Visualization of place attachment

The concept of place attachment is amorphous and difficult to study. To address this, we set out to map and analyze place attachment for a city park in Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada. We developed a GIS application called the Place Analysis System (PAS) to allow place attachment data to be collected, georegistered, stored and processed into map form. Upon analysis, we found notable differences in the spatial distribution of place attachment between groups and under different weather conditions. The ability to visualize and analyze place attachment can assist with both academic and applied studies in fields such as planning.