INTRODUCTIONThis volume explores the concept of place attachment to (1) illustrate its multidisciplinary foundations, (2) identify its various aspects, (3) highlight its potential importance in research and environmental design, and (4) lay the foundation for a conceptual framework to guide future research.The volume includes contributions of scholars with backgrounds or experience in anthropology, architecture, family and consumer studies, folklore, gerontology, landscape architecture, marketing, psychology, social ecology, sociology, and urban planning, with authors providing integrative analyses of place attachment from the theoretical and methodological perspectives of their fields. The chapters also examine attachment to a variety of places-homes, neighborhoods, plazas, landscapes-as well as place attachments at different life stages-childhood, middle years, and later years. The present chapter initiates a preliminary inquiry into the concept of place attachment, based on the material in this volume and in other writings. BACKGROUNDHistorically, attachment to place was of interest primarily to earlier phenomenological scholars, such as Bachelard (1964) and Eliade (1959), and to

Across America, middle‐class and upper‐middle‐class gated communities are creating new forms of exclusion and residential segregation, exacerbating social cleavages that already exist (Blakely and Snyder 1997; Higley 1995; Lang and Danielson 1997; Marcuse 1997). While historically secured and gated communities were built in the United States to protect estates and to contain the leisure world of retirees, these urban and suburban developments now target a much broader market, including families with children (Guterson 1992; Lofland 1998). This retreat to secured enclaves with walls, gates, and guards materially and symbolically contradicts American ethos and values, threatens public access to open space, and creates yet another barrier to social interaction, building of social networks, as well as increased tolerance of diverse cultural/ racial/social groups (Davis 1992;Devine 1996;Etzoni 1995; Judd 1995; McKenzie 1994). In this paper, I explore how the discourse of fear of violence and crime and the search for a secure community by those who live in gated communities in the United States legitimates and rationalizes class‐based exclusion strategies and residential segregation. I examine whether residents of cities experiencing increasing cultural diversity are fleeing neighborhoods because they have experienced a "loss of place" and therefore feel unsafe and insecure (Altaian and Low 1992). Some people are responding to this loss by choosing to buy into a defensive space, a walled and guarded community that they can call home, [gated communities, United States, urban fear]

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INTRODUCTIONThe current fascination with what people term postmodern architecture has focused attention to the design of buildings in which we live and work, but the appeal is not limited to examples from our own familiar surroundings. During the last several decades anthropologists have been increasingly joined by others in taking a more careful look at the built environments of nonliterate societies, and especially the shelters they construct and occupy. The questions posed are broad: Why are there differences in built forms? What is the nature of these differences and what kinds of social and cultural factors might be responsible for the variation? Design practitioners, including architects, land scape architects, and planners, have become involved in debating these questions, as have behavioral and social scientists concerned with human interactions with the environment. At the same time, recent social theory has begun to focus anew on spatial as well as temporal dimensions of human behavior. These developments suggest that attention to the topic of this review is timely. Our purposes in reviewing the relevant literature include defining the major areas of research in the field in terms of issues and 453 0084-6570/90/ 1015-0453$02.00 Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 1990.19:453-505. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org by University of Chicago Libraries on 09/17/13. For personal use only. Quick links to online content Further ANNUAL REVIEWS 454 LAWRENCE & LOW theoretical approach, critically evaluating some of the major contributions, and suggesting directions for future research.Anthropological concern with the built environment is at least as old as the first formalization of theories of cultural evolution during the 19th century. Although material remains of earlier cultural constructions, and shelters housing living cultures, were taken as evidence of evolutionary status, the underlying question about the exact nature of the relationships between society and culture and the built environment persisted. Such relationships are interactive, in that people both create, and find their behavior influenced by, the built environment. A variety of formulations have been used to con ceptualize this relationship: accommodation, adaptation, expression, repre sentation and, most recently, production and reproduction. Each of these conceptualizations represents a different theoretical perspective; each implies a different set of questions and distinct (although at times overlapping) sets of data corresponding to aspects of the built environment and human behavior.The built environment is an abstract concept employed here and in some of the literature to describe the products of human building activity. It refers in the broadest sense to any physical alteration of the natural environment, from hearths to cities, through construction by humans. Generally speaking, it includes built fo rms, which are defined as building types (such as dwellings, temples, or meeting houses) created by humans to shelter, define, and protect activity....