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Journal of Environmental Psychology 24 (2004) 4352

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Love and loathing of the city: Urbanophilia and urbanophobia, topological identity and perceived incivilities
! Marie-Line Felonneau
Department de Psychologie, Universit! Victor S!galen-Bordeaux 2, 3 place de la Victoire, 33076 Bordeaux Cedex, France e e

Abstract This article examines how overall adherence to an ideology favourable or unfavourable to the city affects the practical ways in which one identies with the city in which one lives. We then proceed to explore how these inuence the perception of negative environmental stimuli, which we depict in our study as incivilities. The interrelations between three principal variables are examined: (1) the degree of attraction towards or rejection of the city (urbanophilia vs. urbanophobia), based on how people view the Ideal City; (2) topological identity (strong vs. weak); and (3) perception of the salience of incivilities (also strong vs. weak). Our results indicate that possessing an urbanophile attitude corresponds to a strong topological identity and a tendency to underestimate the frequency of uncivil behaviours. Urbanophobia, on the other hand, is clearly correlated with a weak urban identity and a tendency to overestimate uncivil behaviour in the city. r 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction In this paper we present the rst stage of an ongoing project within the eld of environmental social psychology. Our initial question is: How do subjects relate to their environments and to what extent does this environmental relationship provide the basis for psychosocial and symbolic feelings of belongingness. From a conceptual viewpoint, our reasoning has as its source well-established research on the spatial projection of the Self, self-identity, and related concepts. But our thinking is also inuenced by ongoing social transformations in urban environments and sociological changes in urban mentalities, occurring in both in Europe and the United States in the last few years. Research today on the social psychological relationships between people and cities has to be seen in the context of increasing media attention being given to the proliferation of incivilities and to how difcult conditions of urban life have become. We propose a novel way of approaching the problem, starting from the well-established concept of placeidentity, and opening this up to a double perspective: Firstly, we postulate that the individuals general attitude towards living in the city could underlie his or her spatial identity; secondly, we are also proposing
E-mail address: marie-line.felonneau@u-bordeaux2.fr (M.-L. F! lonneau). e 0272-4944/$ - see front matter r 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/S0272-4944(03)00049-5

that socio-spatial identity directly affects the perception of incivilities actually encountered in the daily environment. In the sociological and psychological literature, these levels of analysis are typically treated separately: Sociologists (Lefebvre, 1968; Ledrut, 1973) tend to focus on urban ideology, without always operationalizing this concept; psychologists, on the other hand, direct their attention more to issues of identity and environmental perception, often without adequate attention to the societal context. In order to go beyond these segmented approaches, we are proposing to examine, within a single research project, both the ideological level of social representations (which can be identied by peoples representations of the Ideal City) and the psychological level of topological identity and of environmental perception. How is the ideology one holds towards the city either favourable or unfavourablerelated to ones identication with the specic city in which one resides? How do these ideological and identication variables affect the ways individuals perceive negative environmental stimuli, depicted here in terms of incivilities?

2. Urban ideologies and representations of the city In France there is a strong theoretical tradition of research on social representations. Historically anchored

