Esta investigación tiene como objetivo descubrir las correlaciones entre los aspectos físicos y sociales del lugar y su impacto en la capacidad de los habitantes para desarrollar el apego al sitio. Basado en la evidencia empírica del estudio de caso de dos ciudades intermedias de la costa peruana: Piura y Tacna, las mismas que presentan un crecimiento urbano acelerado en los últimos 40 años con ocupaciones informales que ahora forman parte del casco urbano; el enfoque se sujeta a línea de investigación de Asentamientos urbanos precarios. Se trabaja al nivel de los vecindarios o escala barrial, empleando métodos mixtos, a través de mapeos, entrevistas no estructuradas y la observación directa para comprender el nivel de apego y el uso del espacio público en cada ciudad.

The place is recognized as a space for the construction of experiences or awareness of the lived world together with its distinctive and essential components. This research has like aim to discover the affective and social links in relation to the residential, neighborhood and the city scales in non-formalized sectors and formalized sectors, which arose in an unplanned way but are currently regularized. The work is based on empirical evidence from the comparative case study of two intermediate cities on the Peruvian coast: Piura and Tacna, showing accelerated urban growth in the last 60 years. Through the collection of a set of variables, it seeks to understand how the space is linked to the attachment to the place, in settlements that are not yet formalized and formalized. With the results obtained, this research contributes to explore the production of knowledge about the formation of unplanned settlements and its impact on the construction of attachment to the place.