The Role of Transitional Servicescapes in Maintaining Attachment to Place: An Abstract

Abstract

Previous research has extended scholars’ focus on place attachment and the servicescape as the physical service setting. However, very little attention has been paid to exploring the temporal dimension in connection with attachment and servicescapes. In particular, how place attachment is maintained during the transition phase between the removal of, or disruption to, one permanent servicescape and the reestablishment of its replacement. For example, the city of Christchurch, New Zealand, suffered two major earthquakes in September 2010 and February 2011 causing significant damage to and the subsequent removal of large parts of the city’s retail, commercial and residential precincts. Six years on Christchurch is still undergoing an extensive rebuilding process. Because of the magnitude of destruction, especially in the CBD, and the logistics of clearing damaged buildings, designing, planning and funding new works have meant that only now a new permanent city is emerging. This rebuilding process created numerous blocks of vacant land on which entrepreneurs set up businesses either as individual temporary servicescapes or part of larger precinct-based transitional servicescapes that contained a collection of individual businesses, events and/or installations. This post-earthquake scenario provides a suitable study environment in regard to the time perspective of servicescapes and how residents maintain, build or rebuild their attachment to place during this temporary or transitional period. Aligned with such an extensive rebuilding programme is the notion that attachment occurs at differing levels of servicescape, whether this is at the individual retail or service store level or the greater precinct or city level. In these transitional phases, place attachment at one level may leverage or be leveraged by the servicescapes of another level. Scholars in environmental psychology have attempted to conceptualise, understand and measure place attachment to interpret the individual–individual, individual–community and individual–place bonding for a specific place scale (e.g., Kyle et al. 2005). The majority of such research focuses on a medium-range place scale such as neighbourhood or community. In this paper we review the literature on servicescapes and place attachment and apply it to the transitional and reconstructed city of Christchurch in order to derive an understanding of the ability of temporary or transitional spaces to maintain place attachment even when the original servicescapes have been destroyed.