Issue 2: What Place Do You Call Home?

Melody WarnickLove Where You Live experiment, Reading and writing

There’s this weird phenomenon that always happens when I tell people I wrote a book about place attachment. They desperately want to tell me their place history. Where they grew up. Where they used to live. Where they live now. Where they wished they live. Absolutely everyone on earth has a story to share about place—and from what I’ve seen, we’re eager to talk about it.

In other words, I’ve realized that This Is Where You Belong: The Art and Science of Loving the Place You Live was made for book clubs.

So I’ve created a downloadable list of book club questions that you can access at my website. For extra incentive to put this on your reading group calendar this year, I would love to Skype with your group when you talk about it. Just email me your meeting date and I’ll do my best to make it happen.

7 items of interest

1. Pokemon Go may be the world’s finest place attachment vehicle.
2. Turn your front yard into a karaoke night club and the neighbors will come running.
3. If you’re a little miserable after you move, surprise! You’re normal.
4. Are you as obsessed with online real estate as I am?
5. Placemaking around the world. These ideas will make you want to build something cool ASAP.
6. This Is Where You Belong was in Time. And Psychology Today. And Realtor.com. And lots of other places you can read about at my newly added Press page on my website.
7. If you’ve read the book, please review it. I’d be grateful.

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Where Do You Really Come From?

Melody WarnickPlace love

Unsplash/Anubhav Saxena

Unsplash/Anubhav Saxena

Imagine you’re at a party with a bunch of people you don’t know, and someone asks, “Where are you from?”

How do you respond: With the name of your neighborhood? Your city? Your hometown? Your state?

It probably depends on a couple things. First, the social context. If you’re from Mobile, Alabama, and you’re standing at a Mobile bar surrounded by fellow Mobilians, you’d probably zoom in on your neighborhood. If you’re partying it up in Paris, you’d probably say, “Alabama.” In Vietnam, perhaps “I’m from America” might be your best bet for a nod of recognition.

Second, how you describe where you’re from depends on your sense of place identity. According to social identity theory, we gain our sense of self through our membership in social categories—gender, religion, and so on. Because we all live somewhere, it’s a natural for social identity; the more positively we feel about it, and the more we see our place as a reflection of our core personality, the more we tend to emphasize it. So if you adore Miami and think your residency there says everything other people need to know about you, you’ve developed quite a strong sense of place identity.

There’s also a dark side to social identity, though, and it’s that “social identity is developed and only makes sense in an intergroup context of social comparisons,” write Fatima Bernardo and Jose-Manuel Palma-Oliveira, psychologists from the Universidade de Evora and the Universidade de Lisboa, both in Portugal. How do we know which group we belong to? Because there are other groups we don’t belong to.

Naturally, we want to believe we’re in the in-group, and the best way to assure that is by thinking of someone else as the out-group—and we always mildly hate them. Where we’re from not only makes us different, it also makes us superior. So we think: Yay, Southerners! Boo, Northerners! Or we tell ourselves that California is better than Arizona or Arizona is better than New Mexico, or Texas is better than everyone. Identifying ourselves with a social group means drawing a dark line between Us and Them.

To see how in-groups and out-groups develop in places, Bernardo and Palma-Oliveira studied four distinct neighborhoods in Lisbon, surveying 180 residents about how they felt about living there compared to other nearby neighborhoods.

Where neighbors had the highest concentrations of place identity and were the happiest with where they lived, they also did the most efficient job of devaluing a fourth neighborhood, called Chelas, where place identity was low. Chelas was described by researchers as hetereogenous, fragmented, and interwoven with high-density housing and industrial areas. Residents of other neighborhoods loved where they lived, and they loved the fact that it wasn’t Chelas. Residents of Chelas, on the other hand, made themselves feel better about their own place by saying, “We’re not that different from everywhere else.”

