EP 04: The Science of Place Attachment
On this episode, we journey into the psychology of moving from place to place and searching for the perfect town or city to settle down in -- if there is such a thing. Sometimes it comes with finding creative ways to build a relationship with your locale -- a conversation with huge insights not only for residents of any town but for local government as well. Our guest is Melody Warnick, author of a new book, "This is Where You Belong: The Art and Science of Loving the Place You Live." You can listen to the episode over and over again and still find new things to take away. Show notes: http://melodywarnick.com Clip near beginning from 1970s "Greensboro is a Place" promotional video, via UNC-Greensboro University Libraries.
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Transcript
On this episode of Municipal Equation.
I think we always have this sense of there's something better out there for us, that there's a better town around the corner. And if we can just find that place, that perfect Shangri La for our family, that things will be better in our lives. It was our fifth state. We moved and
didn't immediately like it. Realized that that idea that we were going to move to some place wonderful and magical, again, had proven to not exactly be true. The connection between a person and a place, a big topic of research that any resident or local government can draw from. We talk about it with author Melody Warnecke. My name is Ben Brown, and this is Municipal Equation from the North Carolina League of Municipalities, episode four.
Well, I had little time to prepare, myself for the journey over here. And so most of my mental images of Greensborough in The States were based almost entirely on magazine and newspaper articles and the pretty bad series of American television programs we got. So when I flew in over Greensborough and, I was suffering from jet lag having been traveling for about twenty four hours, so I was pretty beat up. I looked out the window and I couldn't believe it. I looked down and it was greenery. I'd come expecting a sort of semi desert with Lisa and the old cliche of tumbleweed rolling down the Shantytown Street. And I looked down and there were trees and there were shrubs and there was grass and it was almost like coming to civilization. And it was it was really strange to experience this. It was not at all what I expected. It was just totally unbelievable. The sun was shining. It was warm. It was rather humid, which is something I was not used to. But it wasn't the picture that I'd built up. Ultimately, it was it was a compromise between what I thought and what was reality.
When you move to a new locale, what do you expect? What are you looking for? What do you want when it comes to a new home? Barring unfortunate circumstances, you're probably hoping for a place that clicks, a place that pleasantly matches your expectations, assuming you expect a place that's right in tune with your personality or individual needs. But it doesn't always work that way. And for a lot of people, it's a long term journey to find the perfect fit. If it doesn't measure up, you might be at least thinking about your next move. I've moved a good number of times in the past few years. Most often, it was because the lease was up, and it was a nice thought to find a better house or apartment that was perhaps closer to downtown or in a more walkable area or with more square footage or cheaper or quieter or fill in the blank. The promise of those thoughts always trump the stress that accompanies the physical act of moving. But for the most part, that was also within the context of moving within the same town. Not a big move. Then a couple years ago, I moved to a new city. It was for a job, but the city itself was pretty magnetic and was definitely a factor in my choice to move. And it's been great. Now as I record this podcast, I'm moving again into a more permanent house in the same area. My plan is to stay put because I think I'm getting what I want in my sense of place and home. For whatever reason, the average American moves roughly 12 times in his or her lifetime. Every year, around 12% of Americans move and a couple million of us do what's called a mega move of at least 500 miles. Again, my last big move was job related, but a big chunk of the population, and I'm talking about millennials specifically, like to choose where they live before they even have a job there. That's according to national data that's giving us a better idea of what people envision when they think of the perfect locale. Here's more. 60% of home buyers want walkable or bikable neighborhoods, but people also wanna live within cities. The projection is that by 2050, 85% of the world's population will be living in cities. Currently, 72% of Americans trust their city government to do the right thing compared to 19% on the federal government level, a pretty big reveal. All of these statistics are from a recent book called This Is Where You Belong, The Art and Science of Loving the Place You Live, and it's right in the wheelhouse for Municipal Equations. So I caught up with the author, Melody Wornick, who's moved around way more than me and way farther with big hopes every time of finding that perfect locale. It's an idea to fall in love with, but not an easy one to realize. Warnecke, a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in CityLab, Redbook, Ladies Home Journal, Psychology Today, and many more, set out to find what connects an individual to a place along with the who, what, when, where, and why of relocating. Her new book is the result of that extensive research, and there are a lot of takeaways, not just for everyday people, but for city government as well. So, Melody, you've moved around a lot, five states in thirteen years according to what I've read about you. It's one thing to move from apartment to apartment when you're in your twenties, for example, but you've had a completely different experience that I'm guessing had a pretty big impact on your sense of place and your sense of having a home in every sense of that word. So, Melody, tell us about that experience, and what caused you to relocate so frequently?
