Essentialist and anti-essentialist meanings of place: A new scale and implications for place attachment and openness to outgroups

Place is usually defined as a meaningful location. However, there is ongoing debate about what kind of meaning makes a location meaningful-that is, what exactly transforms a neutral space into an object of people's emotions and attachments. Although there are many ways to approach meanings attributed to places, in this paper, we draw a distinction that originates in discussions between the early theorists of place-phenomenologists who focused on the stable features of locations and the concept of rootedness as the source of meaning (place as an enclosed entity with a historically shaped identity)-and the more recent constructivists, who conceive of such meaning as created during interactions between place users (place as open, dynamic, and changing). These two conceptualizations originate from different ontological assumptions: essentialist and anti-essentialist. We present a new place meaning scale that encompasses both types of features and has two versions-one that concerns real places and one that concerns ideal places. In three studies (N = 1146; N = 2198; N = 1096), we described successive stages of the scale's development. The final version of the scale has three factors, one covers all antiessentialist items and the remaining two correspond to essentialist items: historical identity and sense of genius loci, and immutability. We tested the predictive validity of the scale for place attachment and place preference, openness to the presence of outgroups in the place, and differences between locations that differ in the dominance of essentialist versus anti-essentialist features. The findings show that, overall, people prefer places with essentialist features but that both essentialist and anti-essentialist features predict place attachment. In addition, the essentialist dimension of historical identity was a better positive predictor of the desire to stay in a place than the other two meanings. Finally, openness to outgroups was predicted mostly by ideal rather than real place meanings; it was higher in anti-essentialist ideal places, lower in immutable ideal places, and unrelated to historical identity. The structure of the scale and different patterns of correlations between the two essentialist dimensions and other place-related variables call into question the simple zero-one dichotomy (essentialist versus anti-essentialist) in conceptualizations of place meaning.