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The results of this study indicate that manipulations of the pathway grid configuration and landmark placement in a setting cause changes in environmental knowledge. These experimental manipulations were accomplished using a realistic, dynamic simulation technique at the Berkeley Environmental Simulation Laboratory. Measures of environmental knowledge include: memory for incidental information along the simulated urban route, accuracy of route maps, relocation memory for scenes along the route, and questionnaire measures. Data are also presented showing both positive and negative effects of stress from noise on the processes of environmental cognition.

Fear of crime is one of the most important problems in our cities, even in low-crime rate areas. The aim of this paper is to provide evidence of the issues involved in the perceived risk of victimization and fear of crime in these contexts using the Structural Equation Model (SEM) technique. Five hundred and seventy- one people living in a working-class neighborhood of Barcelona answered a 45-item questionnaire including the following 7 constructs: perception of insecurity, previous threat experiences, social representations of insecurity, personal control and coping skills, potential aggressors, urban identity, and perceived environmental quality. Findings confirm the theoretical model, in which fear of crime is structurally related to: a) environmental features, b) personal variables, and c) social representation of unsafe places. In addition, we found that the role of social aspects is as important as that of environ- mental and psychological ones. Residential satisfaction and urban social identity appear as relevant variables.

What determines whether people consider an environment to be safe or unsafe? In two studies, we employed a multi-level model to examine how safety-related environmental characteristics and individual characteristics influence people's perception of the safety of night-time urban environments. Both studies support previous findings highlighting a key role for environmental appraisals of entrapment (perceived escape possibilities), prospect (perceived overview over a scene), and concealment (perceived environmental affordance of hiding places). More importantly, the studies provide a systematic investigation of person-environment interaction in the safety appraisal process. Our results reveal substantial individual variability in susceptibility to safety-related environmental characteristics (Study 1) and identify an interaction between individual characteristics and appraisals of environmental characteristics (Study 2). Additionally, while both studies replicate an effect of biological sex on safety appraisals, we show that this effect is mediated by trait anxiety, a psychological variable reflecting the propensity to experience anxiety.

This paper explores some of the discursive practices through which the place meanings are formulated, warranted and, above all, contested. Drawing particularly on the work of the social psychologist Michael Billig, we present a rhetorical analysis of newspaper reports and interview accounts about the ‘development’ of a contested public space in Barcelona, known locally both as Figuera’s Well and the Hole of Shame. This analysis explores a number of rhetorically opposed constructions of the nature, purpose and appropriate beneficiaries of this place, whose implications are discussed both within the context of local power struggles and within the context of wider ideological struggles over the nature of public spaces in Barcelona. We argue that a rhetorical perspective reveals how practices of attributing meaning and value to places are often more conflict-ridden, action-oriented, and politically-charged than is implied by much research in environmental psychology. Relatedly, we argue that environmental psychologists need to complement a ‘weak’ conception of the role of conflict in the formation of public space (focused on subjective differences in environmental tastes, preferences and values) with a ‘strong’ conception of the role of conflict (focused on ideological struggles over access, equality and inclusion).

This paper is drawn from a larger research project exploring young people, leisure activities and alcohol consumption. The study draws on the concept of affordances from environmental psychology as a way of framing the debate of what young people need in neighbourhood parks. Parks are important to this age group since they provide a setting for physical activity, relaxation and social interaction. However, human development at this life stage also includes indulging in experimental and/or deviant behaviour. In the eyes of the young people involved, however, their behaviour is mostly benign, even if/when it causes conflict with other users. Furthermore, they often take particular measures to avoid other age groups (defined in environmental psychology as ‘retreat’) and while often voluntary, it may also be enforced. The research suggests that while the park is the most important place for this age group to socialise outside the home, young people themselves often feel poorly provided for and unwelcome. The fact that they adopt what they find in parks to suit their needs is motivated by interconnecting aspirations, perceptions and needs. Developing a more sophisticated understanding of these issues may lead to more appropriate and satisfactory design for all users.

Preferences for urban spaces were studied as a function of spatial category and nine predictor variables: spaciousness, refuge, enclosure, coherence, legibility, complexity, mystery, typicality, and age. A non-metric factor analysis of the preference ratings yielded four categories of urban spaces: Open-Undefined, Well- Structured, Enclosed Settings, and Blocked Views. These categories are similar to the spatial categories proposed for natural environments by S. Kaplan (1979, Assessing Amenity Resource Values. USDA Forest Service General Technical Report RM-68), who stressed openness and spatial definition as bases for categorization. The Well-Structured category was best liked, with the other categories not very well liked and about equal in preference. Regression analyses revealed three variables as consistent predictors of preference. Coherence and complexity were positively related to preference, and age was negatively related. Overall, the results support the Kaplans' proposal that both spatial and non-spatial factors are important in categorizing environments and in explaining environmental preferences.