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at the interstice between the psychological and the social, the notion of social representation takes account of how the subject remodels the reality he or she experiences (Moscovici, 1961; Jodelet, 1982, 1989). This means abandoning the rupture between object and subject, but it has generated relatively little research in the eld of environmental psychology, with the exception of the major studies by Milgram and Jodelet (1976) ! and Levy-Leboyer (1980), strongly committed to a perspective involving the cognitive and social construction of the city. More recently, researchers have become interested in the lters people develop in their daily spatial environments, highlighting the selective processes which guide how we steer our way through the urban milieu (Bonnes & Secchiaroli, 1983; Abric & Morin, 1990). All these researchers conclude that there is an important subjective element in how the we relate physical environment. One can also propose that certain kinds of environment work as spatial settings, into which we can project ourselves psychologically, such projection itself being associated with social categoriza! tion processes (Felonneau, 1998, 1999a, b). By examining representations rather than peoples direct experience as residents in cities it becomes possible to reveal an ideological concentrate, incorporated by the subject. By this we are referring to all those conditions and constraints which contribute towards the elaboration of a whole family of social representations (Rouquette, 1996, p. 170); we also note here that, following Rateau (2000), this ideology consists of a psychological mechanism for generating and organizing representations of specic objects without the disposition being anchored in a particular object. Yet, while representations of the city are grounded in social experiences and acquire different values, they also constitute a deep expression of the subjectivity of the person, through his or her reference points and urban experiences. These beliefs, references and experiences are expressed through attitudes that are on the whole either favourable or hostile to what the urban involves and towards the city. Regardless of their valence, the general representations of the city need to be included in the analysis in order to measure their inuence on topological identity. One can present an initial hypothesis that subjects will identify with their city of residence if they also develop a favourable attitude towards urban life more generally, and, conversely, that people are less likely to identify with their city of residence if they have negative feelings towards living as a city-dweller. It is in this sense that we have decided to introduce the notions of urbanophobia and urbanophilia. These neologisms, which we are still in the process of elaborating, have the advantage of evoking strong imagery. For convenience, we call subjects urbanophiles if they hold pro-urban attitudes, in other words,

if they value the specically urban characteristics of a place. On the other hand, urbanophobes are characterized by an attitude more anti-urban, dening the Ideal City by emphasizing the absence of coercion, of pollution, of cars, and of violence, preferring green spaces to opportunities for exchange, animation and encounters. These notions could be related to the work on community orientations by Hummon (1990). Hummon advocated examining the cultural mediation of attitudes toward communities. This theoretical orientation leads away from the assumption that popular belief and sentiment about places simply reects personal experience, towards an interpretation that stresses the public, collective, and symbolic character of community belief and sentiment (Hummon, 1990, p. 15). By introducing these paired notions, we could also mention the school of thought surrounding Wilsons biophilia hypothesis (Wilson & Kellert, 1993) as well as the work of Tuan (1990) on topophilia, in the context of the affective relations between people and their environments. Most researchers have emphasized an attraction towards nature (biophilia) and a relative aversion towards the city. As Ulrich has noted: Several studies performed in the United States, Europe, Japan have compared aesthetic preferences for urban scenes with and without natural elements. Most of this work has focused on the preference effects of trees and other vegetation in urban or built environment (Ulrich, 1993, p. 96). Wilsons biophilia hypothesis can be interpreted as consisting of two broad propositions: First, that humans are characterized by a tendency to respond positively to nature; second, that this disposition has a partly genetic basis. Tuan has pointed out the ambivalence of this attraction towards nature. Attitudes toward all types of environment have been ambivalent from the beginning. Wilderness signied chaos, the garden and farm represented the idyllic life, but even Eden had its snake; country estates induced melancholy. The city symbolized order, freedom, and glory, but also worldliness, the corruption of natural virtues, and oppression. (Tuan, 1990, p. 248).

3. The self and the environment In Europe, and particularly in France, the spatial dimension of identity forms part of a long-standing research tradition of urban sociology of the 1960s and 1970s. Several researchers have developed this question by introducing the notions of urban life-experiences (le ! vecu urbain) and urban symbolism (la symbolique urbaine) to articulate the distinct psychological and sociological dimensions. From phenomenological analyses (Ledrut, 1973) to observational studies of how people live in their

