The Implications of Urbanization for Inhabitants’ Relationship to Their Residential Environment

Abstract

In the last decades, prosperous regions in Europe have experienced a tremendous rate of urbanization. In spite of considerable research efforts in the last decades, the socio-psychological implications of urbanization are still poorly understood. This paper aims to systematically determine the influence of urbanization on the relationships between inhabitants and their residential environment including their place attachment, place-satisfaction, civic participation, and proximity behavior. To achieve these goals, standardized cross-sectional questionnaires were administered to random samples (N = 1200 each) of the residential population in four study areas in Switzerland, which represent rural, peri-urban, suburban, and urban stages of urbanization. Statistical analysis revealed that place attachment was mainly influenced by the inhabitants' good experiences in the place, their sense of local community, their local social contacts, and the level of urbanization. A structural equation model (SEM) further showed that the degree of urbanization of the setting had a direct negative influence on place attachment, while place attachment appeared to be a key moderator of, and a main driver for, place-satisfaction, civic participation, and proximity behavior.A key to reducing negative impacts of urbanization is therefore to offer optimal opportunities for access to appropriate public places

Congruence between the prioritisation of conservation problems at the local and national scale: an evaluation by environmental scientists in Poland

“…The lack of actions to plan and control urbanisation processes will make them even more pressing problems, including economic and social dysfunction for humans (Litynski 2016;Karwińska et al 2018). In addition, the history of a particular urban area and place attachment may play a role in perceiving conservation problems, and this may also be the reason why urbanisation is considered a major problem on a local scale (Buchecker and Frick 2020).…”

Housing Workers’ Evaluations of Residential Environmental Quality in South Korean Welfare Housing for Low-Income, Single-Parent Families

“…Examples of research topics: How does the occupants' perception of sustainability and sustainable development [16][17][18] relate to the intra-personal community and neighborhood environmental levels (e.g., social interaction, community participation, neighborhood attachment, connectedness to nature)? [63,[75][76][77] How does the quality of the community and natural environment affect the sense of well-being and the sustainability-oriented behaviors of the occupants? On the other hand, HWs' management approaches and leadership styles can also be exploited in relation to the well-being of HWs and the level of organizational sustainability in welfare housing facilities (e.g., workplace relation, organizational culture, management leadership) [17,18,78].…”

Urbanization and the organization of territorial cohesion – results from a comparative Danish case-study on territorial inequality and social cohesion

“…We see two interrelated elements decisive for the strength and type of collective efficacy. First, we will argue that there is not a simple relation between degree of urbanization and place attachment, and if we are to understand how urbanization affects social organization and the chances of collective action and development, we have to address variations in place attachment (Buchecker and Frick, 2020;Fallov et al, 2013;Jørgensen et al, 2016). Second, the existence of a municipal "spatial imaginary" (Sum and Jessop, 2013) works a common frame of reference for the relation between territorial capital, territorial governance and the mobilization of collective efficacy.…”