Four urban public spaces, representing various designs and microclimates, were investigated in Gothenburg, Sweden, in order to estimate how weather and microclimate affect people in urban outdoor environments. The research strategy was both multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary and included scientists from three disciplines: architecture, climatology and psychology. The project is based on common case studies carried out during four seasons, including measurements of meteorological variables, interviews and observations of human activity at each place. Multiple regression analysis of meteorological and behavioural data showed that air temperature, wind speed and clearness index (cloud cover) have a significant influence on people’s assessments of the weather, place perceptions and place-related attendance. The results support the arguments in favour of employing climate sensitive planning in future urban design and planning projects, as the physical component of a place can be designed to influence the site-specific microclimate and consequently people’s place-related attendance, perceptions and emotions.

Research shows that social relations within a space and the group(s) who control that space socially have a greater influence on how safe women feel than does the design of the space. And more action and research is needed to investigate how men dominate space and how this dominance can be broken.

This research examined the effect of concealment (environmental cues), presence or absence of people recreating (social cues), and gender on individuals’ fear of crime in a community park setting. Using a 7-point single- item indicator, 732 participants from two samples (540 park visitors and 192 college students) rated their estimates of fear of crime to 24 photographic representations of a community park. All three, two-factor interaction effects were significant in the park visitor sample, but in the student sample, only the Presence of People Recreating × Gender effect was significant. These results suggest that social and environmental cues may jointly affect fear experiences and that the presence of other people recreating in a park environment and the gender of an individual may influence fear of crime when recreating alone in a park setting. Implications include design and management techniques that promote safe park environments.

“Sense of place” is a widely discussed concept in fields as diverse as geography, environmental psychology, and art, but it has little traction in the field of public health. The health impact of place includes physical, psychological, social, spiritual, and aesthetic outcomes. In this article, the author introduces a sense of place as a public health construct. While many recommendations for “good places” are available, few are based on empirical evidence, and thus they are incompatible with current public health practice. Evidence-based recommendations for healthy placemaking could have important public health implications. Four aspects of the built environment, at different spatial scales—nature contact, buildings, public spaces, and urban form—are identified as offering promising opportunities for public health research, and potential research agendas for each are discussed.

This study systematically examines the physical context of crime on urban residential blocks. A conceptual framework for understanding the relationship of the objective permanent (defensible space) and transient (territorial markers and incivilities) physical environment and the subjective environment to crime is presented. Forty-eight blocks were selected from three working-class urban neighborhoods. Data were obtained from four sources: a telephone survey of 1081 randomly sampled residents, a 15-month follow-up survey (n = 471), block-level police records of 1190 crime complaints, and the Block Booster Environmental Inventory--a new procedure for objectively measuring physical signs of disorder, territoriality and the built environment of 576 homes on all 48 blocks. Five different indicators of block crime were used: perceived crime and delinquency, reported serious and 'quality-of-life' crimes, and surveyed victimization rate. All data were aggregated to the block level. Although the various measures of crime were not consistently intercorrelated, objective environmental items correlated more strongly and consistently with the crime indicators than did the subjective environment, even after controlling for the demographic profile of the block. Defensible space features of the built environment, demographics and, to a lesser extent, the transient environment (disorder and territoriality) contributed significant variance to a series of regression equations explaining up to 60% of the variance in block crime. Implications for environmental criminology and for community policing and crime prevention are discussed.

Crime has long been thought to be intimately associated with the physical environment in which it occurs. Theoretical and empirical developments over the past 20 years demonstrate that this relationship is complex and varies substantially at different levels of spatial and temporal resolution. Research on the distribution of property crimes in time and space resonates with research on the target selection processes of offenders to suggest that crime is strongly related to aggregate elements of the perceived physical environment: nodes, paths, edges and an environmental backcloth. The relationship between crime and the physical environment is mediated through individual awareness and action spaces. This implies a series of research issues and crime control policies for future exploration.

Our children are the citizens of tomorrow, who will have to safeguard the future of our cities. Yet children are too frequently ignored by architects, devel- opers, city officials and planners. Inattention and brutality in human relationships are internalized and leave their traces in the child's development. The monotony, indifference and placelessness of the physical environment also leaves a lasting impact on the cognitive and emotional development of children (Dubos, 1968).

Records on recovery after cholecystectomy of patients in a suburban Pennsylvania hospital between 1972 and 1981 were examined to determine whether assignment to a room with a window view of a natural setting might have restorative influences. Twenty-three surgical patients assigned to rooms with windows looking out on a natural scene had shorter postoperative hospital stays, received fewer negative evaluative comments in nurses' notes, and took fewer potent analgesics than 23 matched patients in similar rooms with windows facing a brick building wall.

