Paper short abstract:

The paper will explore the influence of perceived urban change on resident’s place attachment, but especially, focusing on the dialectic between leaving and staying, place attachment disruptions, such as forced or voluntary relocation due to flooding, new/larger apartment allocations, etc.

Paper long abstract:

Joining the emerging field of environmental humanities, the paper aims at studying the lives and narratives of urban communities neighboring the Riga port. Strongly attached to their places and historical identities, these communities constantly confront change that affects their lifestyle and environmental quality. The decline of Baltic fisheries and industrialization of the port over the past decades have substantially transformed what once were fishing suburbs, rural enclaves within a city, islands providing their inhabitants with access to natural resources and water in particular.

By using the oral-historical study of place-attachment I will explore the influence of perceived urban change on resident’s place attachment, but especially, focusing on the dialectic between leaving and staying, place attachment disruptions, such as forced or voluntary relocation due to new/larger apartment allocations (customary in Soviet times), and other.

The particular research is based on the framework of environmental oral history, which enables us to more fully and critically understand the ways cultural and individual memory and experience shapes human interactions with the more-than-human world, just as it enables us to identify the ways human memory, identity and experience is molded by the landscapes and environments in which people live and work. Life stories are seen as an important resource in the study of the people’s perceptions, experiences and beliefs about environments, constant changes over time, and place attachment.