The study’s author, Samuel Ikendi of the University of California’s Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources and the Merced Earth Institute, positions universities as proxies for evaluating what he calls Green Squares: central open softscape nodes that bring together ecological, social, symbolic, and institutional functions. Synthesizing architectural phenomenology, environmental psychology, and chrono-urbanism, the research uses the 15-Minute Campus framework as an interpretive temporal lens. Rather than treating proximity as a cold geometric distance, the framework shifts the analytical gaze to the fluid rhythms of daily life, recognizing that proximity is fundamentally an embodied experience structured by pedestrian routines, shifting user patterns, and institutional paces unfolding across the same landscape over time.

Methodologically, the inquiry is unusual. It spans an 18-year biographical continuum from 2008 to 2026 across three distinct campus design eras: the 19th-century agrarian park layout of Iowa State University in Ames, the 20th-century post-colonial urban hilltop of Makerere University in Kampala, and the 21st-century master-planned grid of UC Merced in California’s Central Valley. The researcher served as the primary analytical instrument, logging physical features into a four-tier qualitative matrix that separated observational notes on infrastructure and text, methodological notes, theoretical notes mapping elements to the spirit of place, and reflexive observer’s comments. Two-cycle thematic coding processed 184 individual raw text statements and landscape features captured across 64 pedestrian walkthrough traverses, with negative case analysis deliberately cataloging spatial friction, sensory shock, and design failures to prevent celebratory bias.

The empirical analysis reveals how built layouts function across five themes. First, historical anchors bind institutional identity. At Iowa State, the straight Curtiss–Beardshear axis connects the agricultural college to central administration along a non-motorable corridor, anchored by a central flagpole with a Class of 1876 bronze plaque and the historic Cooperative Extension plaque marking the 1906 birthplace of county agricultural extension work. At Makerere, the white-and-blue Main Administration Building, traditionally called the Ivory Tower, was meticulously reconstructed after a devastating 2020 fire gutted the historic structure, restoring its 1941 architectural form. At Merced, a founding chancellor plaque at the edge of the Carol Tomlinson-Keasey Quadrangle anchors institutional legitimacy directly into a landscape that was open pasture land only decades ago.

Second, processional rituals translate structural forms into what the study terms kinetic devotion. The 110-foot brick Campanile at Iowa State, housing a 50-bell carillon whose bells were added incrementally from 1899 to 1967, organizes graduation choreography around a bronze-and-walnut academic mace sculpted to mirror the tower’s geometry. Campus lore holds that a student officially becomes an Iowa Stater when kissed under the Campanile as the carillon tolls midnight, a tradition called campaniling that transforms the daytime thoroughfare into an intimate peer-bonding site. At Merced, the 40-foot stainless steel Beginnings arches bookend a student’s experience: incoming students march southwest across Scholars Bridge through the arches during Orientation’s Journey Inward, and seniors execute a retrograde processional through the same arches at Commencement’s Journey Outward.

Third, environmental markers operate as living policy texts. A single ‘Triumph’ Elm near Curtiss Hall at Iowa State carries a timeline plaque recognizing partnerships between the university and seven tribal colleges across Nebraska, South Dakota, and North Dakota, materializing structural equity through botanical form. At Makerere, the asymmetrical Makerere@100 monument features a ten-sided concrete foundation base, each side inscribed with a plaque documenting one decade of history from the 1922 technical college through the persecution-era 1970s to the modern collegiate transition, while an active meteorological station near Freedom Square materializes the central square as a living laboratory. At Merced, Toloma Grove, dedicated in 2010 with seven California valley oak saplings and indigenous flora, carries a plaque acknowledging the Miwuk and Yokuts peoples, establishing an indigenous land acknowledgment from the young campus’s inception.

