Measuring Place Attachment and the Effect of Place Scale on It in Different Urban Fabrics; Case Study: Rasht City

Attachment to place is seen as a positive emotional connection between individuals and groups and their environment. The attendance and relationship of people with the places they are attached to will have positive psychological consequences for them. However, staying away from these places can lead to distress and mental chaos. Failure to study the effect of spatial scale on spatial attachment causes the needs of citizens to create an emotional relationship to be ignored by designers and planners at different spatial scales. This paper aims to understand the role of place scale on attachment to place, which will help us to identify attachment at these spatial levels and evaluate their relationship. To this end, 400 questionnaires were distributed among the residents of four different urban contexts of Rasht (new, old, middle and peripheral neighborhoods), and the obtained data were analyzed by correlation test. Based on the analysis, a U-shaped relationship was attained between spatial scales in which the house scale has the highest degree of attachment among residents and the neighborhood scale has the lowest degree of attachment. Regarding the minimal attachment to the neighborhood in a U-shaped connection, it can be imagined that the boundaries and limits of the neighborhood in cities are more invisible than the city limits. On the other hand, correlation analysis reveals the attachment between these three scales. Neighborhood attachment has the least correlation with attachment to city and home. This means that in addition to the lack of attachment to the neighborhood in today's cities, this attachment also has a minor role in creating an attachment to other spatial scales and most importantly the city. These results indicate that the position of urban neighborhoods in the lives of citizens is fading and planners should adopt suitable policies to create more opportunities to create emotional bonds between citizens and their neighborhood.