The psychology of place

Abstract

Studies of place and the cognition of the environment have been conducted in the last decades, when in the 1960s, it arose as an antithesis to the influence of positivism and spatial science as explanatory frameworks for human behaviour. Yet much of the recent discussion on environmental issues I have found both unsatisfactory and disquieting. Unsatisfactory because the analyses of behaviour or of particular problems are so frequently mechanical and abstract, simplifying the world into easily represented structures or models that ignore much of the subtlety and significance of everyday experience. Disquieting because these simplified structures often then serve as the basis for proposals for the design of the environments and the manipulation of people and places into patterns that are supposed to be more efficient.