Fourth, human-scale philanthropic rest stops humanize these squares. At Iowa State, concrete benches donated by the Class of 1916 and granite benches installed by the Class of 1910 beneath pine groves display past student custody on the lawn. At Makerere, the recovery of the fire-gutted administration building was heavily supported by localized alumni donor networks through a ‘Buy-a-Brick’ initiative with engraved recognition plaques, making intergenerational stewardship legible on the grass. At Merced, the massive Sierra granite Peterson Stone, inscribed for a regional philanthropic family who funded foundational initiatives when the campus lacked a donor network, serves as a sun-warmed informal bench that democratizes the modern plaza. Fifth, spatial containment dynamics emotionally heighten each square: at Makerere, student strikes mobilized on Freedom Square with the chant ‘Eh, Makerere Oyee!’ echoing off the Main Library and administration facades, forcing executives to walk down onto the grass to negotiate, while at Merced the Kolligian Library and the Science and Engineering arcade frame the quadrangle with floodlit safety perimeters.

The study is careful about its qualitative boundaries. It deployed no microclimatic instrumentation, no surface temperature sensors, no canopy closure measurements, and no student surveys, so all assertions about climate resilience and student psychology are positioned as literature-informed interpretations rather than measured outcomes. The research explicitly notes that the three landscape types possess different baseline conditions, such as canopy density and surface albedo, that alter their real-world biophysical performances. The mature interlocking canopy at Iowa State and Makerere blocks direct solar radiation, whereas Merced’s wide concrete panels create intense summer exposure due to elevated albedo and a lack of mature tree cover, generating localized thermal stress that only native microclimatic sanctuaries like Toloma Grove can relieve. The Fairfield Canal, with its waterfowl and open water, introduces biophilic vitality that softens hardscape glare during extreme midday heat.

The implications scale outward. The study argues that place-identity forged within micro-level nodes potentially extrapolates through campustown interface zones to intersect with municipal civic cores, exemplified by the 2024 municipal annexation that legally integrated Merced’s 1,140-acre campus grid into the city limits. The findings suggest open softscape midpoints function as adaptive chronotopes, localized timespaces where institutional history, cyclic rituals, and spontaneous daily cadences entangle and synchronize, supporting context-sensitive cooling, public inclusion, and temporal planning under the New Urban Agenda and Sustainable Development Goal 11. City planners are urged to establish strict softscape mandates protecting central lawns from densification.

Perhaps the most provocative recommendation concerns orientation rhetoric. The study critiques the top-heavy blindness of traditional welcome speeches, which almost exclusively direct attention upward toward monumental landmarks like the Campanile, the Makerere administration tower, or the soaring Beginnings arches. An over-emphasis on intimidating monolithic architecture is interpreted as potentially reinforcing displacement, imposter syndrome, and alienation among first-generation and low-income scholars. The author proposes Place-Based Contextual Orientation: administrators should rewrite orientation scripts to de-center architectural elitism and elevate human-scale micro-monuments flanking the same squares, from the tribal-college Triumph Elm at Iowa State to the Peterson Stone at Merced and the alumni-funded brick repairs at Makerere, so that a student’s daily fast-paced pathways are physically supported by the collective timeline of regional families, bridging historical town–gown divisions and helping diverse cohorts feel a deep, unshakeable sense of place.

Subject of Research: Urban Planning & Sustainable Cities

Article Title: Reading the midcampus core matters: autoethnographic reflexivity of ‘Green Squares’ as temporally integrated 15-Minute Campus nodes for student belonging, town–gown integration, and climate resilience

Article References: Ikendi, S. (2026). Reading the midcampus core matters: autoethnographic reflexivity of ‘Green Squares’ as temporally integrated 15-Minute Campus nodes for student belonging, town–gown integration, and climate resilience. Frontiers in Sustainable Cities, 8, Article 1962466. https://doi.org/10.3389/frsc.2026.1962466

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/frsc.2026.1962466

Keywords: 15-Minute Campus, chrono-urbanism, campus green space, student belonging, town-gown integration, urban heat island, climate resilience, autoethnography, place-identity, sustainable cities, Reading, midcampus

