I Just Need Some Space

Issue 004: I Just Need Some Space

When I was leaving Amherst, Massachusetts last month, I was listening to Noah Kahan’s new album and driving on a single-lane road as the sun came up. I’d never been there before and I’d only been visiting for a few days, but my heart started to hurt and I found myself nearly in tears as I pulled up to the airport.

I know that sounds so dramatic. But place attachment is a real thing. We form relationships to places the same way we form relationships with other people. I fell in love at first sight with Amherst only for my vacation romance to end abruptly three days later. So put on your favorite rom-com, grab a pint of ice cream, and grieve with me over our lost places this week.

(I put this lightly, but there is a lot of depth to this week’s subject.)

Andddd a podcast update: I had some encouraging feedback after the last audio recording, so I stepped up my game. The podcast now has a) better audio, b) better pronunciation, and c) a few extra tidbits beyond the newsletter. Listen here (also available on Spotify or Apple Podcasts).

Warmest welcome,
Dr. Kati Peditto

In 1958, the city of Boston bulldozed the West End and 12,000 residents were relocated.

It was all in the name of so-called “urban renewal.” The neighborhood was originally a dense, walkable, working-class Italian, Irish, and Eastern European Jewish community near the Charles River, and it was razed to make way for luxury apartments and a hospital expansion. It was all part of Mayor John Hynes’ plan for a New Boston - the West End land had scenic views of the river, and the city administration considered the views wasted on a “blighted” neighborhood.

A few years after the seizure of the West End, sociologist Marc Fried went back and interviewed former residents, and wrote it up in a landmark paper. He found that people were grieving, but not just metaphorically. Literally grieving in the same way that someone would mourn the loss of a loved one. They reported symptoms that looked like bereavement: persistent sadness, depression, difficulty functioning, a longing for something they could no longer have. In his 1963 paper "Grieving for a Lost Home," Fried wrote that over half of the women and a third of the men showed "fairly severe grief reactions."

Environmental psychologists started to call this “place attachment,” and it works a lot like a human relationship.

There is falling in love with a place at first sight (me with Amherst). It is influenced by both personal and physical things. You might form an immediate bond because the local residents share similar ideologies, or because the area is similar in foliage and architecture to where you used to live. But you might also form bonds more quickly if you live on a cul-de-sac vs. a long street. And we tend to form stronger bonds for medium-sized places (like towns, rather than hammocks or continents). Either way, it’s the feeling of being “at home” immediately, even if you’ve never been there before.

And we also have the slowwww burn bonds that we construct over time. Like Geneva, New York, the tiny town in western New York where I lived during grad school with my new husband, where we adopted our first dog together, where we bought our first home, and where we walked for burritos every Thursday. These places accumulate meaning the way relationships do, through time, repetition, and the memories within them.

And then there’s the way a place literally gets into your soul. In the 1970-80s, Harold Proshansky (a good name to know in environmental psychology!) introduced the concept of place identity to describe how physical environments become woven into our self-concept. The places we inhabit shape how we understand ourselves. When those places are torn down or we’re prevented from going back, something in our identity is lost. So naturally, there’s grief when that place is gone and leaves a hole in who we are.

If you’re a visual learner, you’ll enjoy Missy Jessop’s love letter to the Utah desert. Whenever I teach a lecture on place attachment, I always start by showing this video. A peaceful, beautiful 4-minute watch.

The West End is one example, and it’s a pretty famous one (see: West End Museum), but that’s certainly not the only instance of place attachment.

Since I was a grad student, I’ve been struck by Uchita Vaid's work on auto-constructed housing communities in Ahmedabad, India. Her 2021 study was the result of years of fieldwork in which she followed a community being moved from “slum housing” to new apartment-style homes as part of a housing redevelopment intervention (see her footnote on language in urban development).

Over nearly a decade (and two waves of data collection!), Dr. Vaid tracked housing quality before and after redevelopment, conducting observations, resident interviews, and focus groups. Even though the new professionally-designed apartments were objectively higher-quality and safer, residents who moved into the replacement housing showed a significant drop in their sense of ownership and control over their environment, and stopped investing in maintenance. Meanwhile, residents of the original informal settlements, where people had built and modified their own homes incrementally over years, continued improving their housing conditions without any government intervention.

When people create their own environments over time (especially as part of a community), the attachment that develops is qualitatively different than what happens when someone moves into a finished space, no matter how “nice” it is. The process of making is part of what creates the bond. So moving people into higher-quality state-sponsored apartments might sound like a positive intervention, but Dr. Vaid’s work suggests a lot more nuance.

Indigenous communities have understood place attachment at a physical scale and timescale that Western psychology is still working to comprehend. The relationship with land in many indigenous frameworks is constitutive. The land is not just where people live. It is part of WHO the community is, part of their history, their cosmology, their sense of continuity across generations.

Mindy Fullilove's work on Black American communities has a similar thesis. Building directly on Fried’s work, Dr. Fullilove coined the term "root shock" to describe what happens when neighborhoods are dismantled through urban renewal, redlining, or other eminent domain activities, like highway construction. Root shock is the traumatic stress reaction to the destruction of one's emotional ecosystem. Dr. Fullilove suggests it has measurable effects on health outcomes, social cohesion, and community resilience that can persist for decades, just as Fried suggested. It’s worth picking up her book.

The last few issues have focused on interiors. We moved to a bigger scale this week with urban design. But the same thread is there at both scales: How can this space best accommodate people? What do people stand to lose if this place changes? Can our design process account for that?

And don’t get me wrong here - I’m not advocating to preserve every single building just for preservation’s sake. Rather I’m advocating for designers to think about the emotional ecosystem of a place before changing it. We do this with a lot of things already (like investigating structural conditions or site hydrology before we change it). In this case, our design process should incorporate a genuine opportunity to understand what people have built their sense of self and belonging around.

AKA: I downloaded these papers and vetted them, so you don’t have to.

When I first started teaching place attachment, I usually saved these case studies for a lecture called “The Dark Side of Place Attachment.” It’s heavy stuff and intersects with a lot of other topics, like housing policy, race, class, and social identity. There is certainly more to discuss here than I can fit into a newsletter.

There is also a “Light Side” of place attachment, the feeling of falling in love, of finding a place that fits you. I’ll keep you on the hook for that in next week’s newsletter.

To work with me on an upcoming project or speaking engagement, reply to this email or visit katipeditto.com.

Until next week,

Dr. Kati Peditto