYLE

References

1. Scannell L, Gifford R. Place attachment enhances psychological need satisfaction. Environment and Behavior. 2017 May;49(4):359-89.
2. Scannell L, Gifford R. Defining place attachment: A tripartite organizing framework. Journal of environmental psychology. 2010 Mar 1;30(1):1-0.
3. Boley BB, Strzelecka M, Yeager EP, Ribeiro MA, Aleshinloye KD, Woosnam KM, Mimbs BP. Measuring place attachment with the abbreviated place attachment scale (APAS). Journal of environmental psychology. 2021 Apr 1;74:101577.
4. Holmes S. Emotional attachment: Does place play a role? (Doctoral dissertation, Thompson Rivers University).
5. Nisa CF, Bélanger JJ, Schumpe BM. On solid ground: Secure attachment promotes place attachment. Journal of Environmental Psychology. 2020 Aug 1;70:101463.
6. Oleksy T, Wnuk A. Catch them all and increase your place attachment! The role of location-based augmented reality games in changing people-place relations. Computers in Human Behavior. 2017 Nov 1;76:3-8.