Urban attachment is not the opposite of urban transformation. It can be produced by transformation, intensified through novelty, commodified through representation and distributed unevenly across social groups. A neighbourhood under gentrifying and touristifying pressure can simultaneously generate new attachments, weaken established ones and convert older attachments into marketable signs of authenticity. The decisive conceptual shift is therefore from attachment as a stable bond to attachment as an ambivalent urban process. People do not attach to an abstract neighbourhood but to recurrent routes, recognisable interiors, familiar staff, specific atmospheres, sensory cues, social permissions and remembered uses. When these relations change, attachment does not simply disappear. It can migrate, fragment, intensify, become nostalgic, or re-form around new environments.

This ambivalence has an epistemic consequence. Neither “traditional” nor “new” can function as an explanatory category by itself. A long-established café can become a destination for tourists and participate in the symbolic revaluation of a street; a recently opened specialty coffee bar can become a recurrent meeting place and produce genuine familiarity, social recognition and place dependence for nearby residents. What matters is the configuration linking person, process and place: who uses the setting, through which practices, under what economic conditions, and with what degree of access, continuity and recognition. The same material environment can therefore support attachment for one group while producing exclusion or loss for another. Attachment must be analysed relationally, not assigned morally to particular aesthetic styles. Commercial space becomes politically significant because it operates as social infrastructure and as a carrier of value. Cafés can support weak ties, tolerated solitude, repeated encounter and informal publicness, yet they also participate in rent dynamics, consumer distinction and neighbourhood branding. Their social usefulness does not place them outside political economy. On the contrary, their capacity to generate atmosphere, familiarity and perceived authenticity can increase the desirability of streets and districts. The infrastructural and gentrifying functions are not mutually exclusive; they can reinforce one another. A successful café may simultaneously stabilise everyday sociability and contribute to a commercial ecology that raises rents, changes clienteles and alters the symbolic ownership of the neighbourhood.

Digital mediation intensifies this process by allowing place qualities to circulate independently of physical presence. The café becomes image, recommendation, geotag and proof of urban competence. Visual distinctiveness attracts visitors; visitors amplify visibility; visibility increases demand; repeated replication can then erode the very singularity that generated attraction. Authenticity is therefore neither an intrinsic property nor simply a false marketing claim. It is a relational effect produced by material traces, local narratives, repeated use, aesthetic codes and expectations about what counts as properly “of the place.” The same old tiles, metal counter, handwritten menu or multilingual clientele can function as lived environment for one user and consumable authenticity for another. Socioplastics can operationalise ambivalent attachment by treating cafés as dense relational nodes rather than as representative types. Observation must retain physical form, price, menu, clientele, duration, interaction, staff recognition, street interface, visual circulation, local narratives and temporal recurrence as separate but connectable dimensions. The useful comparison is not traditional versus modern, but between different configurations of attachment and transformation. Repeated field visits can reveal whether familiarity grows, whether clienteles shift, whether visual codes are copied, whether prices and dwell times change, and whether a place becomes more locally embedded or more externally consumed. Interviews and observation should therefore capture both appropriation and displacement, both attachment and exclusion, without requiring one to cancel the other. The concept adds a precise theoretical instrument to Socioplastics: urban change can be read as the redistribution of capacities to attach, remain, recognise and be recognised. Cafés become small but unusually legible sites where psychological, commercial, spatial, aesthetic and political processes intersect. Their importance lies not in standing for the whole neighbourhood but in making relational transformations observable at close range. Ambivalent attachment names that condition in which belonging and displacement, familiarity and novelty, authenticity and commodification, publicness and consumption are produced together rather than sequentially. Within Socioplastics, this constellation condenses as RelationalAttachment.