Place attachment, metaphor and memory
Our attachment to places depends on both our senses and our histories
I have a confession to make: when I teach courses in environmental psychology, I avoid saying much about place attachment. I’ve been afraid of it. I get hung up on the idea that we develop attachments to places by means of the same mechanisms that attach us to people. I don’t know why I’ve found this idea so difficult to accept, other than to blame biases born of my academic beginnings in animal behaviour. As I wrote in my last post here, I learned that in that realm the most important element of place attachment seemed to be familiarity. You can make an animal develop what looks like a place attachment just by putting it there. That didn’t seem to have much to do with human attachment, the sorry story of Harry Harlow’s monkeys, or the way that I feel attached to my wife or my children.
My re-education began recently when I listened to a talk given by a much admired and respected colleague, who helped me to see a path from the hard and shiny things that I normally think about in my research to ideas about how we attach to a place. It was especially interesting because the talk took place in São Paulo, a city that I’d never visited before but to which I felt an immediate, strong attraction. The irony screams at me.
Is it possible that there are physical properties of places that make us want to be close to them? Because if it is then we ought to be able to figure out how to build settings (houses, rooms, cities, neighborhoods) that increase the likelihood of attachment. In a world that is being smashed to smithereens by a host of emerging factors that defy our attempts to control or even understand them, our relationships with places have become more precarious than ever but, I believe, also more important than ever. Anything that we can learn that might help us to feel attached to something in our careening out-of-control planet ought to be something to cherish, especially if it changes our inclination to act.
For the past year since I heard my friend’s talk, I’ve continued to bumble along, thinking occasionally that place attachment is something I should dig into but with no clear plan for how that might happen. And then, as seems to happen to me, weird serendipity led the way. There were many landmarks on the road, some coming from a meeting that I attended in Ottawa this summer that was broadly on the topic of housing. I’ve actually done research on housing and dwelling and even here it hadn’t occurred to me that my mind is never really very far from thinking about attachment to places. But the tipping point came on a recent, idle afternoon in London, the city of my birth and I suppose the closest thing this immigrant to Canada and lifelong wanderer has to a true home. I was in the city for a conference but I had enough free time for a stroll.
When I play the flaneur in London, I gravitate naturally to the east side of the city, where my mother was born. We left England when I was far too young to have any proper memories of her early surroundings, and her childhood was not a very happy one, so she was reserved about the details in spite of my entreaties to her to share what I felt was an important part of my story. Towards the end of her life, I bought her a little recording device, hoping to convince her to record her stories so that I could write them down and share them with my family. But she told me that she had a superstition that if she embarked on the project it would hasten her end. Now, I wonder whether she was just putting me off because too many of those early memories were things that she’d rather keep her distance from. I do know a few things about her early life. She was from a large, working class family, thwarted in many of her ambitions for life by her duties to her siblings and then by World War II. I always feel closer to my mother when I am walking the streets that I know she must have inhabited as a little girl and a teenager. But on this trip, rather than navigate to the very source—the house that I knew my mother lived in as a child—I went a little farther afield. A bit worn down from too much time spent in the core of the city doing some research for an upcoming project, I looked for interesting urban greenspaces to visit. St. Dunstan in the East caught my eye. I never thought of the place as any kind of pilgrimage site for me—just an interesting and pretty garden in a part of the city that I like. The church here has ancient roots. Indeed, archeological evidence suggests that it was one of the earliest Christian sites in the city, dated at about the 9th century AD and built upon the ruins of Roman institutional structures and homes. Dig deep enough beneath St. Dunstan and you will find artifacts dating well into the times of Roman Londinium. The ancient Christian site had seen some wear and tear, undergoing major repairs because of faulty construction in the 13th century and then mostly razed by the Great Fire of London in 1666. Following the fire, the great Sir Christopher Wren had rebuilt the church, and so it stood with a few repairs along the way until the 20th century. When my mother was born in 1926 the church would have been active. She may have visited it.
My mother’s roots in this part of London are probably just as deep as those of St. Dunstan. Tracking genealogy of ordinary working-class people is no easy task, but what we know suggests that her (and my!) line goes back in London, probably east London, for at least a thousand years. As I wander through this part of the city, I am literally tracking through the atoms of my ancestors as they float in the air and cling to the old bricks and stone of London’s buildings. In the middle of the 20th century, though, those particles of memory were assaulted by Germany’s attack on London. The attack culminated in one terrible prolonged bombing raid through the evening of May 10, 1941 and the following morning, May 11. This was the awful finale of the London Blitz. Incendiaries landed first, ostensibly in an attempt to light up targets for the bombers that followed, but more likely to terrorize and cow the residents of the city. In the single prolonged attack of seemingly endless waves of bombers, well over a thousand Londoners were killed and massive damage was inflicted on the city’s buildings. Except for the steeple designed and built by Wren, much of St Dunstan’s Church was destroyed. My mother would have been fifteen years old at the time. It isn’t clear whether she was in London on May 10. She was one of the children evacuated from the city to be shielded from the worst of the war but, like so many others, the move was not successful and she returned home to London fairly quickly, At fifteen it is likely she would have returned to the city, but nobody is left for me to ask: another lost memory. I do remember her telling me once of sounds of air-raid sirens, the panicked run to shelters and her blinking re-emergence, never being sure if there would be a home left for her to return to. If she was there, she would have heard the bombs drop that destroyed St. Dunstan’s Church. Even if she were sheltering in a nearby tube station, I’m sure she would have felt the ground around her rumble with the shock waves of the attack, a couple of miles away from her. If she were still living unhappily on a farm, separated from her family and treated as unpaid help, the shock waves from the attack would have washed over her more slowly. Indeed, I think it safe to assume that the entire arc of my mother’s life was disturbed profoundly by the events of the Blitz.
