Nurturing Cultural Heritages and Place Attachment through Street Art—A Longitudinal Psycho-Social Analysis of a Neighborhood Renewal Process

Abstract

The Faro Convention emphasizes the link between cultural heritage and place-related identity, highlighting their role in fostering environmental and community belonging. Urban renewal projects centered around contemporary and street art have gained popularity worldwide but often exhibit unclear impacts on local populations. Few studies have explored this topic using a psychological and longitudinal approach. Addressing this research gap, our study analyzed changes in place attachment and neighborhood image five years after implementing a street-art-based renewal project in a Milan suburb. Moreover, the project’s impact on the neighborhood’s historical “personality” as perceived by residents and citizens (n = 296) was examined. A survey was designed and administered to compare trends in these variables between 2017 (project start) and 2022, applying content analysis and analysis of variance techniques. Results showed that street art inspired by local history and culture had a positive effect on residents’ place attachment and local image, without disrupting community traditions. However, no significant impacts were found among non-residents. These findings highlight the significance of urban renewal policies that prioritize a district’s social and cultural history. Such policies not only safeguard the citizens’ well-being and foster place attachment, but could also revitalize the local imagery, promoting innovation and creativity.

Valorizing Community Identity and Social Places to Implement Participatory Processes in San Giovanni a Teduccio (Naples, Italy)

“…Overall, consistent with the FARO Convention, all these elements compound the local cultural heritage [9, 12,13] and are critical to individuals' and communities' well-being as well as community cohesion and identity [12,13]. In this vein, by relying on the relevant identity-related dimensions individuals have, promoting interventions aimed at involving local actors through collaborative and participatory processes represents a strategy to make them more aware of the shared responsibility and care they ought to have towards such common spaces and resources.…”

“…Building on these results, it seems evident that high-quality, available, enjoyable, and livable spaces, which can serve as public landmarks and are able to host local traditions and social gatherings, are linked to the development of citizens' bond to their community places [2,60] and hold the needed attributes to become meaningful to their daily life and social identities [5,12,13,[61][62][63]. That is, when dealing with people's experience, community places should be taken into account not only as spatial settings with their environmental qualities but also as social venues where interactions and relationships happen and to which individual and shared representations and meanings are attached [64][65][66][67]; this allows us to consider the affective, conative, and sense-making dimensions about places, such as emotions, individual and shared representations, the derived meanings about what a place is like, what are its functions, which images it conveys, which activities it hosts, and so on [68,69].…”

“…The following main areas were explored: (a) the relationship with the local community and the active participation within it, (b) the relationship with the associations that were active in the community, (c) the relationship with local institutions, (d) the perception of local urban spaces and meeting places, and (e) the perception of community resources and constraints. Indeed, all these aspects compound what has been defined as local cultural heritage, which can represent a flywheel for community cohesion as well as economic development [12,13]. Consistently with the topics of the interviews and inspired by the photodialogue methodology [34], which holds the potential to promote critical thinking and dialogue about issues that are felt as relevant by the participants with reference to their community [35]; all the interviewees were also asked to send researchers one or more photos of the places in their neighborhood to which they attributed socialization and aggregative functions for the community and which were significant to community identity in their opinion.…”

“…That is, cultural heritage does not only have a historical, cultural and artistic value but also social, symbolic, and identity values [11]. Indeed, cultural heritage is tightly linked to community places and identity, as well as to the meanings and symbolic systems in which they are incorporated, and which compound the tie between individuals and their community meant both as a social group and as an environmental setting [12,13]. It represents both a common good and a shared resource; thus, taking care of it should be considered a shared responsibility to avoid its over-exploitation, underfunding, neglect, oblivion, and so on [13].…”

“…In this vein, studies have reckoned community engagement and participation as critical processes for enhancing the long-term management of local physical and cultural heritages [14]. Based on this, taking care of neighborhood common places and making them livable and enjoyable for citizens through participatory regeneration processes represent significant dimensions when aiming at supporting individuals' and communities' well-being as well as community cohesion and identity [12,13].…”