Creating a Sense of Place in School Environments

Creating a Sense of Place in School Environments guides its readers to the characteristics that tend to generate a sense of place through children's vivid descriptions of their school and provides a body of critical information that can be employed to design a better school environment that can imprint cherished childhood memories.

The childhood school environment calls for special attention regarding the sense of place it creates. The sense of place in childhood both affects children's current quality of life and frames their lasting world view. It is well known that children's cognitive development is closely related to their place attachment to their surroundings, and that children's adaptation to a given environment depends on how such place attachment can be created. Therefore, it is natural that people's identity in the world is the accumulation of their experience of place while in childhood.

Cross-checking between the imprint of adults' memories of places in school and children's current lived experience of their favorite school place confirmed that certain spatial configurations, which the author herein refers to as place generators can generate positive attributes of physical settings that construct a sense of place and last as lifelong memories. It is an ideal read for academics, students, and professionals.

Sun-Young Rieh is a Professor in the Department of Architecture, College of Urban Sciences, University of Seoul, Korea. She is also a registered architect in both Korea and the USA. She studied architecture in Seoul National University and earned an M.Arch degree from the University of California, Berkeley. She received the Arch.D degree from the University of Hawaii. She was the Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the School of Architecture, University of Hawaii (2007) and a visiting researcher at the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology (2017). Her research expertise includes sustainable environment, gendered urbanism, and educational environments. She has co-authored various books, including Global Planning Innovations for Urban Sustainability (2018), 2030 Seoul Plan Gender Analysis (2013), and The Future of Architectural Education (1999). She is the editor of Boom or Bust?: The Future of Buildings in Teheran-ro District after the Gangnam Building Boom in Seoul (2019).