Approaches on the concepts of place attachment in South Africa

Abstract

This paper presents a select review of the literature on approaches to place attachment. A review of literary works on the topic reveals that approaches to place attachment studies can be grouped into four broad domains: attachment to specific places and ‘meaningful locations’; predictors vs consequences of place attachment; methodologies of place dimensions; and theoretical approaches to the study. Comparatively, we then consider the approach to studies on place attachment in South Africa through a selective review of empirical studies on the topic. These are grouped into three broad categories: community attachment and cultural symbolism studies; place, sense of place, and place identity studies; and studies on the historical perspective of environmentalism in South Africa. We posit that studies on place attachment in South Africa are relatively in their infancy, and that more could be done to augment methodological and theoretical gaps on place attachment research in the country. However, by selecting South Africa as a reference point for studies in the global South, we do not purport that the selected studies are representative of the wide plethora of studies on place attachment discourse in this region.