Investigating the effective dimensions on measuring the level of residents' attachment to residential areas: Haft Chenar neighborhood, District 10, Tehran

Many urban planners and designers have considered the topic of the quality of the emotional relationship between man and their place of residence, or place attachment, in recent years. In the past, the relationships between neighborhood residents who knew each other and were aware of each other’s circumstances contributed to healthy, familiar emotional relationships among them. In other words, neighborhoods, being familiar social units, involved profound cultural roots, pursued certain traditions and customs, and even continued the rites and ways of life and the norms and customs inherited from the past. In modern cities, however, kinship, shared religious beliefs, and moral values ​​give way to anonymity and individualism as the emotional bonds of the local community weaken. Over time, neighborhood connections have lost some of their function. Lack of familiarity with people in the neighborhoods, lack of joint activities, and lack of ethnic, linguistic, religious, and cultural ties as firm as before have reduced people’s levels of emotional connection, i.e. their senses of place attachment with their residential neighborhoods. Therefore, this article aimed to provide structural modeling to investigate the aspects effective on attachment to residential areas.
Theoretical Framework
In recent years, many researchers have examined the aspects of place attachment through structural equation modeling, providing a framework for their classification. Understanding the dimensions of place attachment through structural equation modeling allows researchers to better explore the potentials of this concept and its complexity, which makes up the objective of this study along with identification of the dimensions. The construct of spatial attachment consists of spatial identity, spatial dependence, spatial social bonding, and spatial emotion.

The development of a valid, trustworthy method to measure and evaluate the dimensions of place attachment has been the focus of numerous studies in recent years, with quantity-oriented academics highlighting the multidimensionality of the construct. However, no one, simple scale of measuring is agreed upon by academics and researchers in the field due to the diversity of the methodologies used in the operationalization of the idea and the levels of relevant multi-dimensionality. Because of this significance, this research sought to investigate the dimensions affecting the level of residents’ place attachment. Since this was not easily possible, the indexing technique was used for examination. In this technique, indicators were considered to identify the dimensions, and questions were asked in the questionnaire to measure them. For assessment of the respondents’ opinions about the research topic, their responses were measured with a 5-point Likert scale. Moreover, a simple random sampling method was used to select the sample in the Haft Chenar neighborhood. The sample size was 687, and data analysis was made using the SPSS software version 22. For this purpose, confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling were used.

The findings demonstrated that the level of attachment of the Haft Chenar neighborhood residents is high. On the other hand, the results of the analysis of the structural model of the research supported the hypothesis that place attachment is a quadratic component consisting of the four identified dimensions of spatial identity, spatial affect, spatial dependence, and social connection with the place. It is noteworthy that among all these four dimensions, social connection with the place was identified as the most powerful predictor of place attachment in the research, indicating that the level of social connection in a neighborhood is high, which can directly increase the level of residents’ attachment to the place. Meanwhile, spatial identity received the lowest score for the Haft Chenar neighborhood. Therefore, it seems that residents’ identity to place can be expected to increase due to the experiences formed in the context given that this factor has won the lowest score among the residents, who can realize this by planning and designing an active node and center in the context of these residential neighborhoods and by creating attractive, pleasant places for socializing and embedding community places in the long run. Moreover, a number of solutions were provided for urban planners and designers to increase attachment in the Haft Chenar neighborhood given that these four dimensions of convergent narrative for the structure indicated spatial attachment.

The spatial attachment model was experimentally tested given spatial attachment as a secondary component and the claim of this research that spatial dependence, spatial identity, spatial affection, and social connection with place constitute different primary dimensions of place attachment. Hence, the validation factor analysis method confirmed the validity of the spatial attachment structure as a quadratic component consisting of four dimensions. As demonstrated by the fitness indices of the model, it is suitable for research data.