The concept of ontological security was developed by sociologist Anthony Giddens, building on the psychologist R. D. Laing, to describe the confidence most people have in the continuity of their self-identity and in the constancy of their social and material surroundings. Without this baseline sense of predictability, individuals tend to experience anxiety and disorientation that can undermine their capacity to act. Catarina Kinnvall’s influential work extended the idea to globalization, arguing that the erosion of what she called the “protective cocoon of relational ties” leaves people searching for stabilizing anchors such as routines and biographical continuity. Much of the existing literature has focused on how people narrate security – through symbolic or mythical stories of an imagined, stable past – a strategy studied extensively in the context of far-right populism and religious nationalism.

Jurkiewicz and Helbrecht’s contribution is to shift the analytical focus from what people say to what people do. Their study, part of a broader qualitative project on geographical imaginations and ontological security in rural areas of Germany and Canada, is based on fieldwork in Bad Urach conducted in 2022 and 2023. The researchers carried out 24 qualitative interviews, two collective mapping sessions with a total of eight participants, participant observation, and document and media analysis. They also employed two image-based techniques: photograph elicitation, in which participants reacted to researcher-selected images including a photograph of the town’s market square during the Schäferlauf, and reflexive photography, in which participants took their own pictures on themes such as home, nature, global crises, and locality. Participants were recruited through snowball sampling and direct contacts, and in the second year the researchers deliberately included people actively engaged in the festival as performers, organizers, or behind-the-scenes supporters.

The interviews revealed that the festival’s stabilizing power begins long before the three days of public celebration. For months in advance, residents meet in clubhouses, community centers, and private homes to rehearse, sew costumes, sing, dance, and cook together. One interviewee recalled how, as a child living near the Amandus Church, they were woken at six in the morning by bells as performers sought water for their horses or a spare button for a uniform, and later peeled potatoes at five in the morning with other members of the local choir association. The researchers describe these preparatory networks as communities of practice – social formations in which knowledge is created and passed on through shared activity. Crucially, these bonds extend beyond the festival itself: the festival’s prominent dance group, the Schäferreigen, performs at other events, and its members organize trips together and form lasting friendships.

The embodied dimension of this security is perhaps most vivid in the traditional costumes, or Tracht. One dancer described wearing a costume so old that its previous wearers are uncountable, noting that she knows many women have danced in it before her and that she will eventually have to give it back. The researchers interpret the passing on of costumes from generation to generation as a material ritual that marks both an ending and a new beginning, connecting the wearer’s body to the history of the community. Security, in this account, is not merely narrated in interviews but felt in and through the body – co-produced by bodies, discourses, and material objects. Even stepping back from active participation does not sever the bond: former dancers become Altschäfer, “old shepherds” who remain embedded in the festival’s backstage economy, serving beer at rehearsals and helping with organization.

The festival also anchors a place identity that persists across distance and disruption. Former residents, the Alt-Uracher, described returning to Bad Urach for the Schäferlauf as almost an obligation; one interviewee remarked that booking a vacation during the festival and missing it is a mistake a person makes only once. As one participant put it, classmates who have ended up all over the world are still expected to come home for the event. The researchers read these rituals of return through Massey’s notion of a “global sense of place”: the anchor is not static but shaped through movement, return, and networks connecting the local to the global. Being a Uracher, in this framing, means always having a place to come back to – a form of spatial knowledge that itself generates security in a globalized world.

Crises, paradoxically, have reinforced the festival’s stabilizing role. Interviewees noted that the COVID-19 pandemic cancelled the official 2021 Schäferlauf, but the town staged a small, scaled-down version as a “sign of loyalty,” and the administration refused the convenient excuse to let the tradition die. By contrast, the town of Heidenheim cancelled its own Schäferlauf after the 2008 financial crisis and has not held it since. The persistence of the Bad Urach festival through disruption, the researchers argue, is what cements its function as a resilient practice that sustains local identity. The study also documents how new rituals can emerge organically within the festival’s framework: the Laurentia, a children’s folk song and simple squatting dance performed by hundreds in the market square after the Saturday theatre performance, is not part of the official programme and only dates back some fifty years, yet it has become an anticipated, place-bound ritual that everyone knows.

