A Study on the Place Attachment from Teenager's Point of View with Emphasis on Community Capacity (Physical - Social)1

In addition to physical dimensions, place has spiritual and emotional aspects, too, and encourages emotional sense in its residents. Due to these feelings, a kind of attachment to place leads people to form a local identity. The main purpose of this research is to explain the place attachment of teenagers in selected neighborhoods of Tehran. This sense of attachment to place affects social inclusion, with a focus on social capital, and capacity of the place, with emphasis on the quality of the living environment. The analysis of these effects are the purpose of this article, and aims to introduce use of structured models (because of multi-dimensional nature of the research and the presence of latent variables) in the field of urban studies. In this correlation analysis study, a sample of size 475 of the teenagers from the communities of districts 17, 10, 8 and 1 of Tehran were selected through stratified systematic sampling, and each of the five research variables,including social inclusion, capacity, location, social security, access to services and socio-economic origin, were examined by means of “structural equation modeling” techniques and “path analysis”. Three different models of the relationships between variables were produced. The results of the models show that the sense of attachment to place among adolescents are better expressed by “spatial capacity” and “better access to services” variables. These two variables have the most causal effect on place attachment and account for 73% of variance. Based on the research findings, the four main variables: “place capacity”, “social capacity” “access to services”, “social security” and the subsidiary variable “socio-economic origin” have significant 1. This paper is derived from the first Editor’s Ph.D. thesis with the title of “explaining the community capacities (social and physical) in the view of teenagers in Tehran” and is guided by the second, and the third editors of original thesis. The entire current research is happening at the School of Art and Architecture at the University of Tarbiat Modares in the city of Tehran. relationship (p