ABSTRACT
The year 1992 was a watershed for research on place attachment. Not only was the landmark book Place Attachment (Altman & Low, 1992) published, in that same year some colleagues and I published “Beyond the Commodity Metaphor” in the journal Leisure Sciences (Williams et al., 1992). Our paper was not intended as a methodological contribution to place attachment measurement. Rather it was an effort to reframe the study of outdoor recreation experiences around the notion of “relationship to place” as an alternative to modeling it as a multiattribute consumer choice, or what we called “the commodity metaphor.” Yet because the paper introduced one of the first psychological scales for measuring place attachment as an affective bond, that scale has been widely applied in place attachment studies and adapted for use in many different kinds of places.