The findings are not uniformly celebratory. The researchers emphasize that the festival’s continuity is contested and that its stabilizing force is unevenly distributed. Some residents expressed simple disinterest – one said they could not relate to the music at all, another that they did not have “that gene” for festival participation. More pointedly, interviewees criticized songs in the Schäferreigen that glorify sexualized violence in wartime and an annual theatre play whose author had historical ties to Nazi Germany and whose portrayal of women one female participant found unwatchable, suggesting it be modernized. Another interviewee, a newcomer living in the town’s new residential area rather than the historic core, described the social distance between the two as a wall, saying she felt excluded from local traditions and rituals. In such cases, the researchers conclude, the same continuity that secures some residents can produce ontological insecurity for others, reinforcing boundaries along gendered and established–outsider lines.

The study’s broader significance lies in reframing ontological security as an active, situated, and material practice rather than a purely narrative or symbolic construct. Festivals, the authors suggest, are not merely representations of a past community but sites where community and continuity are actively produced through recurrent, shared, embodied engagements with place and tradition. At the same time, they caution that attachment to continuity can itself become a mechanism of boundary-making, essentializing local identities and upholding existing power structures. Understanding heritage as a present-day practice with a contemporary function, they argue, opens the possibility – and the necessity – of change: examining how narratives of continuity are challenged over time, how festivals respond to critique, and how stabilizing practices might be reworked so that the security they generate does not depend on excluding those who do not fit the inherited script.

Subject of Research: The role of traditional festivals and heritage practices in producing embodied ontological security in times of crisis

Article Title: “Doing” ontological security: on the role of traditional festivals and heritage in times of crisis

Article References: Jurkiewicz, J., & Helbrecht, I. (2026). “Doing” ontological security: on the role of traditional festivals and heritage in times of crisis. Geographica Helvetica, 81(3), 393-405. https://doi.org/10.5194/gh-81-393-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/gh-81-393-2026

Keywords: ontological security, traditional festivals, intangible cultural heritage, Schäferlauf, Bad Urach, qualitative research, place identity, embodied practice, crisis, rural Germany, cultural geography, community

The scale of the recent acceleration is striking. According to the study, led by Jiayuan Li and Xin Xie of the Future Design School at Harbin Institute of Technology in Shenzhen, together with Chunwen Yang and Walton Wider, 79.7 percent of all publications on industrial heritage appeared in just the last decade, between 2016 and 2025. This surge was accompanied by sustained growth in citations, indicating that the field is not merely producing more papers but generating work that other scholars actively build upon. The researchers attribute this intensification to mounting global pressure on post-industrial cities, where deindustrialization has left vast tracts of obsolete infrastructure that demand decisions about demolition, preservation, or transformation.

Geographically, the study found that research output is concentrated in two powerhouses: Europe and China. This distribution reflects the different but converging pressures facing each region. Europe, home to the cradle of the Industrial Revolution, has spent decades grappling with the legacy of abandoned mines and factories in regions such as the Ruhr Valley in Germany and the coalfields of Wales, where heritage tourism has been promoted as a legitimate strategy for post-industrial economic restructuring. China, by contrast, has experienced an extraordinarily rapid wave of industrial restructuring, with cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing, Nanjing, and Guangzhou racing to decide the fate of factory complexes that ceased operation only within living memory.