Place is a substantial way to distinguish between Us and Them, and according to social identity theory, we need to identify Them in order to find Us. But there are ramifications to this kind of self-identity. Do we call other parts of town “the ghetto”? Do we say someone is from the wrong side of the tracks? Do small-towners demonize city-dwellers, or vice versa?

In social identity theory, people can most effectively make the case against Them if they’re familiar with the enemy. Areas that are similar but not too similar play up differences between the in-groups and out-groups. But it can also lead to culture wars, gang wars, racism, and territorialism.

I’m all about encouraging localism—my book, This Is Where You Belong, praises the benefits of loyalty to where you live. But I worry that, taken to an extreme, localism becomes another reason to define the Other, i.e., the people who are from other places. We shut ourselves off from people who are different geographically (or culturally, racially, or economically) based on the simple fact of their being different.

Social identities are fluid, a resource that fluctuates according to our current situation and need. If you’re new or temporary in your city, your self-identification with it might drop, while your identification with your state or country might increase. Similarly, if you identify with your neighborhood—I’m from Brooklyn!—your city might seem less important to you.

So imagine again that you’re at that party in Vietnam. This time, you meet a fellow American. Here? In Vietnam? So far away from home, it wouldn’t matter if she were from California and you were from Maine. Surrounded by members of an out-group, you’d both feel like you were from the same place. If she turned out to be from your city? Or even from a neighborhood you know? Well, that would be something of a miracle.

Source

Fatima Bernardo and Jose-Manuel Palma-Oliveira, “Urban Neighbourhoods and Intergroup Relations: The Importance of Place Identity,” Journal of Environmental Psychology 45 (2016): 239–251.

Moving to a New Town: The Impact on Kids

Melody WarnickMoving

Source: Unsplash

Source: Unsplash

To break the news to our two daughters that we were moving to Blacksburg, Virginia, I concocted a scavenger hunt around our house in Austin that finally led them to a wall map. Next to the state of Virginia, a Post-It note said, “We’re moving.” Ella, then ten years old, looked at us with glistening eyes. “Really?” she said.

Then she broke into a grin and flung her arms around us. “Thank you!”

So that was weird.

More typical, perhaps, is my friend’s daughter Grace, who spent her first couple months in Blacksburg prattling on about the places and people she missed in her old town of Ithaca, New York. “It’s not that I don’t like it here,” she reassured her mother. “But something just doesn’t feel right.”

Moving is part thrilling, part awful, always emotionally fraught. And as hard as it is for emotionally stable adults, it can be particularly trying for children. By age five, when kids are old enough to have their own social network and happy memories of life in a place, a move can feel like a forced march into enemy territory. All that is familiar, comfortable, and beloved is being left behind.

Most kids are resilient, moping for a few weeks or months, but eventually settling into new friendships and falling in love with their surroundings—in the same slow, careful way adults do.

But I’m not going to lie. If you’re moving with kids or teenagers this summer, you’re right to worry, at least a little. Geographic mobility has been shown to have serious adverse effects, particularly for teenagers.

One longitudinal study of data gathered in Amsterdam found that teenagers who moved a lot were more likely to suffer from stress, fatigue, irratibility, depression, sleep difficulties, and other psychosocial issues as adults. A University of Virginia study showed that introverts who moved a lot as children died earlier as adults. Other researchers have found that frequent or recent movers performed worse in school and were more likely to misbehave, abuse drugs, or engage in sexually promiscuous behavior.

Why so many problems? Psychologists suggest you blame the unmooring range of negative feelings and experiences that children deal with when they move: loss, grief, loneliness, fear of the unknown, lack of social support, frustration, stress, and helplessness. For some children, particularly those in familial situations already low on stability, the emotional demands of moving can set off a cascade of lasting psychological and emotional effects.

If you’re planning a move or anticipating a job transfer, you’re probably scared right now. Here’s the good news: Your move doesn’t have to completely mess up your kid for life. Simply being mindful of your child’s needs during this transition allows you to offer extra help. Here’s how.