Well, it's funny because I grew up, spent my entire childhood on the same cul de sac in the same house in Southern California. But after I graduated from college, I had just gotten married. My husband and I moved east to, Maryland for a job. And we lived there for about three years and then wanted to get a little close to our families in the West, so we moved to Utah. And we hadn't been long in Utah when we realized my husband wanted to go to grad school. So two years later, we moved to Iowa for that and, you know, did school there and then moved to Texas for a job. And Texas was maybe not the greatest fit for us. So my husband went on the job market, found a new job in Blacksburg, Virginia, and we moved again two years later. So there was always a good reason for it. There was always a job or a family or school, something that was drawing us to a new place. But I think we also always had the sense of there's something better out there for us, that there's a better town around the corner. And if we can just find that place, that perfect Shangri La for our family, that things will be better in our lives. I call this the geographic cure, the idea that if we can find the right place, then everything in our lives will somehow magically improve and be perfect. So we moved to Blacksburg, Virginia four years ago. It was our fifth state and our then 11 year old daughter's third elementary school. And we moved and didn't immediately like it, realized that that idea that we were going to move to some place wonderful and magical, again, had proven to not exactly be true, and felt like a breaking point. It felt like we need to stop this cycle, and we need to feel we need to put down roots somewhere, and we need to learn how to be happy where we are right now.
So these experiences and this sort of, epiphany about wanting to know how to be happy in the place you are, it's one thing to learn something about yourself and how you adapt to that environment, but you wrote a book. So at what point did you realize that this is something I need to be writing about in long form to tell others about? And maybe you can summarize the point of the book for us here.
Yeah. The book is called This Is Where You Belong, The Art and Science of Loving the Place You Live. And it's about that process that people go through as they learn to be at home and rooted and happy in the place they live. It really started solidifying in my mind when we were making this last move from Austin to Blacksburg, Virginia. And when I'm moving, it becomes completely all encompassing. For months, it's all I think about. I would go online and I would watch videos of this new place that I'd never been to. I would, you know, Google Street View the entire town, so I felt like I had a sense of it. And it felt like everyone I knew was going through the same process on a fairly regular basis, which was actually pretty correct. About 12% of Americans move every year, which is 38,000,000 of us, and most Americans average about 12 moves in a lifetime. So it's something that a lot of us go through often, and yet there's there's very little information about it out there. It I couldn't find a book in the library that was about moving or about, finding the right place for you or anything like that. So it's something that my friends and I were talking about all the time. We were mostly transplants, and this was heavy on our minds. How do you come to feel at home in a place? There's no larger discussion about it, and I wanted to remedy that. So I ended up researching and writing this book about why we move and what makes us stay and how we can love where we live more. So largely, it's about the science of place attachment, which is the ceiling of being at home, being connected, and, loyal to the place that you're living. And I wanted to give people some some help. I I wanted to give people something of an instruction manual. So people who are in the situation of moving or even people who had been in their towns a long time, maybe didn't feel very connected to it, could have a road map for changing their feelings about it. You know, the one of the interesting things I learned about place attachment is it's an emotion. It's a feeling you have about your town, but it's also a series of behaviors. When you feel place attachment, you act in certain ways, and there are certain actions that create place attachment. So I wanted to explain
what those are and how people do those in their lives. Yeah. And what I like about the book is it doesn't just wax about what it means to be home. You actually do recommend actions that anyone who reads this book can try. You call them love where you live experiments, and you say that they can be replicated in any hometown. Could you tell us about those experiments and maybe give us an example that we can try?
Yeah. Absolutely. So the idea of love where you live experiments were to create some simple actions that anyone could do no matter where they live to create a to improve their sense of place attachment and to create a sense of connection to their town. Part of them, they're kind of two varieties of love where you live experiments. Some of them are based on things that you can do that will improve your emotional well-being in the town. Some of them are more like things that you can do to improve the town itself. So for instance, I have a chapter about buying local and how important that is to cities in creating a tax base and creating a sense of identity with small local independent businesses. So the level where you live experiment, I do a couple in each chapter. One thing I did for buying local was join a cash mob, which was Okay. An activity organized by the Downtown Business Association where people show up and pledge to spend $20 at a downtown business, but you don't know where it is until you get there. So I joined a cash mob. I also pledged to, to myself to spend a little more money at a local toy store that I really loved. So these are things that are meant to be doable and relatively fun. So here's one that readers can do that is, easy in in most places. Join a CSA. So that's community supported agriculture. They're available in almost all areas of the country. So it's kind of like, a local farm will, let people prepay for, a summer's worth of produce. It's a way of supporting your local farm, but for the people who join the CSA, it's a way of understanding the seasons of your area, becoming more in touch with what's growing and what is produced locally. And there are studies that show that people who join CSAs and shop at farmers market, it's called civic agriculture. And people who do those things are also more likely to vote or show up at public meetings or to write letters to their city council people. So there's this kind of virtuous circle that when you do one thing, like joining a CSA and eating local food to show support for your town, you're also more likely to start doing other things. You become a kind of person who is engaged at all levels in your town.
