Community attachment in the context of urban settlement regeneration: Mediating role of resident interaction

Large-scale urban settlement regeneration has created a dissonance between community environment improvement and resident interaction maintenance, posing challenges to community attachment. Relying on the three-pole triangular model, influential factors were identified in terms of resident interaction, community environment, and individual characteristics. Path analysis model was established to examine feasible pathways and effects of influential factors on community attachment, using survey data from Harbin, China. The results demonstrate that resident interaction is a mediation between community environment and community attachment, as well as between individual characteristics and community attachment. Resident interaction could be regarded to consist of three sub-dimensions: interaction depth, interaction breadth, and interaction frequency. Among them, interaction depth plays a crucial mediating role. Increased interaction depth could enhance community attachment, but extensive or frequent interactions do the opposite. Increasing greening directly benefits community attachment. Constructing public space and improving pedestrian walkways could directly and positively affect community attachment and enhance it by affecting resident interaction. Furthermore, residents with higher education attainment, lower annual income or longer residence time were more likely to be attached. Some policy implications and suggestions for local government and developers were proposed, which can encourage residents' identity in the regenerated community and enhance community attachment.