  1. Give your kids some control. For teenagers, feeling like major life decisions are being made over their heads can trigger anxiety and a sense of helplessness (which can translate to rebellion). The antidote? Involve them in as many decisions as you can. Invite them along on your house hunting trip. Let them peruse the Realtor.com listings. At the very least they can choose their own bedroom.
  2. Help them acquire friends fast. The most frightening part of a move for kids (and frankly, adults) is losing their reliable and long-standing network of friends. To make them feel more comfortable in their new place, make socializing priority #1. Join a sports league, sign them up for summer camp, work the playdate circuit. It’ll take time, particularly for adolescents, so encourage them to maintain friendships in their old city for now. Knowing a BFF is a text away will help them feel less lonely and awkward.
  3. Reestablish stability. Quickly resuming old routines, including chores and Friday night pizza dates, will make kids feel more grounded. Attending a church like the one in your last town may help too.
  4. Ante up. One mom I know offered her daughter a new dog and her son a ride to and from middle school every day (so he could avoid the dreaded bus). Normally I don’t recommend bargaining with terrorists, but in this case the move was your choice, and your kids are being forced to go along with it. It’s not out of line to sweeten the pot.
  5. Love your new town. Your children will mourn what they miss about where they came from, but you can speed up the process of place attachment by highlighting new things to adore, from festivals and concerts to museums and zoos. The quicker you figure out what your town is good at, the easier it will be to fall in love with it. And that’ll make everyone, kids and adults alike, a lot happier where they live.

Sources

Shana L. Pribesh, “The Consequences of Residential and School Mobility for Adolescents,” PhD dissertation, The Ohio State University, 2005.

Doohee Lee, “Residential Mobility and Gateway Drug Use Among Hispanic Adolescents in the U.S.: Evidence from a National Survey,” The American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse 33 (2007): 799–806.

Kuan-Chia Lin, J. W. R. Twisk, and Hui-Chuan Huang, “Longitudinal Impact of Frequent Geographic Relocation from Adolescence to Adulthood on Psychosocial Stress and Vital Exhaustion at Ages 32 and 42 Years: The Amsterdam Growth and Health Longitudinal Study,” Journal of Epidemiology 22, no. 5 (2012): 469–76.

David J. Dewit, “Frequent Childhood Geographic Relocation: Its Impact on Drug Use Initiation and the Development of Alcohol and Other Drug-Related Problems Among Adolescents and Young Adults,” Addictive Behaviors 23, no. 5 (1998): 623–34.

Shigehiro Oishi and Ulrich Schimmack, “Residential Mobility, Well-Being, and Mortality,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 98, no. 6 (2010): 980–94.

Issue 1: My Book Is Here. Well, Almost.

Melody WarnickBuy local, Love Where You Live experiment, Reading and writing

I’ve spent nearly three years working on it. Luckily, you only have to wait 11 days. My first book, This Is Where You Belong: The Art and Science of Loving the Place You Live, will be published by Viking/Penguin on June 21. In a nutshell, it’s about how to put down roots and be happy in your city—and how, after five states in fifteen years, I attempted to do that here in Blacksburg, Virginia.

Now, amazing things are happening.

There have been nice reviews. Library Journal called it “an enjoyable book for anyone who cherishes their hometown as well as for those who don’t and would like to do so,” which pretty much sums it up.

There will be Instagram giveaways. Follow @vikingbooks or @melodywarnick.

There will be interviews (I’ll be on the Army Wife podcast and the Mom Hour podcast) and articles (like “Every Small Business Should Share This List With Customers,” which ran on Inc’s website). Psychology Today magazine is excerpting the book in its July issue.

Still, I need your help. Want to support This Is Where You Belong as it makes its way into the world? Here are some ideas of what you can do.

