Cities we belong to: how urban spaces affect our sense of belonging

People often think about belonging in terms of a legal status, where you were born or how long you have lived in a certain city or area. However, there is a much more profound side to belonging involving psychology: we become part of a city not simply by living there, but also through the experience of being in that city; its different sounds, textures, spaces and the experiences and memories we create there will come to be woven into our sense of who we are as individuals.

The term given by environmental psychologists for this is "place attachment", which refers to the emotional bond that exists between individuals and places. The emotional bond is not simply determined by an individual's experience or memories of that place alone; rather, it is also a result of the cultural meanings that are associated with a place, how individuals use a place on a day-to-day basis, and how these experiences, memories and meaning after time cause physical spaces (environment) to become places where individuals identify as belonging to. Researchers in the area have identified that this process is not linear from beginning to end but is an ongoing dynamic between the individual and their physical environment; it grows and evolves over time.

According to this psychological theory, familiarity contributes significantly to the emotional connection between people and their environment. Various l facets of a community or neighbourhood that comfort an individual receive from the environment. There are examples of sensation through examples of sounds from shopping in your local marketplace to scents of apples in a bowl in your kitchen. There are also examples of visuals from sun setting on your neighbourhood view or from seeing your feet on the last step of your staircase to hearing your shoes hit the last step of those same stairs. All these sensory experiences create an emotional attachment to a specific location. Topophilia is based on how people feel about places based on their life experiences, values, and beliefs. In addition, place attachment does not exist without reference to culture or social identity. Research indicates that emotional attachment to urban environments can be generated through a combination of territorial characteristics (i.e. physical and non-physical), as well as social identity characteristics (i.e. the identity of the people who live there). An in-depth study conducted in Newcastle has provided evidence that people's affection for a place and their feelings of comfort and confidence in that place produce a connection to that location, the social commitment/personal ties of the individual to that place, and the day-to-day interaction between individuals and that place. This demonstrates that emotional connections to a place and the social and spatial elements involved in creating those connections are closely related.

Migrant communities make this relationship between place and identity particularly clear. Research done on Italian migrants in Newcastle upon Tyne shows how place identity and attachment create a sense of belonging and home during their later years. The way in which a place becomes meaningful to an individual often requires negotiation, combining how they feel about the current environment and the memories associated with other places, and the social conditions that allow them to identify with the new city.

The concept of place attachment also relates to the continuity of experience. For people who have moved from one city/ country to another, many spatial cues can elicit memories and emotional connections that bridge location and timing. For example, studies conducted with migrants in public neighbourhood spaces show that when they recreate familiar activities within those spaces, those experiences can also remind them of earlier life experiences and further add to their feeling of belonging, even after they have moved.

Cities are social and physical spaces created by human interaction, memory, and activity/responses to the environment. Urban areas contain rhythms of everyday life: spaces for people to gather, socialise, celebrate, and struggle, which are key to understanding the meaning of a city. Public spaces such as squares, parks, and marketplaces; informal gathering spaces; and nodal points for people to connect culture/historically serve as cultural sources of connection and community engagement.

Therefore, the cities we belong to are places where our experiences in-the-body, our culture, and our social/remembrance connect to create a sense of place for us. They acknowledge us as individuals (familiar streets, social connections, auditory rhythms, shared routines) so that we can begin to acknowledge ourselves in those same cities. Thus, belonging is based on continuous living relationships between individuals and their homes, as well as ongoing experiences shared with others.