The present study investigated the effects of public art on visual properties and affective appraisals of landscapes. Undergraduate and graduate students sequentially viewed landscapes with or without public art and rated each one for visual properties and affective appraisals. Study 1 revealed that the presence of public art reduced pleasantness of the natural scene, but did not reduce that of the urban scene. In Study 2 focusing on the urban landscapes, the t-tests showed that public art consistently yielded greater arousal and the visual properties related with arousal level (e.g., complexity), whereas for pleasantness and the visual properties related with pleasantness (e.g., legibility) the scores varied with the public artworks. Adopting the experimental design that systematically combined 4 landscapes with 2 pieces of public art, Study 3 revealed that the affective quality of public art had more influence on the landscapes than the compatibility between public art and the landscapes.

Recent case studies of receiving communities have established that translocal immigrants are transforming their neighbourhoods, producing spaces of identity. While these studies have focused on the reshaping of local power dynamics, less attention has been given to the spaces, themselves, and the qualities that influence identity. This study utilises place identity literature, from environmental psychology, to explore the remaking of MacArthur Park, a public space at the centre of a Mexican and Central American immigrant community in Los Angeles, California. We find that new ‘place identities’ are influenced by the specific physical, social, and cultural elements of the park, as study participants attempt to maintain identities influenced by important places in their sending communities. The result is a park that has emotional significance for participants, significance that leads to agency – everyday and political practices – to protect the park, sometimes in the face of immense challenges.

The aim of this paper is to bring the concept of place identity into the context of intergroup relationships in urban place, using the social identity approach. A field study was conducted in four adjacent neighbourhoods in the city of Lisbon, in order to explore the influence of place identity on the perception of the participants’ own neighbourhood and its residents (in-group) and of the other neighbourhoods and their residents (out-groups). The results showed that place identity was highly correlated with neighbourhood satisfaction, relevant out-group differentiation, and favouritism to the in-group and depreciation of the relevant out-group. The results also enabled the identification of three types of possible relationships between the groups: a relevant out-group for comparison, an idealized reference group for approximation, and a devaluated group for avoidance. Moreover, in this study, we extend the predictions of SIA to the comprehension of specific distance estimation distortion patterns.

There are two purposes to the present study. Our methodological purpose is to develop and test a procedure and instrument for assessing crime- and fear-related features of the urban residential environment. We examine three classes of cues: symbols of social and physical disorder, territorial functioning, and architectural 'defensible space' features. Past research examining the physical environment correlates of fear of crime has relied almost exclusively on subjective perceptions of the environment rather than on independent and objective measures thereof. Our theoretical purpose is to test the 'disorder' thesis of Skogan, and Wilson and Kelling, that actual physical incivilities erode resident's confidence in their neighborhood and lead them to infer that serious local problems, unrelated to the physical environment, are serious. We conducted environmental assessments and resident interviews (n = 412) on 50 blocks in 50 Baltimore neighborhoods. The assessments demonstrated high levels of inter-rater reliability and concurrent validity, controlling for social class. Regression analyses showed that physical incivilities were independently linked to perceptions of social and crime-related problems. The results show that reliable and valid assessment of crime- and fear-related environmental features can be conducted. They also support the central kernel of the Wilson and Kelling, and Skogan thesis, that the actual presence of disorder-related cues engender perceptions of social and crime problems.

The purpose of this study was to explore the ability of place attachment to predict place-specific and general pro-environment behavioural intentions. The study sample (n 1⁄4 355) consisted of visitors to a Canadian national park, Point Pelee National Park. The place attachment scale utilized in this study was designed to measure three subdimensions: place identity, place dependence, and place affect. Explor- atory factor analysis of data measured by these scales revealed two place attachment subdimensions. Place affect, an individual’s emotions and feelings for a place, acted as a more generalized or pervasive phenomenon. Place affect items loaded on both the place identity (an individual’s cognitive assessment of a place) and place dependence (an individual’s functional assessment of a place). Structural equation modeling confirmed the strength of place attachment’s ability to predict place-related pro-environment intentions. It also identified place attachment’s prediction of pro-environment behavioural intensions related to everyday life. Place identity mediated the effects of place dependence in predicting pro- environment intentions. Further research which utilizes in-depth and longitudinal case studies is sug- gested to explore the role of place-specific emotion and feelings, as well as place identity in fostering environmentally-responsible action as these factors are theorized to play an important role in promoting pro-environmental behaviour. Studies of place attachment to everyday settings rather than iconic national parks are also called for.

Guided walks near a light rail stop in downtown Salt Lake City, Utah, were examined using a 2 (gender) × 3 (route walkability: low- mixed-, or high- walkability features) design. Trained raters confirmed that more walkable segments had more traffic, environmental, and social safety; pleasing aesthetics; natural features; pedestrian amenities; and land use diversity (using the Irvine-Minnesota physical environment audit) and a superior social milieu rating. According to tape-recorded open-ended descriptions, university student participants experienced walkable route segments as noticeably safer, with a more positive social environment, fewer social and physical incivilities, and more attractive natural and built environment features. According to closed-ended scales, walkable route segments had more pleas- ant social and/or environmental atmosphere and better traffic safety. Few gender differences were found. Results highlight the importance of under- standing subjective experiences of walkability and suggest that these experiences should be an additional focus of urban design.