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environment (Palmade & Piona, 1980), most research sought to relate perception to the experience of living in urban environments. Within this framework, a central concept is that of habiter, dened by the way one settles into a place, stays in it, protects oneself within it, constructs a shelter, both within the context ones own life trajectory, with the spatio-temporal dynamic that this presupposes, and ones own way of inserting oneself in the social fabric. Habiter is more than living in a particular environment: It involves a way of investing ones affectivity, imagination, emotions and contact with reality. The familiar environment, in this case the household, becomes a space in which the Self makes emotional investments, characterized by its principal function of providing a support for identity. This means there are two principle elements of the spatial dimension of identity: The body and the household (Lugassy, 1970, 1989). While these approaches are certainly interesting, their heuristic value is limited by a lack of conceptual unity. The concept of identity, which underlies all such analyses, remains somewhat submerged by the diverse ways in which it is approached. At the same time, in the last three decades, psychological and sociological research on the spatial dimension of identity published outside France, has generated a more homogenous theoretical model, based on directly operational concepts such as place identity (Proshansky, 1978; Proshansky, Fabian, & Kaminoff, 1983; Sarbin,1983; Korpela, 1989), urban identity and urban related identity (Lalli, 1992), settlement identity (Feldman, 1990) and residential attachment (Fried, 1982). Proshansky deserves particular recognition for dening the concept of place identity as a substructure of self-identity, consisting of cognitions relating to the physical world in which the subject lives (Proshansky et al., 1983). Subsequently, the emphasis has been on values, attitudes, feelings and beliefs with respect to the environment. According to Proshansky, yThe Self can be thought of as a term which describes the individual as a total system including both conscious and unconscious perceptions of his past, his daily experiences and behaviours, and his future aspirations. (Proshansky et al., 1983, p. 58). Based on this denition, Proshansky et al. introduced a working denition of place-identity: It is a sub-structure of the self-identity of the person consisting of, broadly conceived, cognitions about the physical world in which the individual lives. These cognitions represent memories, ideas, feelings, attitudes, values, preferences, meanings and conceptions of behaviour and experiences which relate to the variety and complexity of physical settings that dene the day-today existence of every human being (Proshansky et al., 1983, p. 59).

Beyond the classic studies of how the environment contributes towards the construction of the Self (Cooley, 1902; Mead, 1934), we need to explore further how the subject living in an urban environment elaborates his or her identity in a spatial context. Residential identity is also strongly associated with residential history (FleuryBahi, 2000). In fact, as Schutz (19621966) put it: y [T]he place where I am living has no signicance for me as a geographical concept, but as my home. Following this line of reasoning, we also subscribe to Lallis assertion: y Place identity can be viewed as part of self-identity; self-identity comprises specic and conscious convictions, interpretations and evaluations of oneself. Therefore, place identity is an aspect of an individuals identity, comparable to gender identity, political identity, or ethnic identity (Lalli, 1992, p. 287). The concept of place identity, as Lalli strictly denes it, refers to personal identity which is based on attachment resulting from a given spatio-temporal insertion. In order to avoid any confusion and since we are referring the social psychology of the environment, we prefer to substitute the term topological identity to the concept of place identity, thereby including a more explicitly social dimension of the subjects relation to his or her environment, with four items in our scale incorporating the ideas of social comparison and group membership (see Appendix B). We therefore dene the topological identity as the propensity, to a greater or lesser extent, to feel an emotional consciousness of belongingness to a place and to other people who inhabit it, not only as a function of personal dispositions and personal references, but also in function of collective, culturally marked, ways of thinking about the environment. One needs to keep in mind that reference here to topological identity involves a synthetic and convenient way of referring to social psychological place identity.

4. The self and incivilities Our starting point is the paired notions of civilities/ incivilities, to operationalize the relationship between the ideological environment, consisting of values and norms, and the subjects environmental perception. By civilities we refer to the orderly regulation of daily social exchanges (Bernard, 1997). The foundation of civility lies in respecting a certain number of social codes and interaction rituals (Goffman, 1974); on the other hand, failure to observe these codes and rituals denes incivility, or, more precisely, incivilities, since these are by denition in the plural. In this article incivilities are dened as acts of nonrespect or of aggression towards others and towards the environment, without necessarily reecting the legal category of delinquency or criminality (Furstenberg, ! 1971; Lagrange, 1984, 1995; Roche, 1996, 1998). Such

