By Sam Talbot –
Take a moment and think of the place in which you find yourself right now. No matter the location, there are seemingly infinite ways to develop a connection to a particular place. For example, you may depend on your surroundings to provide basic needs, or maybe the connection has developed from an emotional attachment or your identity. It seems reasonable to assume that if you’ve developed a strong connection to a place, you’d be more concerned about environmental issues specific to that area, and more willing to act on that concern. But how can we quantify something that is as complex and contextual as “sense of place”?
Researcher Asim Zia from the University of Vermont and his team of colleagues set out to answer that question with a grant funded by National Science Foundation. Their study focused on potential relationships between strong sense of place, environmental concern, and citizen action.
Measuring sense of place can be approached objectively or subjectively. Zia and his colleagues point out that pure objectivity and pure subjectivity lie on either end of a continuum. There’s no clear answer as to which approach would more closely represent an accurate measurement of sense of place (see table below for an example of a simplified framework describing these two approaches). They set out to find an integrative approach that falls along this continuum and is based on measurable reports of observable phenomena.
To better understand a person’s environmental concern, the research team used a conceptualized version of ambit. Ambit represents an individual’s periphery of their movements measurable over a period of time in relation to a home place. For example, over the course of a week, a UVM graduate student’s ambit may be focused mostly around their apartment in Burlington, then emphasis is given to school campus, favorite coffee shop, Lake Champlain, City Market, a friend’s house, etc. The particular places outside of the home can be quantified in terms of distance, weighted with time spent and frequency of trips.
In an attempt to measure ambit, the researchers surveyed 74 residents of Silicon Valley in California. The survey aimed at eliciting respondent’s memory of trips taken over the course of a year. The resulting data suggested 5.07% less time spent for every 10 miles distance away from home. Even though respondents spent more time closer to home, the amount of time per distance from home varied greatly. This led to the rejection that concern is an objective function of weighted distance alone. Therefore, it is also inherently subjective, for example, through long distance trips to visit family or coral reefs.
Survey respondents also reported on their level of activism and attendance at community meetings. Zia used this information to explore the relationship between ambit-based measure of sense of place and community action. The data suggested respondents who spend a higher weighted average of time closer to home (i.e. higher sense of place) are more likely to participate in community action. The researchers point out that these findings are not necessarily generalizable, however future empirical research could shed more light on ambit-based sense of place. For example, GPS data or agent-based modeling – in addition to surveys – would provide a more robust set of data regarding individual movement between particular places, and shifting environmental concern as a function of such mobility.
Zia and his colleagues provide clear insight into the importance of proxies, such as their proposed ambit-based, sense of place theory: “As we work to develop new formal and informal institutions for dealing with problems that both exist in places and cross the boundaries of established spaces, it will be increasingly important to know something about people’s contours of meaningful place attachments as experienced on the ground.”
Sam Talbot is a second year student in the Ecological Planning Program.
Citation
Zia, Asim, et al. “Spatial discounting, place attachment, and environmental concern: Toward an ambit-based theory of sense of place.” Journal of Environmental Psychology 40 (2014): 283-295.
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