In its wisdom, the caretakers of St. Dunstan’s Church decided not to repair the ruins following World War II but to leave them as a memorial to the sad and horrific events of that day. What has happened over the intervening eighty-odd years is the remarkable transformation that you see in the photographs. The site is overgrown with trees, shrubs, moss, and other types of plants. It’s astonishingly beautiful.
When I stumbled on all of this a few weeks ago, its personal significance struck me immediately. The ruins were a metaphor for my mother’s interrupted early life. The overgrown wildlife was what had grown up around the ruins. It was me. It was my siblings. It was all of the many people who followed in my mother’s wake—the children, and grandchildren she loved. It was the grandchildren and great-grandchildren she never met. My mother died in her 70s after a life checkered by ill-health and disappointment but also grounded by a family who adored her. She never let us doubt for a second that we children were her everything, and we did our best to reciprocate. She lived for family, perhaps striving as so many of us do to give to us what she had struggled so hard to find as a child and then as a young woman.
I tell you all of this not to engage in the weird, cringy pleasure of oversharing but to explain what happened next. As soon as these thoughts came together for me, I experienced a violent, protective instinct towards the site. I was repulsed by the other visitors, mugging for their phone cameras to broadcast puerile instagrammable moments. Their presence seemed almost blasphemous. They shouldn’t have been allowed here. I needed them to leave. Over the course of about 20 minutes, I had developed a fierce attachment to this place so strong that sharing it with other humans was almost beyond my tolerance. Out of nowhere, the man who was so confused about what place attachment was had been knocked on his behind by the fiercest experience of it he had ever known. Since that moment, the memories of that place have taken up permanent residence in my cranium. Now, when I think of my mother, she is there in the garden at St Dunstan in the East.
Taking a step backwards and looking at this as a scientist, I can sort out some of what happened to me. Apart from its personal significance, the park at St Dunstan in the East is beautiful. The natural features alone, set in a busy urban context, have all of the effects I would predict from my professional work. The wildness of the site makes for a superb restorative experience—an antidote to the hubbub of a big city. The ruined walls have the hallmarks of the kind of “elegant decay” that draws so many of us (perhaps too many of us!) to sites like Venice, Italy—another of my favourite places on the planet. But for me the clinching argument had to do with the way that the place wove itself into my own personal history. When those ruins became my mother there was no longer any way to claw the place from my heart.
A historian friend of mine once told me about her experiences while handling ancient documents. Sometimes researchers are required to use bare fingers rather than gloved hands for their work. The reasoning is that the damage that might occur from contact with bare hands is outweighed by the risk of clumsy handling with gloves. She said that the feeling of intimacy when her fingers touch the same papers that carry the oils and dirt of the hands of their creators gives her a frisson of wonder but also a feeling of nostalgia. Nostalgia for the not-experienced: that’s what I felt in the garden. It was as if I’d stumbled into some foreign, unknown site and I discovered that not only was my mother there but she had always been there and so had I. I had always known this place that I was now standing in for the first time.
When I think about my scientific work, these are the kinds of moments that give me pause. I wonder at the inadequacy of trying to boil down a rich experience like the one that I had in London that day into the models and equations of a science. These must be the moments that provide ammunition for those who are more convinced of the limitations of scientific approaches than of their prospects for deep understanding. But I think I’ve walked away from this particular experience emboldened by the idea that there’s room for both the scientific principles and the particularities of the lived experience here. Someone other than me might not experience the landslide of emotions that overwhelmed and attached me to the site, but it is easy to recognize the way that the physical features of the ruins collided with my own personal history to produce strong attachment. What happened to me makes sense. It’s not a mystery beyond understanding, by any means.
Our world is a complicated place. We live together, sometimes in harmony but often not, in settings that were not purpose-built to address our psychological needs. History, aesthetic, emotion, and culture often clash. Sometimes those clashes cost lives. But the issues are too important for us to throw our hands up in the air with despair at their complexity. Even if the edges don’t quite meet and we can’t quite resolve all of the contradictions, the understanding that comes from the effort of trying to make sense, to try to unravel place attachment when and where we can, will, I’m convinced help us to find our way to surroundings that nurture and support us. Understanding why we love places can guide our efforts to build places worth loving.