The Role of House Outdoor Environment Features in Creating Home Attachment

Home attachment is a positive emotional bond between home and its dwellers which may result in safety, solace and tranquility for them. To create this kind of relationship, some physical and social prerequisites need to exist inside home. This article aims to answer the question whether house outdoor environment features are also effective in developing home attachment or not. Aiming to answer the question, it tries to survey features effective in creating home attachment in order to discover those related to house outdoor environment. It employs causal process method in which a logical causal link is made between linkable concepts in the research area. This causal relationship is discoursed by referring to related literature. Therefore, some outdoor prerequisites for home attachment can be revealed after going through some causal steps. This research has identified “residential satisfaction” as a preliminary step for creating home attachment. After establishing this causal relationship, efforts are made to discover some outdoor features effective in residential satisfaction by survey on literature of this area and coding proper concepts through content analysis. Based on this article findings, some outdoor features effective in developing residential satisfaction and also home attachment are: "exterior view of the house and neighboring buildings", "neighboring satisfaction", and "quality and good reputation of neighborhood". Lack of these features will result in decreasing residential satisfaction leading to a decrease in home attachment. Concentrating on these factors and presenting physical and social solutions to improve them can result in creating homes that may ease dwellers attachment.