Neighbourhood attachment, city attachment or beyond? Residential mobility and scales of place attachment in Shanghai, China

Abstract

With suburbanisation and gentrification becoming global phenomena, residential mobility has been incentivised and is extensively taken as a critical lens through which to understand the formation and variation of place attachment in different urban settings. Extant literature has suggested that the strength of place attachment is curvilinear across different geographical scales. However, limited research has investigated how processes and changes of residential mobility, embedded in different socioeconomic and structural settings, shape people's place attachment at the neighbourhood and city scales. To address this shortfall in the literature, this study employs a process‐based perspective by reconciling past housing experiences with that of the present to investigate how residential mobility affects place attachment based on a large‐scale survey in Shanghai in 2021. The findings show that the processual residential mobility relays profound influences on place attachment at different geographical scales. Specifically, homeownership secures residents' a privileged multi‐scale attachment. Meanwhile, access to state welfare housing in the past and at present, as well as residential moves driven by individual needs are more likely to engender a single‐scale attachment. Experiences with housing relocation and market rental exert negative influences on place attachment at both the city and neighbourhood scales. Both housing policy‐related structural factors and socioeconomic status have led to marginalised residential mobility, consequently entailing a sense of ‘placelessness’ in urban China.