‘United by a Castle, Wine and a Mountain’: Understanding the Contents of Place Identity and the Strategies to Maintain Identity in a Municipality Context

ABSTRACT Understanding place identity in terms of both its intensity and the contents that underpin it is an important source for understanding intergroup relationships between neighbourhoods in an urban context. To tackle this objective, a municipality in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area in Portugal was selected due to identity heterogeneity between its four parishes. Participants were asked to evaluate their identity with the place, the prestige and the quality perception of the municipality parishes and to characterize the municipality based on a set of features. Two hundred and one participants from the municipality answered a questionnaire. Overall, we found that each parish had its own strategy to achieve a positive identity through differentiation of others and favouritism of themselves, which was linked with the type of content chosen. The results allowed us to identify four types of strategies for achieving a positive identity: mobility, assimilation, social creativity and out‐group bias. Thus, the current study revealed that the intergroup dynamics between spatially defined groups can be characterized by the features of place identity, which can support future planning and development of the territory.