Phenomenology and the clark experience

The author argues that his research and teaching interests are very much a legacy from Clark University, especially because of events there during the years 1970–72. The essay first identifies four factors—place, time, people, and atmosphere—which seem to have shaped developments in environment-behavior research during that time at Clark and considers how those developments touched the author personally. Second, the author reviews his present research interests in terms of three themes: fostering careful looking and seeing; examining environmental experience; and establishing a phenomenology of place and place-making. He argues that each of these themes is in part a product of his Clark experience during the early 1970s.     

A social topography of home and horizon: The misfit, the dutiful, and longing for home

The environmental perception wave at Clark University was already in full swing when Anne Buttimer arrived in Fall 1970 with curiosities about social space, ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’, ‘home’ and ‘reach’, from a project on residential area design in Glasgow, Scotland. Lessons learned from the intense interaction between geographers and psychologists were enormously valuable for subsequent work with geography students at Clark during the 1970s. Since then she has worked on temporality and environmental experience, migration and identity, with colleagues in Sweden, and has pursued autobiographically-based approaches to questions of creativity and context and the history of geographic thought and practice. In retrospect, she claims, one of the most valuable results of the perception wave was to provoke awareness of the lenses through which reality is experienced by people in different cultures, and that includes the disciplinary cultures into which researchers themselves are socialized.     

Environmental psychology or behavioral geography? Either way it was a good start

The paper traces the author's background as a British geographer and the intellectual climate at Clark University in 1968 which led him out of urban social geography into the uncharted domain of children's knowledge of the geographic environment. Following the integration of theory and research on the development of spatial cognition in children came the need to investigate child development in relation to the physical landscape more comprehensively in a Ph.D. dissertation. Subsequent work, built entirely from this early base, continues to investigate children's use, knowledge and experience of physical environment in a variety of settings. Applications of research are made in both the fields of environmental education and environmental planning and design.     

Environmental perception: An odyssey of ideas

Convergent interests paved the way for multidisciplinary research in environmental perception and behavior, in which the Clark Group was an important focus. For me that fruitful conjunction began in the mid-1960s, when I taught at Clark and had just embarked on a large-scale assessment of observer responses to urban milieus. Through the early 1970s the Clark Group helped to catalyze perception insights generally and to guide my own work. Emigration to Britain in 1972 distanced me from that ambience and style of inquiry, but the Clark experience continues to inform by perceptual excursions into images of the past.Specific memories of Clark merge with general judgements about the fortunes of environmental perception research. By the early 1970s it was already clear that various drains on scanty human resources in this new field left insufficient concerted attention for theory and synthesis. The 15 years since have seen little fundamental progress. Much research seems narrow in scope, lifeless in tone, and trivial in its conclusions. Exciting advances can be found along a number of peripheries, but the centre seems devoid of spirit.     

‘El Gallo''s’ Last Flight for Jeremy Anderson: In Memoriam

The ‘Clark Phenomenon’ began in 1966 with two major events: the publication of a special number of the Journal of Social Issues with the (now admittedly sexist) title of ‘Man's Response to the Physical Environment’, and the arrival of Jim Blaut on campus. This watershed year, just two decades ago, also may have marked the transition from infancy to adolescence of the reborn field of ‘environmental cognition’. This article traces these early middle years of environmental cognition and its related emphases at Clark, the leadership of certain members of the faculty of the Graduate School of Geography in bringing the new field to full flower, the spinoffs and inevitable reactive forces, and the application of environmental cognition to problems of intercultural communication on environmental issues of an international scope. Such application is a later reflection of the social and political consciousness of the 1960s, the concern to relate environmental psychology to what was taking place in the U.S.A. and in the ‘emerging’ nations of the so-called developing world. In all of this, the Clark influence was, and remains, relevant.     

