Place attachment, place identity, and place memory: Restoring the forgotten city past

Abstract

This paper investigates collective memory in inhabitants of two twin cities, Lviv (Ukraine, previously Lwów, Poland) and Wrocław (Poland, previously Breslau, Germany). Due to territorial changes in Eastern and Central Europe after World War II, the two cities changed their state belonging and-consequently-their populations. This study focused on memory of residence place and on its relationship with place identity and place attachment. A sample of 200 participants from three districts of Lviv and 301 participants from four districts of Wrocław were investigated on a number of issues, including reported place identity (city district, city, country region, nation, Europe, world, human being), place attachment (apartment, house, neighborhood, city district, city) and place memory (memory of the city, the city district, the street, and the house). Collective memory showed a powerful ethnic bias, equally strong in both cities, but with different underlying mechanisms: predictors of the bias were national identity in Lviv and demographic variables (age) and lack of place identity in Wrocław. Place (city) was constructed as national symbol in Lviv, and as an autonomous entity in Wrocław. Some evidence was also obtained that the degree to which place attachment is associated with the higher-order (national) or lower-order (local) identity predicts the amount of ethnic bias in perceptions of the pre-war past of the two cities. The findings are interpreted within the dual-process models of perception, here applied to perception of places. © 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.