So it really does create community and maybe creates interest in local government and how the town is run and so on.
Yeah. Absolutely. It has this sort of trickle down effect.
You mentioned the 12% statistic earlier that roughly 12% of Americans move every year. Your book gives out a lot of statistical data. A couple that stood out to me were that 66% of millennials say that they would choose the city where they'd wanna live before they even look for a job, and that 28% of Americans don't even know their neighbors by name, any of their neighbors. Now right there, I just hit two random factoids about location and place. When you were doing your research and finding these little dots of data, what did you find surprising, and what picture started to emerge for you?
You mentioned the data about neighbors and how so many of us don't know any of our neighbors. And I think that really used to that for me. One thing that I learned about place attachment is becoming attached to your place is really a process of creating meaning where you live, creating sort of a narrative, and and having good experiences where you live. A lot of that happens when we develop relationships. So one of the things I recommend, first and foremost, for anyone who's new in a town or struggling to feel happy there is expand your network of relationships, which can be difficult to do. But I tell people to try and start with their neighbors. You know, place is geography, and the closest geography we have is our neighborhood. And I found a lot of statistical research based evidence that connecting with your neighbors, talking with them, learning to trust them, and have relationships with them is incredibly beneficial. One thing that really surprised me was a study, a couple of studies from the University of Michigan that showed that people who know and trust their neighbors are forty eight percent less likely to have a stroke and sixty seven percent less likely to have a heart attack. That's amazing. Right. Which is amazing and shocking. There was another study that showed that parents are less likely to abuse or neglect their children if they live in supportive neighborhoods, meaning if they live in a neighborhood where they feel comfortable asking neighbors for help and they feel comfortable letting their kids play with the other neighbor kids. There are also studies that show even for people who have a strong social network independent of their neighborhood, perhaps, you know, they're married, they have a family, they have a good network of friends, they still derive a well-being benefit from connecting with their neighbors, which is it requires a mindset shift for most of us. Most of us, have gotten in the habit of not really talking with neighbors. The Right. Yeah. It's like being private. Yeah. Right. The exactly. The definition of what a good neighbor is has changed. It used to be a good neighbor would chat you up over the fence and bring you cake and stuff like that. And now a good neighbor is a person who leaves you alone and stays out of your business and doesn't have a an annoying yappy dog or something like that. And and I totally understand that. I'm I'm a big introvert, and to some extent, I don't necessarily wanna have neighbors who are always dropping by, you know, in the morning. But even just having a level of relationship with your neighbors, if you know their names, you've, you know, maybe shared a meal or two, and you can call on each other for help when you need it. We have an extra neighbors that we've made a conscientious effort to get to know by, you know, taking the muffins. We have them over for dinner. They had us over for dinner. And we're not BFFs, but when we go out of town, they roll our trash cans to the curb, and I would, you know, trust them with our house key. So those small feelings of, trust and social cohesion in your neighborhood make a big difference.
That's amazing that just the simple act of getting to know your neighbors might literally be a life saving effort that you make. That's amazing to me. Right. Another stat that you mentioned, 85% of the world's population will be living in cities by the year 2050. What do you think is driving that?
I think people are rethinking their priorities, and a lot of it is this shift toward valuing place. You mentioned the statistic earlier, about millennials who would rather choose the town where they wanna live and and then find a job versus kind of the old school way of doing things or the traditional way of doing things, which is you find a job and you go wherever the job happens to be. So I think people are paying attention to the kind of place they wanna be, and they're a little more cognizant of how places shape their lives. So people want to live in walkable neighborhoods. They don't wanna have a long commute. They wanna have easy access to small business. I think especially millennials want to work and play in the same place. They want all those parts of their lives to sort of exist on top of each other for convenience and also for the sense of community that it creates. Jane Jacobs, you know, classically has pointed out that that sense of neighborhood neighborliness and community is driven by being on the street. When we see each other, we start to have conversations, and you see the same people day after day. That's what drives community, but most of us, we drive cars and we park in our garages. I have a neighbor in one of the towns that I live who we shared a duplex. So she was on one side of the wall and we were on the other, and she would come home from work every day. She would sit in her car, pull into her garage, and shut the garage door behind her before she even got out of her car. Is this to fend off any attempts we might make to have a conversation with her? So I think people are starting to feel like they want something more than that, and it's a little easier in cities. I also think one thing we're seeing is the revitalization of a lot of small cities. Mhmm. I've seen in my research that loyalty is really strong in some under the radar places like Akron and Toledo and Chattanooga. You know, people who grew up there are returning home, but it's also drawing transplants. And I think a big part of that is people wanna feel like they are part of creating their city. You see that in Detroit right now that it's drawing people who want to shape the city's future. They want to be involved in it. It's kind of a a do it yourself ethic where people don't wanna just move to a town and and let the town bestow its gifts on them. They wanna create the goodness of the town. They want it to be what they have in mind. And, a lot of these small cities are really open to that. They they know they need the help and they welcome it.
