Understanding, Assessing, and Acting in Places: Is an Integrative Framework Possible?

Abstract

The field of environmental psychology appears to maintain three rather different habitats, that have not so far been formed into a coherent ecology. One is the area from which this book drew its central inspiration. That is the study of environmental cognition. The processes by which people perceive and know their physical surroundings. As made clear and presented in some detail in Chapter 1, this research has its roots in two interrelated traditions: the “cognitive mapping” tradition that is usually traced to the work of Lynch (1960), and the “environmental meaning” tradition that grew out of the studies of Osgood, Suci, and Tannenbaum (1956), especially as they were developed by Berlyne (1971). In many ways the great significance of Kaplan and Kaplan's (1978) contribution, developed in Chapter 9, is the way Kaplan has integrated these two strands and thereby enriched our perspectives on environmental knowing. At the heart of this domain is the cognitive psychology belief that knowledge of the world is integrally linked to the perception of it. Neisser (1976) has done most to elaborate this view and argue for epistemic perception as the starting point for understanding human transactions with the world. In providing this emphasis the laboratory-based, experimental tradition out of which it is derived is never completely forgotten. The transactions are with simple, concrete entities that exist outside the laboratory but could be readily simulated within it. This inheritance from an earlier generation of perceptual theorists is an important one, to which I shall return. I see it as the major reason why prospects for theoretical integration, even though they have been opened up by fruitful developments in cognitive theory, still escape us. The second distinct habitat in environmental psychology has far weaker theoretical roots and a less well-established vocabulary. It used to be called “building appraisal” (Canter, 1966), it then became the more alliterative “environmental evaluation” (Zube, 1980), and now is drifting into “assessment.” The origins of this domain are in the pragmatic requests of architects, planners, and environmental policy makers for information on how good their decisions have been.