How can place attachment inform the decision to stay? Walking interviews with residents in a struggling Swedish rural municipality

Abstract: This thesis provides in-depth understanding of five residents´ place-relation to a Swedish rural municipality in decline and how this relation can affect their decision of living in the municipality. The participants relation to place is mainly explored and explained through the concept place attachment and partly sense of place. As a quite experimental method, the study used walking interviews to see if it can contribute to new ways of exploring place attachment. To analyse the material the study is guided by the tripartite model of place attachment (PPP-model), developed by Scannell & Gifford (2010). The decision to live in the municipality are shown to be based on a diversity of place attachments, where ancestral/family rootedness, everyday rootedness, a pragmatic place attachment, and an ambivalent place attachment can be observed. Furthermore, one can conclude that the participants relation to the place is highly complex and involves a set of emotions. The result also showed that a reflexive sense of place, infused with feelings of melancholy and hopelessness plays a part in shaping the participants relations with place. This confirm the notion from previous research (Manzo 2003) that place attachment also exists in a larger socio-political context and cannot solely be understood as de-politicized personal experience. Furthermore, the use of walking interviews gave the result that a complex individual set up of many places and spaces of attachments could be observed. The walk also revealed the importance of how pre-cognitive affective sensations plays a part in persons relation to the physical and material place. This suggests that pre-cognitive affect might be fruitful to be considered more fully in further place attachment research.