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behaviour are generally not very serious but become unacceptable on a daily basis (Wievorka, 1999) because they trigger a diffuse feeling of the decline of the social order and there a sentiment of fear (Moser & Lidvan, 1991; Derbarbieux, 1996). By studying the perception of incivilitiesor, more exactly, the perception of their degree of saliencewe can understand better how the subject relates to his or her city, a relation which is both complex and undergoing profound changes (we should note here that at the present stage of our research the salience of incivilities is measured only by the perception of their frequency: Subsequent research reports will be incorporating the perception of their gravity). Psychologists, sociologists, historians and geographers have been questioning the role of urban organization in the emergence and denition of civility or its opposite, incivilities. Such interrogation has a long tradition. The increasing repression and control over our impulses as the foundation of social exchange in modern societies has been widely recognized (Elias, 1969). Already in the 16th century, Erasmus (1528) conceived of civility as a strategy for distinguishing between the urban milieu and peasant crudity and the barbarian instinct. For 19th century thinkers, the city paradoxically connoted an inherent threat to hygiene and morality; at the turn of the 20th century, sociologists held the notion of the city as a profoundly destabilizing inuence (Simmel, 1903). The Chicago School proclaimed that people living in large cities chose to maintain a distance and separateness from others, to protect themselves from the hundreds of people they encountered each day (Grafmeyer & Joseph, 1990). In these conditions of mental overload (Fischer, 1976; Milgram, 1976), the individual is inclined to neglect even the minimal rules of politeness. In addition, as interpersonal exchanges increase quantitatively, they will be of shorter duration and less friendly and incivilities and become almost the normal way of interacting in large cities (Moser & Corroyer, 2001). In the 1970s, this somewhat fruitless polemic was abandoned in the United States, replaced by a more pragmatic logic by which the notion of incivility became a way of looking at delinquency (Wilson & Kelling, 1982). In the 1980s, several French research studies were conducted in the same vein, associating incivilities with ! feelings of insecurity (Moser, 1992; Roche, 1993). Researchers were now at last able to counter the semantic imprecision of the notion of incivilities, proposing an inventory of behaviours considered as uncivil, together with the environmental characteristics liable to generate these behaviours. Perkins, Meeks, and Taylor (1992) constructed their block environmental inventory (BEI) with the purpose of systematically quantifying the physical and social contexts of insecurity in urban residential areas. Subsequently, Hermand,

Delbarre, and Simeone (1995, 1997) adapted the BEI to identify environmental components reecting the level of social disorganization likely to generate the feeling of insecurity. Of course, we could also cite McKechnies work McKechnie (1974)an intellectual precursor to this eld. Particularly relevant are certain items of his Environmental Response Inventory concerning the need for security. The overall model we adopted is based on the following triptych: Urbanophilia vs. urbanophobia; strong or weak topological identity; and strong or weak salience of perceived incivilities. Underlying our model are the two following hypotheses: (1) a generally urbanophile attitude will correspond to a strong topological identity and a tendency to underestimate the frequency of incivilities; on the other hand, (2) a generally urbanophobe attitude will correspond to weak urban identity and a tendency to overestimate incivilities. Starting with the premise that topological identity is a component of social psychological identity, those subjects who identify with their city of residence and with its inhabitants, whom we refer to as possessing strong topological identity, will, according to our hypothesis, perceive incivilities encountered in their daily environment as less salient. On the other hand, for those with a weak topological identity, incivilities will be seen as more frequent. Even if the causal direction may seem difcult to establish a priori, we base our reasoning on other studies (particularly Lalli, 1992) which propose that positive identication is conducive to positive environmental evaluation rather than vice-versa. Our approach is close to that of Taylor and Goottfredson (1985) who hypothesized that persons living in more heterogeneous neighbourhoods would be less attached and also that levels of perceived or objective environmental disorder would be negatively associated with attachment levels.

5. Methods We used three instruments in our research. A questionnaire to elicit representations of the Ideal City, a scale of Topological Identity and a scale to measure the Perception of the Salience of Incivilities (the three research protocols appear in appendix). As a preliminary to our research, a sample of 100 university students completed two word-association tasks with respect to each of the following stimuli Ideal City and uncivil behaviours. This generated 350 words for the rst concept, and 80 for the second. The research itself was conducted in three stages.

