Urban Social Identity and Sustainability

Abstract

One of the most recent fields of investigation in environmental psychology focuses on the relationship between human behavior and management of environmental resources, aspects related to what is known today as sustainable human development. For the authors, this kind of behavior is linked to the relation that people establish with particular environments, specifically, the processes of socioenvironmental identity that condition the people-environment relationship. The authors present the results of a study conducted in the Olympic Village of Barcelona. The urban social identity of residents was analyzed, focusing on three main factors: identification-satisfaction, image of the neighborhood, and perceived social homogeneity. These three factors were analyzed in relation to a series of items in the initial questionnaire referring to proenvironmental behavior, representation of particular natural resources, and environmental attitudes. The authors expected the answers to these questions would differ significantly according to the degree of identification of residents with their neighborhood.