The origins of environment and behavior at clark: Recollections from pre- and neonatal life

This paper provides an account of developments and events in the Departments of Geography and Psychology at Clark University during the 1960s that led up the establishment at Clark of a flourishing, though largely informal program of graduate training and research in environment-and-behavior, involving close collaboration among members of these two departments. The paper concludes with some reflections on the structural problems besetting the development of new interdisciplinary programs at the graduate level, such as the field of environment-and-behavior appears to call for. The history of the experience at Clark (as at other institutions), it is suggested, points to more informal devices and arrangements that do not explicitly challenge the established disciplinary order as more likely to be crowned with success.     

A view from the periphery

The author describes his background and relationship to the behavioral geography revolution at Clark. Key events included the independent invention of ‘turf maps’, the Place Perception Project of Blaut, Stea and McCleary, and the synergy of an exceptional cluster of faculty and students. The influence of the revolution on the author's own research has resulted in a radical redirection of effort toward applied research on children's environmental behavior, geographic learning, and participatory design methods in particular.     

Parks,streets and “just empty space”: the local environmental experiences of children and young people in a Scottish study

This article is concerned with the nature and significance of inequality in the environmental experience of children and young people. We argue that research in this area needs to widen in perspective and address a complex set of environmental attributes that matter to children and young people, and to their development. Discussing a study conducted in three differing locations in Scotland, the paper examines the local places that were important to children and young people, and the factors that affected the benefits they derived from them. The results illustrate that unequal experiences arise partly through different material provision of environmental goods, but also issues of quality and maintenance, and that relational dynamics have a crucial role. An important concern is not just the quality of experiences in the present, but the effects that environmental experiences in early life have on skills and capacities taken forward into adulthood.     

Discovering cartography as a behavioral science

Cartography, involved as always in the creation and study of maps, has not been an active ingredient or participant in the work of psychogeography. Nevertheless, there are significant aspects of psychogeography which are extremely important to maps and the cartographic process; on the other hand, it is clear that this ancient art and science can be, with an integration of concepts from psychogeography, redefined as a ‘behavioral science’. This perspective on cartography emerges from the diverse influences which existed at Clark University over a decade ago; it has been applied in a number of different contexts and appears to offer a more flexible paradigm for the discipline than the one based on the communication model which has served as the philosophical basis for mapmaking during the past two decades.     

1992-2017年中国环境规划研究演进特征与趋势

伴随着生态文明建设被确立为国家战略，环境规划成为一项保障城市与区域可持续发展的重要公共政策工具。为从主观判断转向客观计量分析评价我国环境规划研究领域的知识生产特征和趋势取向，以更好地促进高质量发展，本研究引入CiteSpace软件对中国知网数据库中与环境规划相关的1170篇论文文献进行分析，全面梳理了我国1992-2017年环境规划文献脉络演进轨迹，归纳其中演进特征与趋势取向。研究发现：①从环境规划的概念提出开始，我国在该领域的研究一直处于不断完善与扩展的状态，高被引论文关注方向较为广泛，反映出研究热点议题的多元；②研究学者合作网络初步浮现，但研究的学科多元交叉性仍有待提高，"高产"机构研究持续性较好，合作较为多元，但地域分布的不均衡性对我国多样环境问题解决所需的近域知识有效供给带来制约；③环境规划领域的研究以与生态环境或环境规划相关的具体问题为对象，多结合当期的经济社会与国家政策环境来进行开展，呈现出持续性与时效性相结合的特点，并逐渐由方法技术视角转向政策工具视角，即由仅解决环境问题为取向的研究转向将环境规划作为解决公共政策问题的研究；近期研究热点指向多规合一与空间规划，以及绿色发展理念的探讨，更加强调其与城市与区域规划之间的密切联系。     

From synthesis to analysis and back again

This is a retrospective view of experiences and events centered around participation in the geography Ph.D program at Clark University in the early 1970s. It traces my career from that of a landscape architect practitioner-teacher to involvement as a graduate student with the Clark resources management group and to current research interests and activities. Two themes are highlighted, the effects of the Clark experience and the continuity of my interest in values, issues and problems related to landscapes.     