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Stage 1: For the rst stage of our research, we constructed a list of 18 items to characterize the ideal city, based on the responses in the preliminary phase we have just described. This questionnaire was administered to a new sample of 150 students registered in Behavioural Science courses at the University of Bordeaux, all of whom had lived in the city of Bordeaux for at least 3 years. Subjects in this new sample were instructed to select and rank-order the 10 features which they considered indispensable in qualifying a city as ideal. These items were then separated into two categories: City vs. non-city. The items were identied using the method of independent judges. They were then given to a sample of 80 students who were asked to classify them into two categories: Urban and nonurban. We only retained those items that were placed on the same category by 80% of the judges. Nine city items were retained, referring to characteristics which are specically urban: culture, work, animation, social exchanges, architectural heritage, going out, fashions, availability of consumer goods and cosmopolitanism. The 9 noncity items refer to elements not specically urban and even sometimes contrary to the concept of the city: Greenery clean, tranquillity, unpolluted, free of trafc, safe, helping others in need, egalitarian and welcoming. On this basis, subjects were considered urbanophiles if they selected the urban characteristics to represent the Ideal City, and urbanophobes if their representation of the Ideal City depended rather on nonurban characteristics. In this way we were able to classify our subjects by calculating their responses on an index of urbanophilia. The Index of urbanophilia is given by the formula: Urbanophilia Number of city items : Total number of responses

This index varies between 0 and 1: The higher the score, the more urbanophile the subject. To obtain more polarized results, we retained the two-thirds of subjects in the lower and upper terciles. Stage 2: In the second stage of our research we used a scale to measure topological identity, based on the urban identity scale developed by Lalli (1992). Initially, this scale contained 20 items involving 5 dimensions: External evaluation, general attachment, continuation with personal past, perception of familiarity and commitments. Because of our hypotheses, we added a more specically social psychological dimension, that of social identication. We conducted a principal components analysis to validate the scale for our sample. Contrary to the results obtained by Lalli (1992), the dimensions of attachment and continuity with personal past were not

found to be independent. Altogether we found 4 factors, which accounted for 60% of the total variance. These 4 factors were: Attachment, external evaluation of the city, involvement and social identication. The nal version of the scale contained 22 items (alpha de Cronbachs alpha: 0.86) We then calculated individual scores for topological identity on a 4-point scale (1disagree completely; 2 generally disagree; 3generally agree; 4completely agree). The total sample contained 128 subjects. The maximum score possible was 88 (22 4) and we obtained the following results: 38 subjects had a weak topological identity (with scores ranging between 28 and 44), while 35 respondents showed a strong topological identity, with scores between 56 and 76. (In order to be able to compare contrasting samples, we eliminated the subjects scoring in the median range.) Stage 3: Finally, in a third stage, we constructed a questionnaire to measure the salience of incivilities, based on (a) the BEI as modied by Hermand et al. (1995) and (b) results from the word-association test obtained in our exploratory stage. Frequency of incivilities was determined on a 5-point scale: Never, sometimes, often, very often, always. This measured the perceived salience of incivilities, independently of their objective reality. It is important to mention that subjects perceive or fail to perceive these incivilities independently of the objective situation as being absent, rare, common or frequent in their daily lives. One should nevertheless point out that all our subjects lived each day in an environment characterized by frequent incivilities. Following validation by principal component analysis, we retained 23 items (Cronbachs alpha: 0.89). The rst four axes accounted for 48% of the overall variance, the rst 2 factors reecting the environmental dimension and the others representing social relationships. We labelled the rst factor dirtiness, evoking undesirable traces left in the environment by other people, a certain type of stain or soiling by another person, either absent or invisible. This is made up of items such as pollution, dropping rubbish, etc. Factor 2 was an index of abandonment, the core of which was the inadequate maintenance of the built environment, as if the landscape was somehow marred. Factor 3 was a more direct expression of incivilities, an affront to the social codes of politeness and respect for other people; it combined behavioural items such as being shoved, arguing in the streets, provocation, creating disturbances, etc. Factor 4 covered serious delinquency, including vandalism, selling drugs, sticking up handbills, the defacing of and damage to buildings, etc. Each subject then received a score for each of the following variables: Urbanophilia vs. urbanophobia, topological identity and perceived salience of incivilities.

