engleski

“…in this city of mine, wherever I am, I feel at home”: Place attachment among people experiencing homelessness.

This paper explores place attachment, the bonding that occurs between individuals and their meaningful environments. Specifically, it examines narratives of place attachment among people experiencing homelessness in their current places of living while comparing coastal and continental experiences. This analysis relies on Scannell & Gifford’s tripartite organising framework (2010) that understands place attachment as a multidimensional concept with person, psychological process, and place dimensions. This presentation will specifically focus on: i) the person dimension at the individual level which involves personal connections one has to a place ; ii) place attachment as affect in which person–place bonding involves an emotional connection to a particular place in the psychological process dimension and iii) the physical features of a place and the meaning that those features represent in the place dimension of place attachment. This research is based on qualitative materials gathered from the CSRP project Exploring Homelessness and Pathways to Social Inclusion: A Comparative Study of Contexts and Challenges in Swiss and Croatian Cities (No. IZHRZO_180631/1). Explanations as to why place attachments are more pronounced in coastal areas compared to continental parts of Croatia are proposed.

place attachment, homelessness, feeling at home, sense of belonging

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