The connectedness to nature scale: A measure of individuals’ feeling in community with nature

Five studies assessed the validity and reliability of the connectedness to nature scale (CNS), a new measure of individuals’ trait levels of feeling emotionally connected to the natural world. Data from two community and three college samples demonstrated that the CNS has good psychometric properties, correlates with related variables (the new environmental paradigm scale, identity as an environmentalist), and is uncorrelated with potential confounds (verbal ability, social desirability). This paper supports ecopsychologists’ contention that connection to nature is an important predictor of ecological behavior and subjective well-being. It also extends social psychological research on self–other overlap, perspective taking, and altruistic behavior to the overlap between self and nature. The CNS promises to be a useful empirical tool for research on the relationship between humans and the natural world.     

A pragmatic environmental psychology: A metatheoretical inquiry into the work of M. Powell Lawton

Environmental psychology is a field of such great diversity—in topics of interest, research approaches, in disciplinarity—that it often appears to lack coherence, exemplified by its poor fit within paradigmatic frameworks found in academic psychology, resulting in its “outlier” status. This paper explores the work of the environmental gerontologist M. Powell Lawton, as an exemplar of environmental psychology research, suggesting that such a review renders greater insight into the current state of the field than any top-down applied conceptual framework. Themes discussed include Lawton's theoretical perspective on the person, the environment, and the relationship between them, his inquiry at various units of analysis; the type of knowledge valued as evidenced in his work; and his fundamental applied orientation, all of which are reflective of contemporary directions within environmental psychology as a whole. Reviewed is Lawton's final proposal that takes an “epistemologically inclusive” approach, embodying all of the themes above and reflective of inquiry sought within pragmatic psychology. As such, it is argued that environmental psychology may find great affinity with the pragmatic psychology approach currently gaining impetus within applied and clinical psychology.     

The phenomenological contribution to environmental psychology

This essay considers the value of phenomenology for environmental psychology, first, by examining differences between a conventional scientific approach and phenomenology; second, by presenting substantive phenomenological research meaningful for environmental psychology. Three substantive themes are discussed: (1) a phenomenology of human experience; (2) a phenomenology of physical environment; (3) a phenomenology of the person—world relationship. The essay concludes that conventional research in environmental psychology has sometimes uncritically accepted theories and concepts which are out of touch with the actual fabric of environmental behavior and experience. A phenomenological perspective looks at the person—environment relationship afresh and thus helps to revitalize the ontological, epistemological and methodological foundations of environmental psychology.     

Pattern of representation of countries in cognitive maps of the world with special reference to Africa

Although for a long time environmental psychologists have been concerned with the nature and process of environmental perception and its representation in map forms, global sketch maps have not been popular in mainstream research. Further, conceptual and theoretical insights into the subject are yet to be fully achieved; and quite significantly, comparative analysis has been limited by the concentration of research efforts in the developed countries of Europe and America. In the same vein, the challenge of clarifying the psychological, spatial and social underpinnings of cognitive maps and their contributory role in day-to-day space-related problem solving and decision-making brings to the fore the need for cross-disciplinary and across-regional studies. This paper examines the world's image from an African perspective, exploring those countries of the world that are best known to Africans and the factors responsible for the pattern of recall and representation in the maps drawn by them. Some 656 maps were collected from 13 sites in 11 countries. Analysis of the frequency of inclusion of countries was first carried out; chi-square analysis was then performed on the frequency of inclusion by level of a country's economic development, population, geographical size and relative location from Nigeria and Africa. The results from qualitative interpretation show that while images of countries may have been influenced by composite and multifaceted factors, embracing historical and cultural associations, media images and invocations, Africans, nevertheless, tended to recall nations following some descending hierarchy, with ‘developed/geographically prominent countries’, ‘we’ (i.e. Africa), ‘others’ and ‘unknown’ countries as discernible clusters. From statistical test, population and spatial size of countries, the proximity of countries to the assessors and to some extent, level of economic development, were found to be significant in accounting for the pattern of recall and representation in cognitive maps. The paper shows that in spite of the evident limitations of mental sketches they hold some promise for our understanding of cross-regional variations in the images of the world, which could be important to the building of relevant social and geographical education to foster global understanding.     