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48 M.-L. F!lonneau / Journal of Environmental Psychology 24 (2004) 4352 e Table 1 Items characterizing the Ideal City City items Overall mean Number of times selected as rst choice 11 1 3 13 2 3 2 2 5

We then compared subjects scores on each scale to determine inter-scale correlations.

6. Results Overall, with an average score on this index of 0.428, our students more often chose nonurban characteristics to describe their Ideal City. These initial results are relatively surprising since they come from subjects who are both young and urban, i.e. not inclined because of their age, a priori, to prefer the tranquil to the animated. (In subsequent research, these analyses should include be rened to include SES and gender. This was beyond the scope of the current study but certainly merits more attention.) Among the 10 items with the highest scores used by subjects to depict the Ideal City, 6 were not specically urban (greenery, cleanliness, welcoming, safe, unpolluted and helping others in need) while 4 were urban (culture, social exchanges, going out and animation). The two mentioned most frequently were greenery and cleanliness. Those that were most frequently left unclassied (i.e. not part of to the representation of the Ideal City) were architectural heritage, work, fashion, and availability of consumption goods. In observing Table 1 one could ask whether our subjects Ideal City could really be considered a city at all. Doesnt it rather appear as a quasi-natural ecological niche having lost all its urban character, in a certain sense, a non-city, as described by Lugassy (1970)? Our rst hypothesis was conrmed: The two general attitudes with respect to the Ideal City were clearly related to subjects topological identity. The relationship between these two variables is statistically signicant (F 1:86 10:337; p 0:0018): Urbanophiles identied more strongly with the Ideal City than did urbanophobes: Clearly the topological identity of urbanophiles was stronger than that of urbanophobes (M 9:660; SD=1.504; M 8:651; SD=1.437). After forming two contrasting groups according to the criterion of strong or weak topological identity, we retained the upper and lower quartiles of respondents. The relationship between the two variables was found to be highly signicant (w2 11:369; p 0:0007) (see Table 2). We then tested for the inuence of urbanophilia vs. urbanophobia on subjects perception of the salience of incivilities. The ANOVA between urbanophobe vs. urbanophile attitudes and perception of the frequency of incivilities was not statistically signicant yet supported our prediction (F 1:86 3:631; p 0:0601). Since all subjects encountered the same environment every day, one can see that urbanophobes do in fact consider
City items 1 Culture 2 Work 3 Animation 4 Social exchanges 5 Architectural Heritage 6 Going out 7 Fashion 8 Availability of consumption goods 9 Cosmopolitanism Noncity items 10 Greenery 11 Cleanliness 12 Tranquility/calmness 13 Unpolluted 14 Free of trafc 15 Safe 16 Helping others in need 17 Equality 18 Welcoming 4.508 1.562 3.516 4.250 1.805 3.703 0.273 0.875 2.469

6.398 5.188 2.469 3.719 0.734 3.883 3.250 2.297 3.969

26 17 6 9 3 9 6 7 13

Table 2 Interrelationships between the two variables: urbanophile vs. urbanophobe and strong and weak topological identity (T.I) (w2 11:369; p 0:0007) Strong T.I. Urbanophobes Urbanophiles Percentages in rows 70.833 21.739 46.809 Weak T.I. 29.167 78.261 53.191 Total 100 100 100

incivilities as occurring more frequently than do urbanophiles. (M 66:977; SD=10.566; M 61:956; SD=13.851). The hypothesized relationship between strong vs. weak topological identity and perceived salience of incivilities (also strong vs. weak) was also conrmed (F 1:68 5:378; p 0:023). As anticipated, subjects with strong topological identity underestimated the frequency of incivilities, compared those with a weak topological identity (M 61:314; SD=13.551; M 68:286; SD=11.519). These results were therefore consistent with the conclusions of American studies of urban identity (Proshansky, 1978; Proshansky et al., 1983), conrming that when one has an emotional sense of belonging to a place, he or she is clearly less sensitive to environmental indices of social disorganization, indices which are all the more acceptable since they emanate from others who are similar to oneself (item 10 in the topological identity scale was the afrmation:

