ancient cities

250 Environmental Psychology
En v i r o n m E n t a l Ps y C h o l o g y
The interdisciplinary field of environmental psychology
began in the 1960s in the United States
with the founding of the Environmental Design
Research Association, the journal Environment
and Behavior, and the first PhD program in environmental
psychology at the City University of
New York Graduate Center. Institutionally different
but parallel efforts occurred in Europe,
Scandinavia, and Asia about the same time.
Environmental psychology focused on the important
role of the physical environment in shaping
human behavior and development. It offered an
alternative to accounts based on internal psychological
processes and social relations devoid of
a physical context. There was also widespread
agreement that environmental design, urban planning,
and environmental conservation would
benefit from a better understanding of people’s
perceptions, understandings, and behaviors.
Most founders of environmental psychology
also believed that a valid account of psychological
processes must start from the unit of “person in
environment” rather than viewing psychological
processes as internal to the person or to some particular
region like the brain or function such as
cognition. From this perspective, environmental psychology
is a new interdisciplinary area of inquiry
engaging not only psychology but also the multiple
disciplines that account for human behavior and
experience in terms of more macroscopic spatial,
social, and cultural processes and structures, as well
as the physical sciences that contribute to knowledge
of the material nature of the environment and
of human beings.
Kurt Lewin’s field-theoretic orientation in social
and developmental psychology, his student Roger
Barker’s development of ecological psychology,
and the pragmatic psychology of William James
and John Dewey each offer analytic tools to study
“person in environment” units. Environmental
psychologists also draw on existing mainstream
psychological theories through, for example, applications
of behaviorist paradigms to shaping proenvironmental
behaviors or cognitive psychological
approaches to wayfinding.
Not all of the founders of environmental psychology
were themselves psychologists. Urban planner
Kevin Lynch’s book Image of the City in 1960,
anthropologist Edward T. Hall’s book The Hidden
Dimension in 1966, architect Christopher
Alexander’s book A Pattern Language, the Chicago
School of Urban Sociology and the fields of human
ecology, and systems theory, as well as the social
upheavals of the times, all strongly contributed to
the birth of environmental psychology. These ideas
and disciplines remain important for environmental
psychology, as does the problem- and action-centered,
“real world” orientation that arose from the
sense of the urgency of social and environmental
problems facing the world.
Major Conceptual and
Methodological Contributions
By starting with the question of how individuals
engage with the world around them, environmental
psychologists formed new concepts that place
human experience in a dynamic relationship to the
material and social world. In this regard environmental
psychology shares many perspectives with
geographical, sociological, and anthropological
conceptions of how human experience is shaped.
However, interest in the individual level of analysis
prompted a focus on the experiential, face-to-face,
everyday aspects of life rather than starting with
more societal or cultural levels of analysis.
Environmental psychology studies human experience
and behavior at multiple levels of analysis.
Environmental psychologists struggle, not always
successfully, to avoid environmental determinism
as well as the reductionism of all experience and
behavior to individual-level processes. The focus on
“individual in environment” led to new approaches
to understanding human behavior. The concepts
that follow constitute some major contributions
of the field.
Affordances
James Gibson, a perception psychologist, defined
affordances as the behavioral potential of the
properties of the physical environment relevant to
the particular perceptual and behavioral capacities
of the organism. For example, a ledge one foot off
the ground affords sitting comfortably for a threeyear-old
but not for a six-foot-tall adult. The concept
has been extended to include socially organized