Abstract

There is growing interest in identifying solutions to reignite engagement and attachment to urban areas. One promising avenue is to explore how individuals' bonds with urban spaces can drive such engagement, a concept central to place attachment theory. This theory posits that individuals are more likely to return to and engage in activities within places where they have formed meaningful connections through positive emotional, cognitive, and behavioral interactions (Giuliani 2003). Augmented reality (AR) offers a compelling opportunity to foster such attachment by creating immersive, interactive digital experiences that connect users with physical places. By superimposing digital content onto real-world environments, AR creates seamless, integrated experiences in which users interact with digital overlays and their physical surroundings simultaneously, thereby engaging emotions, cognition, and behaviors (Steffen et al. 2019), with research suggesting that enjoyment of these experiences can foster attachment to the places in which they occur (Oleksy and Wnuk 2017). Building on place attachment theory and extant AR research, we will consider four characteristics of AR technologies and explore their influence on the emotional and social processes that drive attachment to urban areas. Informativeness, the extent to which AR provides access to pertinent information about the physical environment in which individuals are located, allows users to further engage with and appreciate the local features of their environment. Accessibility, defined as AR’s ability to surface information that would otherwise be difficult to obtain, supports a richer understanding of the place. Interactivity, which enables users to dynamically engage with virtual content and with others, fosters a sense of social connection and belonging even in solitary contexts. Finally, personalization, or the extent to which AR content can be tailored to fit individual preferences, allows users to engage with relevant, context-specific content in situ. We will first collect survey data to test our exploratory model, followed by a lab experiment. This research will contribute to AR and environmental psychology literature and will provide actionable insights into how AR can support urban revitalization by enhancing user engagement with urban areas.

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