1. Preorder the book.
2. Review the book.
3. Talk it up. You probably know someone who’s moving this summer and needs this book, right? Or mention it on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter and tag me (@melodywarnick).
4. Work your connections. Ask your friendly neighborhood journalist/radio host/blogger/podcaster to talk to me or review the book. Email me if you’d like a press release.
5. Come to an event. The official launch party will be in Blacksburg on June 24. I’ll also be doing a reading at Kramerbooks in Washington, D.C., on June 22, at 6:30 p.m.. And I’ll be at the Texas Book Festival in Austin on November 5.

Thank you for all your help and for allowing me this sordid display of beggary. Here’s to loving where we live.

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The Power of Public Grief

Melody WarnickUncategorized

Source: Ben Townsend/Flickr

Source: Ben Townsend/Flickr

For the first couple years we lived in Blacksburg, Virginia, I refused to participate in the Virginia Tech Run in Remembrance. It just felt too weird.

Every April, the university organizes a 3.2-mile run to memorialize the 32 students and faculty members killed in 2007 by a student who’d chained the doors to Norris Hall shut and sprayed classrooms with bullets. The Virginia Tech massacre remains the largest mass shooting in the country, evoked every time another monster murders a lot of people, which is far, far too often.

In Blacksburg, April 16 is a day that will live in infamy. There are residents who still can’t help but give a PTSD-fueled shudder when they hear a cavalcade of ambulance sirens.

Not me. I didn’t even live here at the time. I heard about it on the news in my house in Iowa, thought, “How awful,” then more or less moved on. This was a trauma, but not my trauma. A momentary kick in the gut, that’s all.

Then I moved here from Texas in 2012 and discovered that in some ways, April 16 happened yesterday. People brought it up in PTO meetings and dropped it in casual conversations. They promised on social media that they would #neverforget. A horseshoe ring of 32 gray Hokie stones in front of the administration building acted as a permanent reminder, but there were also, I knew, a series of memorial events each spring. The Run in Remembrance was one of them.

I never signed up. Because I didn’t feel intimately connected with the tragedy, horning in on it felt somehow false, an ugly and undeserved display that one researcher termed “emotional rubbernecking.” I hadn’t earned the right to be there.

But after a year of studying place attachment, I changed my mind. April 16 was the town’s tragedy. Now that I lived here, it was mine. The difficult things that happened here—even long-ago history—belonged to me in a sense. For better or worse, I’d inherited them and needed to do my part caring for them.

For someone who wants to feel like they belong, that matters. In a 2015 study, Miriam Rennung and Anja S. Göritz, psychologists at the University of Freiburg, set out to test the effects of sharing negative emotion. They gathered study participants into groups of three or four and had them watch video clips from sad movies like Schindler’s List, either collectively, semi-circled around a large screen, or on their own laptops with earbuds, not knowing that the person next to them was watching the same thing.

The result? Participants who communally watched the same clip felt closer to each other and more socially cohesive afterward than the people who’d stayed in their own head space. Experiencing negative affect together, at the same time, with attention focused on the same depressing point, made them feel bonded.

In other words, the public mourning that I’d eschewed as made-for-TV spectacle—the candlelight vigils, the public memorial services, the placing of stuffed teddy bears at community shrines—fosters social connection among people who vitally need it. Hopefully, write Debra Jackson and Kim Usher in an editorial in the International Journal of Mental Health Nursing, it’ll “contribute to community healing and recovery from trauma.”

So a few weeks ago I lined up alongside the Drillfield, Virginia Tech’s enormous quad, in my orange t-shirt and sneakers, and with 10,000 other participants observed a moment of silence for 32 people who I’d never known and never would.

Despite that, the run isn’t morbid or even particularly sad. The marching band plays. A capella groups sing along the route. Everyone yells “Let’s go Hokies” as we stream into the football stadium. But for at least that one moment before the running starts, we focus our attention on the single horrific thing that unites us as people who live in Blacksburg. I’m guessing it’s similar to how people in Newtown, Connecticut, feel united, or residents of Brussels, Belgium.

None of the current crop of Virginia Tech students was here in 2007; the freshman class was 9 years old then. We see the shooting at a remove, but because we live here, we’re in it together.