2018 Theses Master's

Place Attachment in rapid urbanization areas-a case study of Zhu Village

Liu, Hui

With the rapid pace of urbanization in China, it becomes more and more important for urban planners to explore the planning issues existing in urban villages, which are the semi-urbanized spatial entities with collective land ownership regime in urban China. Place attachment is widely researched in planning field, which is used to describe the people-place connections. In this thesis, I explored residents' attachment in a typical urban village in Guangzhou using both quantitative and qualitative methods. Through surveys, I found residents in Zhu Village have moderate attachments to the place they live in, and some significant differences were identified based on variables like local status and length of residence. The results of interviews reveal that the locals hold a higher level of emotional attachment while the non-locals tend to show a strong feeling of place dependence. For locals, the emotional connections are anchored deeply in the culture, consanguinity and power worship to the village while emotional associations of non-locals are formed on the basis of the deep or shallow cognitions to a place. As for functional attachment, locals emphasize the functional connections in relation to activities with place-specific meanings. But for non-locals, whether the residence could satisfy their general needs for living is key to the formation of their functional attachment.