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Contribution type: New Concept
Concept: Polytopophilia
Name of the contributor: Erica Dorn
E-mail of the contributor: erica.dorn@oregonstate.edu
Polytopophilia describes an orientation of affection, belonging, care, and responsibility toward multiple places. Building on Yi-Fu Tuan’s concept of topophilia—the affective bond between people and place—polytopophilia names the increasingly plural and distributed ways people experience attachment to place. Polytopophilia recognizes that people may develop deep attachments to several places simultaneously, through family, migration, work, memory, community, culture, and ongoing movement between places.
Polytopophilia is particularly relevant under conditions of mobility and uneven migration, where people's lives and relationships are often distributed across neighborhoods, cities, regions, and countries. It does not suggest that attachment to multiple places is a diluted form of belonging or a condition that must ultimately be resolved into attachment to one “home.” Instead, it understands plural place attachment as a lived condition and a potential source of care, connection, and responsibility across geographic boundaries.
Polytopophilia therefore asks us to expand how we understand belonging to place. To care deeply about one place does not necessarily require disengagement from others; people can cultivate relationships of affection and stewardship across multiple geographies. The concept offers a way of understanding place as relational, mobile, and interconnected, while also recognizing that the ability to move between and maintain relationships with multiple places is shaped by unequal social, political, and economic conditions.
How I came to the term:
I developed the term polytopophilia through my research on place, mobility, and transitions in U.S. suburbs. My work began with a question about how we understand people's relationships to place when their lives do not fit the conventional image of belonging to a single, stable geographic community. I was particularly interested in the tension between topophilia, or affection for place, and the increasingly mobile and geographically distributed lives of many people. Through my research, I encountered people whose relationships, identities, responsibilities, and senses of belonging extended across multiple places. A person might care deeply about the suburb where they live while also maintaining profound relationships with a hometown, another country, a family landscape, or communities formed elsewhere. These attachments are not necessarily competing forms of belonging; they can coexist and shape one another. This led me to extend the idea of topophilia through the prefix poly-—not to suggest that Tuan understood topophilia as singular, but to name something that became increasingly visible through my own research: the possibility of loving, caring for, and belonging to multiple places at once.
The concept also emerged from recognizing that mobility does not necessarily produce placelessness. Movement can instead create relationships among places. For people whose lives are shaped by migration, diaspora, commuting, translocal relationships, or repeated movement, place attachment can become distributed across a network of locations rather than concentrated in one geographic home.