To dissect the intellectual architecture of the field, the team employed a battery of computational bibliometric techniques. Performance analysis tracked publication and citation trends over the 35-year window, while VOSviewer software was used to construct co-citation and co-word networks, revealing which scholars and concepts form the field’s foundations and which themes cluster together. CiteSpace, a tool designed to detect emerging trends and transient patterns in scientific literature, was then applied to identify term bursts, periods when particular keywords suddenly spike in scholarly attention. The methodology followed established science-mapping principles, including the systematic review reporting standards set out in the PRISMA 2020 guidelines, lending rigor to the identification and screening of the publication corpus.

The co-citation analysis uncovered three distinct knowledge domains that anchor the field. The first centers on industrial heritage tourism, identity, and memory, a tradition tracing back to foundational work on mines and quarries as tourist attractions and on the role of heritage in community identity. The second domain revolves around adaptive reuse and sustainable urban regeneration, encompassing research on how obsolete industrial buildings can be converted to new functions while reducing environmental impacts, a topic increasingly framed through the lens of the circular economy. The third domain concerns governance and participatory planning, examining how stakeholders, communities, and authorities negotiate the future of industrial sites, from Berlin’s Oberschöneweide district to post-industrial landscapes where public participation has reshaped redevelopment outcomes.

Co-word analysis reinforced these domains while revealing the thematic glue that binds them. Tourism interpretation and place identity emerged as tightly linked concepts, reflecting scholarly consensus that how industrial sites are narrated to visitors shapes whether local communities embrace or resent their heritage designation. Adaptive reuse and conservation for sustainable regeneration formed another thematic cluster, connecting building-level technical decisions to city-scale sustainability goals. A third cluster addressed site management within urban redevelopment, highlighting the practical challenges of integrating heritage protection into planning systems that often prioritize land value and capital accumulation. The researchers note that journal and institutional rankings differed depending on whether productivity, citation impact, or network connectivity was measured, a sign that the field’s most prolific contributors are not always its most influential connectors.

The term-burst analysis added a temporal dimension, showing how scholarly attention has surged around specific concepts at specific moments. Bursts were detected for terms including industrial heritage itself, tourism, adaptive reuse, authenticity, quality, history, heritage, frameworks, and spatial distribution. These bursts chart the field’s evolution: early work concentrated on defining industrial heritage and establishing its touristic value, while later phases saw intensifying focus on authenticity debates, the development of sustainable management frameworks, and the spatial dimensions of heritage within urban fabric. The trajectory suggests a maturing discipline moving from descriptive case studies toward theoretical frameworks and evaluative methods, including multicriteria decision analysis and fuzzy approaches for assessing the value and reuse potential of industrial buildings.

Beneath the bibliometric patterns lies a profound tension that has animated the field since its inception: the dissonant nature of industrial heritage itself. Unlike castles or cathedrals, factories and mines are often sites of labor conflict, environmental degradation, and painful economic loss. Scholars in the field have long wrestled with whose heritage is being preserved and whose is being erased, examining how communities’ sense of deprivation can persist even as their industrial past is packaged for tourists. The new mapping confirms that questions of social value, community recognition, and authorized heritage discourse remain central, with recent work exploring digital and participatory methods for involving superdiverse urban populations in deciding what aspects of their industrial past deserve to survive.

The study’s authors argue that the four research areas identified, heritage interpretation, adaptive reuse, governance, and urban redevelopment, should be understood not as separate silos but as connected components of a single sustainability challenge. A converted power station becomes a cultural venue only if governance structures support its operation; a heritage tourism strategy succeeds only if interpretation resonates with local identity; and urban regeneration flourishes only when conservation performance is measured against real social and environmental outcomes. Yet the analysis also exposes gaps. The authors call for comparative and longitudinal research on conservation performance, public access, social value, and local outcomes, noting that much of the existing literature remains anchored in individual case studies rather than systematic cross-site evaluation over time.

