Having a sense of one's place: challenges of identifying and nurturing social and environmental community affordances

Abstract

This paper demonstrates how an understanding of people's relationships with the physical spaces they occupy as home and community can contribute to our practice at individual, social and environmental levels. Community psychology suggests how a social residential community can influence the ability of its people to thrive and sustain cultural vitality with concepts such as sense of community and belonging. Similarly environmental psychology informs the understanding of the physical context of the residential community. Concepts such as sense of place, place identity and attachment suggest how spaces become places which afford inhabitants opportunities for biopsychosocial development and well being. This paper weaves these theoretical threads of community, environmental and ecological psychology and its research to describe processes by which people attribute meaning to their physical surroundings and subsequently symbolically represent them as home and community. Methods are presented for observing this fabric as a source and site for consultation regarding current individual, social and environmental challenges. Social justice issues embedded in current inequities of environmental affordances are considered from the experiences of adolescents, indigenous peoples, and rural and immigrant communities.