Meaning And Behaviour In The Built Environment

The Meaning of the Built Environment is a lively illustrated study of the meanings of everyday buildings for their users. Professor Rapoport uses examples and vignettes, drawn from many cultures and historical eras as well as contemporary America, to explicate a new framework for understanding how the built environment comes to have meaning, both for individual people and whole societies.

The Meaning of the Built Environment is a lively illustrated study of the meanings of everyday buildings for their users. Professor Rapoport uses examples and vignettes, drawn from many cultures and historical eras as well as contemporary America, to explicate a new framework for understanding how the built environment comes to have meaning, both for individual people and whole societies. `...this book fills a significant gap: it introduces the notion of environmental meaning so clearly that no reader will doubt the basic premise that the environmment holds meaning as part of a cultural system of symbols, and influences our actions and our determinations of social order.' -- Design Book Review, Fall 1984

Today’s most pressing challenges require behaviour change at many levels, from the city to the individual. This book focuses on the collective influences that can be seen to shape change. Exploring the underlying dimensions of behaviour change in terms of consumption, media, social innovation and urban systems, the essays in this book are from many disciplines, including architecture, urban design, industrial design and engineering, sociology, psychology, cultural studies, waste management and public policy. Aimed especially at designers and architects, Motivating Change explores the diversity of current approaches to change, and the multiple ways in which behaviour can be understood as an enactment of values and beliefs, standards and habitual practices in daily life, and more broadly in the urban environment.

This second volume in the Advances in Environment, Behavior, and Design series follows the pattern of Volume 1. It is organized into six sections user group research, consisting of advances in theory, place research, sociobehavioral research, research and design methods, and research utilization. The authors of the chapters in this volume represent a range of disciplines, including architecture, geography, psychology, social ecology, and urban planning. They also offer international perspectives: Tommy Garling from Sweden, Graeme Hardie from South Africa (re cently relocated to North Carolina), Gerhard Kaminski from the Federal Republic of Germany, and Roderick Lawrence from Switzerland (for merly from Australia). Although most chapters address topics or issues that are likely to be familiar to readers (environmental perception and cognition, facility pro gramming, and environmental evaluation), four chapters address what the editors perceive to be new topics for environment, behavior, and design research. Herbert Schroeder reports on advances in research on urban for estry. For most of us the term forest probably conjures up visions of dense woodlands in rural or wild settings. Nevertheless, in many parts of the country, urban areas have higher densities of tree coverage than can be found in surrounding rural landscapes. Schroeder reviews re search that addresses the perceived and actual benefits and costs associ ated with these urban forests.

Urban Sustainability Through Environmental Design provides the analytical tools and practical methodologies that can be employed for sustainable and long-term solutions to the design and management of urban environments.

In order to function, architectural theory and practice must be shaped to suit current cultural, economic, and political forces. Thus, architecture embodies reductive logic that conditions the treatment of human and social processes – which raises the question of how to define objectivity for architectural mentalities that must conform to a set of immediate conditions. This book focuses on meaning, and on the physical and mental processes that define life in built environments. The potential to draw knowledge from aesthetics, psychology, political economy, philosophy, geography, and sociology is offset by the fact that architectural logic is inevitably reductive, cultural, socio-economic, and political. However, despite the duty to conform, it is argued that the treatment of human processes, and the understanding of architectural mentalities, can benefit from interdisciplinary linkages, small freedoms, and cracks in a system of imperatives that can yield the means of greater objectivity. This is valuable reading for students and researchers interested in architectural theory as a working reality, and in the relationships between architecture and other fields.

The book establishes a correlation between architectural theory and the biosemiotic project, and suggest how this coupling establishes a framework leading to an architectural-biosemiotic paradigm that puts biosemiotic theory at the heart of cognising the built environment, and offers an approach to understanding and shaping the built environment that supports (and benefits) human, and organismic, spatial intelligence.