For policymakers, urban planners, and heritage practitioners, the mapping offers a practical roadmap. As cities worldwide confront climate targets, housing shortages, and the economic aftershocks of deindustrialization, the adaptive reuse of industrial buildings is increasingly promoted as a strategy that conserves embodied carbon, preserves cultural memory, and catalyzes neighborhood revitalization simultaneously. The evidence base for those decisions, this study shows, has grown explosively but unevenly, concentrated in Europe and China and organized around three intellectual traditions that are only now beginning to converge. The derived datasets and analysis outputs from the research are being made publicly available under a Creative Commons license, inviting the next generation of scholars to extend the map into regions, languages, and questions that the first 35 years of industrial heritage research have yet to fully reach.

Subject of Research: Bibliometric mapping of global industrial heritage research on conservation, adaptive reuse, and sustainable urban regeneration

Article Title: From industrial remains to sustainable futures: mapping the knowledge structure and emerging directions of industrial heritage research

Article References: Li, J., Xie, X., Yang, C., & Wider, W. (2026). From industrial remains to sustainable futures: mapping the knowledge structure and emerging directions of industrial heritage research. SN Social Sciences, 6(10), Article 468. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01777-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01777-y

Keywords: industrial heritage, bibliometric analysis, adaptive reuse, heritage tourism, sustainable urban regeneration, co-citation analysis, term-burst analysis, heritage governance, place identity, urban redevelopment, Web of Science, VOSviewer

Psychologists have long distinguished between these two strands of well-being. Hedonic well-being, rooted in the tradition of subjective well-being research, captures positive affect, life satisfaction, and the avoidance of displeasure. Eudaimonic well-being, drawing on Aristotelian ideas of the good life, concerns living in accordance with one’s true self, experiencing personal growth, purpose, and mastery. Tourism scholars have increasingly argued that travel experiences feed both channels, and adventure tourism in particular has been linked to profound psychological benefits, from overcoming fear to building confidence and existential authenticity. Yet surprisingly little empirical work has tested how tourists’ psychological connections to adventure destinations actually shape these outcomes. The new study set out to fill that gap with a carefully constructed field survey.

The researchers, Mohd Helme Basal of Universiti Teknologi MARA and Universiti Putra Malaysia and Shahazwan Mat Yusoff of Universiti Malaya, surveyed Malaysian domestic tourists who had taken part in adventure and nature-based activities at three sites in Gopeng, a well-known adventure hub in the state of Perak. After rigorous data screening, 398 usable responses were analysed using partial least squares structural equation modelling, a statistical technique well suited to testing complex networks of relationships between latent psychological constructs. Notably, the authors specified hedonic and eudaimonic well-being as reflective-reflective hierarchical component models, allowing each well-being domain to be measured through multiple interrelated facets rather than a single scale score.

The conceptual core of the study is place attachment, a construct with deep roots in environmental psychology describing the emotional, cognitive, and functional bonds people develop with specific locations. Rather than treating attachment as a single feeling, the researchers decomposed it into four dimensions. Place identity reflects the degree to which a destination becomes part of a person’s symbolic self-concept. Place dependence captures the functional suitability of a place for pursuing desired activities. Place affect denotes the emotional resonance of a location, the feelings of warmth, excitement, or calm it evokes. Place social bonding refers to the interpersonal connections formed with others in and around the place. This multidimensional structure allowed the team to test whether all bonds with a destination are psychologically equivalent, or whether some matter far more than others.

The results reveal a strikingly differentiated pattern. Among the four dimensions, place affect emerged as the clear champion: emotional attachment to the destination was positively and consistently associated with tourist satisfaction, hedonic well-being, and eudaimonic well-being alike. In other words, the simple pleasure of feeling emotionally drawn to a river, cave, or forest landscape predicted both immediate enjoyment and deeper psychological fulfilment. Place identity told a more selective story. Symbolic self-place connections were positively associated only with eudaimonic well-being, suggesting that when a destination becomes woven into who a person believes themselves to be, the reward is meaning, accomplishment, and self-realisation rather than momentary delight.

