Community responses to environmental threat: Place cognition, attachment, and social action

Abstract

Place attachment (PA) is an important motivation to spend time in one's neighborhood, talking to neighbors sociably or about local issues, and rather than flee, to stay and fight—that is, to create social capital and participate in collective efforts to preserve or improve the community. Those efforts are often in response to some perceived threat to residents' health, safety, property, and/or quality of life, and to the very PAs that led to residents' community engagement. This chapter reviews, analyzes, and builds upon theory and research across multiple disciplines on residential community PA and its relationship to psychological and collective responses to environmental threats, with particular attention to energy exploration and extraction. We explore ways in which PA is shaped, nurtured, and experienced within the context of community, and what other community-focused cognitions and behaviors PA influences. The first half of this chapter is organized around the theoretical model of community PA and responses to environmental threats proposed in the prior edition. The current chapter emphasizes applications of community PA via two case studies of the role of PA, place cognition, and social action in response to “fracking” (hydraulic fracturing) for shale oil and gas in Bulgaria and the US.