Generating person-place bonding in grassroots innovations: the case study of Groene Mient, The Hague, The Netherlands

The climate crisis is weakening humanity’s ties with its meaningful places. Rapid urbaniza-tion, mobility, migration and climate change are increasingly challenging these place mean-ings that contribute to human social-ecological wellbeing. Thus, place has a central im-portance in human experience. Understanding person-place bonding can provide clues about how and why people become attached or detached to places valuable to them in the urban landscape. In the Netherlands, grassroots innovations offer some guidance into new ways of knowing, living and reviving those person-place attachments by implementing alternate ur-ban futures. Although the reasons behind person-place bonding, called place attachment, have been explored in various urban contexts, the implications of place attachment within grassroots innovations remains unexplored. This paper aims to explain how place attachment occurs in grassroots innovations in the Netherlands. By drawing on the place attachment tripartite (person, psychological, process) organizing framework by Scannell and Gifford (2010), this paper develops a new conceptual model outlining four mutually inclusive pro-cesses that contribute to person-place bonding in grassroots innovations in the Netherlands. The paper contends that the four processes of enabling participation, spaces and strategies, creation and communication of vision and trust building generate place attachment in grass-roots innovation in the Netherlands. With this conceptual lens, the research analyses the case study of Groene Mient in The Hague, a social-ecological housing project. Through a quali-tative case study research, the paper contends that residents developed a collective, psycho-logical attachment to the place that shaped their place identity as a learning community through enabling participation, spaces and strategies, creation and communication of vision and trust building. As such, the four processes are interconnected and influence each other.