Beyond house and haven: toward a revisioning of emotional relationships with places

An extensive and ever-growing body of literature exists that explores the nature and nuances of people's emotional relationships to place. This includes writings on sense of place, place attachment and place identity. A review of this literature suggests that while these concepts are broadly defined and discussed in theory, their application in research does not fully embrace all of the important dimensions they suggest. Empirical research, influenced by the notion of ‘home’, consequently focuses on residential settings, positive affect and a depoliticized view of individual experiences. This has limited our understanding of a complex and multi-faceted phenomenon. Recent literature demonstrates a need to better incorporate the full magnitude of human experiences into the current discourse on people–place relationships. Recent research that works toward this end is discussed here. Consequently, this paper focuses on several strengths in the literature that warrant further investigation: First, people's emotional relationships to places encompass a broad range of physical settings and emotions. Second, people's relationships to places are an ever-changing, dynamic phenomenon, and as such, they can be a conscious process in which people are active shapers of their lives. Third, people's emotional relationships to places exist within a larger socio-political milieu.