Human Behavior And Environment Public Places And Spaces

This tenth volume in the series addresses an important topic of research, de sign, and policy in the environment and behavior field. Public places and spaces include a sweeping array of settings, including urban streets, plazas and squares, malls, parks, and other locales, and natural settings such as aquatic environments, national parks and forests, and wilderness areas. The impor tance of public settings is highlighted by difficult questions of access, control, and management; unique needs and problems of different users (including women, the handicapped, and various ethnic groups); and the dramatic re shaping of our public environments that has occurred and will continue to occur in the foreseeable future. The wide-ranging scope of the topic of public places and spaces demands the attention of many disciplines and researchers, designers, managers, and policymakers. As in previous volumes in the series, the authors in the present volume come from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, research and design orientations, and affiliations. They have backgrounds in or are affiliated with such fields as architecture, geography, landscape architecture, natural re sources, psychology, sociology, and urban design. Many more disciplines ob viously contribute to our understanding and design of public places and spaces, so that the contributors to this volume reflect only a sample of the possibilities and present state of knowledge about public settings.

This eleventh volume in the series departs from the pattern of earlier volumes. Some of those volumes addressed research, design, and policy topics in terms of environmental settings, for example, homes, communities, neighborhoods, and public places. Others focused on environmental users, for example, chil dren and the elderly. The present volume examines the field of environment and behavior studies itself in the form of intellectual histories of some of its most productive and still visible senior participants. In so doing we hope to provide readers with a grand sweep of the field-its research and design content, methodology, institutions, and past and future trajectories-through the experiences and intellectual histories of its participants. Why intellectual histories? Several factors led to the decision to launch this project. For one, 1989 was an anniversary and commemorative year for the Environmental Design Research Association, perhaps the major and most long-standing interdisciplinary organization of environment and behavior re searchers and practitioners. Established in 1969, this organization has been the vehicle for generations of researchers and practitioners from many disciplines to come together annually to exchange ideas, present papers, and develop professional and personal relationships. It held its first and twentieth meetings in North Carolina, with the twentieth conference substantially devoted to dis cussions of the past, present, and future of the field-a taking stock, so to speak. Thus it seemed appropriate to launch a volume on intellectual histories at this significant juncture in the life of the field.

The authors offer a perspective of how to integrate public space and public life. They contend that three critical human dimensions should guide the process of design and management of public space: the users' essential needs, their spatial rights, and the meanings they seek.

An international team of leading scholars explores the latest theories, research, and applications critical to environmental psychology Featuring the latest research and concepts in the field straight from the world's leading scholars and practitioners, Handbook of Environmental Psychology provides a balanced and comprehensive overview of this rapidly growing field. Bringing together contributions from an international team of top researchers representing a myriad of disciplines, this groundbreaking resource provides you with a pluralistic approach to the field as an interdisciplinary effort with links to other disciplines. Addressing a variety of issues and practice settings, Handbook of Environmental Psychology is divided into five organized and accessible parts to provide a thorough overview of the theories, research, and applications at the forefront of environmental psychology today. Part I deals with sharpening theories; Part II links the subject to other disciplines; Part III focuses on methods; Part IV highlights applications; and Part V examines the future of the field. Defining the ongoing revolution in thinking about how the environment and psychology interact, Handbook of Environmental Psychology is must reading for anyone coping directly with the attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors that are destroying our environment and putting our lives in jeopardy. Topics include: * Healthy design * Restorative environments * Links to urban planning * Contaminated environments * Women's issues * Environments for aging * Climate, weather, and crime * The history and future of disaster research * Children's environments * Personal space in a digital age * Community planning

This book is about the "public realm," defined as a particular kind of social territory that is found almost exclusively in large settlements. This particular form of social-psychological space comes into being whenever a piece of actual physical space is dominated by relationships between and among persons who are strangers to one another, as often occurs in urban bars, buses, plazas, parks, coffee houses, streets, and so forth. More specifically, the book is about the social life that occurs in such social-psychological spaces (the normative patterns and principles that shape it, the relationships that characterize it, the aesthetic and interactional pleasures that enliven it) and the forces (anti-urbanism, privatism, post-war planning and architecture) that threaten it. The data upon which the book's analysis is based are diverse: direct observation; interviews; contemporary photographs, historic etchings, prints and photographs, and historical maps; histories of specific urban public spaces or spatial types; and the relevant scholarly literature from sociology, environmental psychology, geography, history, anthropology, and architecture and urban planning and design. Its central argument is that while the existing body of accomplished work in the social sciences can be reinterpreted to make it relevant to an understanding of the public realm, this quintessential feature of city life deserves much more u it deserves to be the object of direct scholarly interest in its own right. Choice noted that: "The author's writing style is unusually accessible, and the often fascinating narrative is generously supported by well-chosen photos."