Place Attachment

Place attachment is the emotional and cognitive bond a person forms with a particular location — a home, neighbourhood, city, or landscape — built up through memory, repeated experience, social ties, and meaning-making. It is studied in environmental psychology, urban planning, tourism, and cultural heritage research, and is shaped by both individual factors (autobiographical memory, identity) and collective ones (community, history, culture). For accessibility, place attachment matters because disabled people are often excluded from the everyday rituals of place — pubs and cafés, transit, civic events, religious spaces — that build it, and inaccessible heritage sites and digital reconstructions can reinforce that exclusion. Inclusive heritage and urban-play design treats place attachment as an outcome to support, not just an aesthetic to evoke.