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On the whole, the people who live in this city are similar to me). When we compared the overall scale of perceived frequency of incivilities with the four sub-scales of topological identity we found that only two dimensions were inter-correlated with this variable: Attachment (r 0:174; p 0:05) and social identication (r 0:189; p 0:0325); this is not the case for the sub-scales of external evaluation nor involvement. For attachment, the results showed that the stronger the attachment to the city, the less one perceives ambient dirtiness (r 0:214; p 0:0152) and the less one is sensitive to behaviour by others which shows lack of respect (r 0:154; p 0:0820). Principal Components Analysis indicated that the dimension that we label ambient dirtiness was made up of the items rubbish in the streets, people who urinate in public, people who spit, dog faeces and littering. The subscale we label lack of respect resulting from the Principal Components Analysis consisted of the items youths going around in gangs, people who bump into you, people who block your way, sound pollution during the daytime, sound pollution at night, arguing in the streets and provocative behaviours. As for social identication, the more our subjects identied with people living in the same environment as themselves, the less they tended to give less attention dirtiness (r 0:161; p 0:072), and, to a lesser extent, paid attention to impolite and disrespectful behaviours (r 0:153; p 0:0855), or even the criminal acts (r 0:147; p 0:0986) of people encountered (the subscale of criminal behaviours was made up of sticking up handbills, breaking windows, vandalism, selling drugs, delinquency and grafti).

7. Discussion At this stage in our research, the results demonstrate a relationship between general attitudes towards what is urban, ideological views and forms of topological identity. One can conrm that how we relate to the physical environment in which we live needs to be contextualized within the framework of a particular and relative normative structure. More generally, we should recall that the rules of civility are tacit or, in other words, a guide for mental action (Bernard, 1997), internalized by each member of a social group, the denition of which depends largely on the subjects integration into his or her city. The results provide evidence of an association between two dimensions: On the one hand, the ideological, expressed through representations and attitudes towards the city; on the other hand, the more directly psychological spatial dimension of identity and of environmental perception.

If we have been able to show a correlation between urbanophilia vs. urbanophobia and the expression of topological identity, nevertheless we cannot really conrm the existence of a causal relation, and even less, at this point in our research, determine the direction of causality. Yet the fact that these two variables are positively related with each other is already a nding of some importance. We are now in a position to assert that urbanophilia is more closely associated with strong topological identity than urbanophobia is with weak topological identity (see Table 2). In other words, having a personal representation the Ideal City based on relationshipssocial exchanges, encounters with others, animation, or cultureis likely to generate a positive identication with the city in which one lives. The projection of the Self is probably easier in an environment that one evaluates positively, despite objective annoyances that one may encounter within it. On the other hand, if one values more those physical features that are not exclusively urban, such as greenery, tranquillity and safety, this doubtless makes it harder to identify with an objectively polluted city. Here the spatialization of the Self becomes even more difcult as the environmental nuisances probably re-activate a general sense of malaise. Turning to environmental perception, our results show that incivilities need to be understood in a larger perspective; their salience varies from one person to another, in particular depending on ones general attitude towards the city and his or her integration into the personal environment, measured in our study by topological identity. It is for this reason that we have emphasized the fact that the salience of urban inconveniences needs to be clearly dissociated from the environmental reality (we note, parenthetically, that this latter nding could have applications in the context of developing programmes to increase sensitivity to hygiene and security). In fact, an objectively dirty, polluted and unsafe city does not necessarily possess these characteristics for everyone. Signs of disrespect are only perceived by those subjects who are least at ease in the city, as if, in some way, they are unconsciously seeking out the slightest sign of social disorder, as if the malaise of identity that they experience makes the negative environmental characteristics even more salient. On the other hand, we could also say that people favourable to urban life, with a sense of attachment and identifying with their city of residence, forget in a manner of speaking to see the ambient dirtiness and disregard disrespectful behaviours. These are no doubt offset by urban hedonism and the playful aspect of living in the urban core (Ledrut, 1973). If we widen the perspective, going beyond our results, we can infer from this rst stage of the analysis of our data that our subjects, students living in a large city,