Oekopsychologie: Some general implications from a particular literature

One goal of this paper is to present a perspective on psychological research in which the relationship between person and environment is the central point of interest. The german term Oekopsychologie is introduced as a higher level framework that subsumes both, the theory-oriented ecological perspective (the Oekologische Psychologie in German), and problem-oriented and environmental psychology (the Umweltpsychologie in German) with its more applied character. It is argued that the ecological perspective should be based on 10 tenets which stem from an emphasis on the fundamental importance of the man-environment relationship. The paper is also an attempt to stimulate bridge-building activities between German-speaking and English-speaking environmental psychologists.     

In the midst of change

It is characteristic to be in the midst of change and not to recognize it. In retrospect 1970–72 at Clark University presaged a successful universalization of environmental perception, but it was a high point rather than a beginning in pursuit of the higher aspirations of the then-fledgling field. These aspirations—to solve practical problems, to develop a common methodology, to bridge the disciplines, and to develop or revise a theory—have never been fully realized. Widely accepted today, environmental perception and behavior mirrors the everyday differences within and between disciplines and thus is divided by theoretical ideology, substantive focus and views as to what constitutes data. As with the individual disciplines, I have successfully integrated environmental perception into my own work, moving it from the exceptional to the everyday, and with some regret, from the magic of 1970–72 to the science of today.     

城镇化进程中生态环境管治的国际经验与启示

城镇化发展带来的环境污染问题已成为影响我国城镇化发展质量的重要方面。在新型城镇化建设全面推进和高质量发展要求的背景下,如何解决城镇化建设过程中的城市生态环境问题,优化空间布局,促进区域可持续发展,成为亟需解决的重大问题。本文基于全球视角从总结借鉴国际上主要国家城镇化过程、模式以及在此过程中生态环境保护和改善的经验入手,从科学规划、科技发展、法律制度、公众参与等方面总结国外经验,并从构建空间治理体系、治理环境突出问题、发挥政府主导作用、加大公众参与力度等方面探索构建我国新型城镇体系下生态环境管治的策略方案。     

Clark remembered

The ‘Clark Phenomenon’ began in 1966 with two major events: the publication of a special number of the Journal of Social Issues with the (now admittedly sexist) title of ‘Man's Response to the Physical Environment’, and the arrival of Jim Blaut on campus. This watershed year, just two decades ago, also may have marked the transition from infancy to adolescence of the reborn field of ‘environmental cognition’. This article traces these early middle years of environmental cognition and its related emphases at Clark, the leadership of certain members of the faculty of the Graduate School of Geography in bringing the new field to full flower, the spinoffs and inevitable reactive forces, and the application of environmental cognition to problems of intercultural communication on environmental issues of an international scope. Such application is a later reflection of the social and political consciousness of the 1960s, the concern to relate environmental psychology to what was taking place in the U.S.A. and in the ‘emerging’ nations of the so-called developing world. In all of this, the Clark influence was, and remains, relevant.     

STEREOTYPICAL PROCESSING: THE ROLE OF ENVIRONMENTAL CONTEXT

Previous research examining stereotype dilution had illustrated the importance of task instructions (Neuberg & Fiske, 1987), outcome dependence (Erber & Fiske, 1984; Neuberg & Fiske, 1987), and information about the target individual (Krueger & Rothbart, 1988; Macrae et al., 1992). This paper presents two studies investigating the stability of an occupational stereotype under different environmental conditions. Specifically it examines the maintenance and dilution of stereotypical judgements about licensees (pub managers) amongst undergraduate students. The results of the first study provide evidence for a context-free stereotype about public house licenses. However, results from the second study suggest that this stereotype is influenced by environmental conditions. That is, subjects do not simply continue to stereotype regardless of context, rather, under certain environmental conditions they individuate and reduce the impact of their stereotypical judgements. Implications for stereotype research and the role of environmental variables are made.