Place Identity

The concept of place identity—the sense of belonging to emotionally, socially, and culturally significant places—is an important facet of people's self-identity. Place identity situates psychological development in the life spaces, home spaces, neighborhood spaces, and national/transnational/global spaces where people live and work. As a psychological construct, it highlights the significance of understanding residents' conceptions of themselves as located in a particular space and time and as members of a social community and cultural group.

American environmental psychologist Harold M. Proshansky (1920–1990) first used the term place identity in his work of the 1970s and in a 1983 article in the Journal of Environmental Psychology. In his theory, social identity and place identity are both the basis of a person's self-identity:

• Place identity can be seen as a substructure of self-identity that defines an individual's personal identity in relation to the physical world through memories, ideas, feelings, attitudes, values, preferences, meanings, and conceptions about behavior relevant to the physical settings in his or her daily life. These attitudes, beliefs, and other cognitions emerge from the individual's personal experiences, good and bad, in relation to the physical world. (Proshansky in Altman & Christiansen 1991, p. 26)

Proshansky conceived of place identity as the positive and negative influences of people's surroundings on their self-identity and self-perception. The physical situation and its social implications act as powerful forces on the way that people define their own value and the way that they believe others perceive and value them. Proshansky identified three elements as underlying the development of place identity: the physical settings of home, school, and neighborhood where social roles are formed; the architectural settings that influence what is expected behaviorally; and any place where a child learns the skills needed to use or change an environment and consequently derives satisfaction and a sense of mastery.

[Page 1074]While Proshansky originated the concept within the discipline of psychology, place identity has grown into a theory frequently applied to research and to practical concerns ranging from crowding, housing and community development, and neighborhood reform, to environmental meaning and sociocultural relationships with the environment such as place attachment.