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reveal themselves to be more urbanophobe than urbanophile. Already, in the 1970s, sociologists were showing there was a cultural pressure to elaborate a myth of la bonne nature: The intrinsic benets of the countryside, which then became transposed into denigrating the city. It is the middle classes who experience this more strongly, as the city is perceived as the quintessence of social coercion, stress and discontent. This urbanophobia constitutes in some ways a corollary of the biophilia hypothesis developed by Wilson in the 1990s. One sees that the preference for natural environments is widespread across the whole society and resurfacing as the theses of ecologists gain more support and with increasing media coverage of urban pollution, violence and insecurity, as much in Europe as in the United States.

For each of the following statements, indicate whether you: (1) disagree completely, (2) generally disagree, (3) generally agree, (4) completely agree External evaluation 1 Bordeaux is seen from outside as possessing prestige 2 Compared with other cities, Bordeaux has many advantages 3 Bordeaux is mainly a city for tourists 4 There are many things here which are envied by other cities General attachment 5 I really feel like a native of Bordeaux 6 I see myself as an inhabitant of Bordeaux 7 I feel really at home in Bordeaux 8 This city is like a part of my self 9 Lots of things in this city remind me of my own past 10 I cannot imagine living in a different city because I would give up too much of myself 11 I had so many experiences in Bordeaux that I have become intimately bound up with the city 12 I know Bordeaux so well that I would recognize the town on a photograph taken at any time 13 When I amble through Bordeaux I feel very strongly that I belong here 14 This town is very familiar to me indeed Commitment 15 I would like to stay in Bordeaux indenitely 16 I would like to witness Bordeauxs future development 17 Bordeaux plays an important part in my projects for the future 18 My personal future is closely tied up with Bordeaux Social identication 19 The fact that I live in this city conveys an image of myself to others 20 On the whole, people living in this city are like me 21 Compared to others, people living in this city are generally decent 22 Sometimes it bothers me when people label me as a person living at Bordeaux

Appendix A. The Ideal City questionnaire Instructions to subjects for completing the questionnaire. Among the following items, choose 10 characteristics that a city absolutely must possess to be considered ideal. Please arrange your answers in order of importance (city and noncity items were presented to subjects in a mixed order). City 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 items Culture Work Animation Social exchanges Architectural Heritage Going out Fashion Availability of consumption goods Cosmopolitanism

Noncity items 10 Greenery 11 Cleanliness 12 Tranquillity/calmness 13 Unpolluted 14 Free of trafc 15 Safe 16 Helping others in need 17 Equality 18 Welcoming

Appendix C. Items in the incivilities scale Appendix B. Topological identity scale Instructions to subjects for completing the questionnaire. Instructions to subjects for completing the questionnaire. Here is a list of what are commonly called incivilities. For each statement, indicate whether you are

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likely to encounter what the statement describes, in situations or places you nd yourself in every day: (1) never, (2) sometimes, (3) often, (4) very often, (5) systematically (always) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 Broken windows Sticking up handbills People who urinate in public Poorly maintained buildings Dropping rubbish in the streets Being shoved by people Abandoned cars Vandalism Dog faeces Abandoned buildings Dirt on the pavement People who spit Youths going around in gangs Sound pollution during the daytime People who block your way Grafti Arguments in the street Sound pollution at night Selling drugs in the streets The presence of groups of delinquents Areas left abandoned Provocative behaviours People who throw litter on the street

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