So I I'm sure in everything we've talked about, there are some takeaways for people who work in municipal government in some way. The city council, town planning office, public information office. Is there any advice that you would give to these people in these government roles? Any wisdom in terms of developing local initiatives or events or ways to connect with residents and establish a sense of place? And and what works from your experience?
I think there are a lot of ramifications for municipal government. One of the things that we're seeing is increased interest in urban design and place making. City governments are rethinking how to prioritize and plan and budget. There's a story I tell in the book of, you know, twenty five years ago, Oklahoma City was trying to entice a a big company to relocate to the city, and they were offering it a huge variety of tax breaks and land benefits. And, ultimately, the city, the business chose to relocate someplace else. And when Oklahoma City's representatives asked them why, they said, we just can't see our employees being happy in Oklahoma City. So it led to this complete mind shift in among government workers in Oklahoma City that the priority wasn't necessarily luring business or increasing the tax base. The priority needed to be making Oklahoma City the kind of place that people wanted to live. And if it was the kind of place that people wanted to live, the businesses would come as well. And I think that's that's happened there. So some of the things that they did were, you know, things that probably are logical, like focusing on improving the school system. They also did a lot of things to revitalize their downtown, to make it more walkable. They created a a river walk. They brought in lots more entertainment venues. They built a stadium and and a kayaking facility downtown. Not all cities are going to be able to do that, and their efforts have spanned years and have required, millions and millions of dollars. But I think on a small scale, cities can focus on how to make their their streets more walkable. I've seen that in Blacksburg where, a little street that ran through the downtown was, they removed some of the parking. They changed a two way street to a one way street, and they expanded, the sidewalk. So not only is it easier for pedestrians, but it's created all this outdoor seating for restaurants, and that's made the area a lot more vibrant. It attracts people. One thing that I learned, and that I I draw on in the book is a study by the Knight Foundation called Soul of the Community where they studied, they surveyed 26,000 people in 26 cities over three years and found that three main things contributed to a sense of place attachment and satisfaction where you live, and they were kind of unexpected. It it wasn't, you know, how well your government functioned or, you know, the the quality of the local schools. It was whether people thought the place was beautiful, whether the city offered social things to do, and there was a a sense of connection, and community, and whether the city was open, whether it was welcoming to all kinds of people. So So I think if you if you work for city government, focusing on those things, social offerings, aesthetics, and openness can really change the way the city works and how well people like it. And when your residents are happy to live in a place, they become ambassadors for it. They talk it up, and they're proud of their place. And that draws new residents and new businesses, and it becomes a a very happy cycle.
So, clearly, this book and the advice that it gives isn't just for serial movers like yourself. It's also for people who've maybe lived in one place for years or even decades. It's for local leaders and and so on. If if this book accomplishes one thing, what do you hope that is? What's the bottom line for you?
I would love to make people more conscious of how malleable their places are. Every choice we make on a daily basis from where to shop to whether to say hi to a neighbor, to whether we pick up a piece of trash, or whether we walk or drive to the grocery store, affect where we live. And where we live and what kind of place it is and how we relate to it has enormous effects on our well-being. I'd love to see people become caretakers of their place. I think people who work for municipal governments are already doing this, but I think there are ways to engage residents to give them some freedom over making their places better. And as people start doing that, as they start cherishing where they live, they not only become more content in their towns, but they make their towns better places to live. And if that happened, I would be thrilled.
Melody Warnecke, author of This Is Where You Belong, The Art and Science of Loving the Place You Live. Where can people learn more about this book or pick up a copy? You can buy it at any bookstore or online retailer
from Amazon, or I always recommend Indie Bound, which will lead you to your local independent bookstore. Or you can find out more information at my website, which is melodywarneck.com.
Melody, thanks so much for being on the show. We really appreciate this. Thanks so much for having me. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this podcast, please spread the word. The more we grow, the more we can do. Share the show links that you can find at soundcloud.com/municipalequation, where all the episodes are. You can also get us on iTunes and most podcast streaming apps. Don't forget, Municipal Equation is production of the North Carolina League of Municipalities at nclm.org. Follow the show on Twitter at muniequation. That's at m u n I equation. And drop me a line at bbrown@nclm.org. My name is Ben Brown. Thanks again for being a part of The Equation.
Well, I had little time to prepare, myself for the journey over here.