Even more revealing were the dimensions that failed to register. Place dependence, the perceived functional usefulness of the destination for adventure activities, showed no significant association with satisfaction or with either form of well-being. For adventure tourists, it appears, a place being objectively good for rafting or caving does not by itself make them happier or more fulfilled. Place social bonding delivered the study’s most unexpected finding: it was negatively associated with satisfaction and showed no significant link to hedonic or eudaimonic well-being. The authors caution against over-interpreting this result, noting that the conditions under which group interactions influence tourist outcomes remain poorly understood. Group dynamics in adventure settings can be energising, but they may also introduce friction, safety anxieties, or diminished feelings of personal control, and the study suggests these effects warrant dedicated investigation.

Satisfaction itself proved to be a powerful psychological bridge. The analysis showed that satisfaction was strongly and positively associated with both hedonic and eudaimonic well-being, confirming its central role in the chain running from how tourists evaluate their experience to how their well-being ultimately responds. The overall model demonstrated moderate explanatory power and positive in-sample predictive relevance for all endogenous constructs, indicating that the framework captures meaningful variance rather than statistical noise. Methodologically, the researchers followed established guidance on partial least squares structural equation modelling, assessed discriminant validity with contemporary criteria, and screened for common method bias using full collinearity procedures, strengthening confidence in the robustness of the reported relationships.

The theoretical implications reach beyond Malaysian adventure tourism. Place attachment research has often treated the construct as a broadly beneficial force, but these findings show that emotional, identity-based, functional, and social bonds do not operate uniformly. Only emotionally engaging attachments appear to support the full spectrum of tourist well-being, while identity-relevant connections serve a more specialised eudaimonic function. This resonates with a broader shift in tourism scholarship toward positive psychology, in which experiences are evaluated not merely by whether visitors enjoyed them but by whether they contributed to personal growth, resilience, and a richer sense of self. It also aligns with evidence that nature-based and adventure activities can support mental health through mechanisms such as fear mastery, awe, and restoration, while positioning place attachment as a distinct psychological pathway operating alongside the activity itself.

The practical consequences for destination managers and adventure operators are equally tangible. If emotional resonance is the strongest consistent predictor of satisfaction and both forms of well-being, then experience design should prioritise emotionally engaging encounters: guided moments of awe at natural features, storytelling that connects visitors to the landscape’s history and ecology, and atmospheres that foster genuine feelings of belonging. Because place identity fed eudaimonic well-being, operators and destinations may also benefit from helping tourists see adventure sites as extensions of their personal narratives, through achievement milestones, memorable challenges, and imagery that visitors can carry into their sense of who they are. At the same time, the ambiguous and even negative role of place social bonding is a caution against assuming that group-oriented programming automatically enhances satisfaction; the design of social interaction in adventure settings deserves deliberate, evidence-based attention.

The study also arrives at a consequential moment for the sector. Adventure tourism operators in Malaysia and worldwide have faced prolonged disruptions in recent years, and rebuilding demand will depend on demonstrating that these experiences deliver authentic psychological value, not just excitement. By empirically separating the well-being dividends of different place bonds, the Gopeng findings give the industry a vocabulary for that case: the destination that makes visitors feel something, and that becomes part of who they are, is the destination that makes them well. The authors note that future work should clarify the mechanisms underlying social bonding effects and test the model across other destinations and tourist populations, but the central message is already clear. In the psychology of adventure travel, feeling a place may matter far more than merely using it.

Subject of Research: How place attachment dimensions relate to adventure tourists' hedonic and eudaimonic well-being in Malaysia

Article Title: The role of place attachment in adventure tourists’ hedonic and eudaimonic well-being: evidence from Malaysia

Article References: The role of place attachment in adventure tourists’ hedonic and eudaimonic well-being: evidence from Malaysia. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01696-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01696-y

Keywords: adventure tourism, place attachment, place affect, place identity, place dependence, place social bonding, tourist satisfaction, hedonic well-being, eudaimonic well-being, Malaysia, PLS-SEM, environmental psychology