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Urban design: The growing influence of environmental psychology
Journal of Environmental Psychology (1991) 11, 359-371
R E V I E W ESSAY
URBAN DESIGN: THE GROWING INFLUENCE OF ENVIRONMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY ANNE R. BEER University o f Sheffield, Sheffield SIO 2 U J, U.K.
Common Places: Community Ideology and Identity in American Culture. D. M. Hummon, New York: State University of New York, 1990, £ 17.95. ISBN 079-1402754. Public Places and Spaces. Human Beha viour and Environment, Advances in Theory and Research. Edited by I. Altman and E. H. Zube, Vol. 10, I. New York: Plenum Press, 1989, £30.00. ISBN 0-306430797.
People Places, Design Guidelines for Urban Open Space. By Carolyn Francis and Clare Cooper Marcus. New York: van Nostrand Reinhold, 1990, £31.50. ISBN 0-442319290. The Polities of Park Design. By Galen Cranz. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989, £13.50. ISBN 0-262-030861-t. The Pedestrian and the City. By Carmen Hass-Klau. London and New York: Belhaven Press, 1990, £39.50. ISBN 1-85293-121-3. The Meaning of Gardens. Edited by M. Francis and R. Hester. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988, £39.95. ISBN 026-2061279. Anne Beer is Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Sheffield. Her special interest is the intelface between planning and design and the role a proper consideration of environmental planning issues could play in the town planning proeess. She is' a Town Planner and involved in current practice and applied research through the work of the Environmental Consultancy (~]the University of SheffieM of which she is a Director. She has recently begun work on an interdisciplinary rfsearch projeet aimed at reassessing the role of open space in cities in relation to the social and economic costs and the impact on the physical and natural environment of the present level o)Cprovision. Her book Environmental Planning for Site Development (Spon, Chapman Hall) was published in 1990.
The need for a new approach to design in cities has been increasingly recognized by the public and politicians as well as town planners. An interesting series of articles in the journal Town and Counto' Planning (December, 1990) serves to illustrate the many strands of thought that are involved in any consideration of how to plan and design for the cities of the future. The Green Paper on the Urban Environment (EC, 1990) produced by the Commission of the European Communities is another example of this increasing concern. Alongside considerations of the cultural, social and economic issues which have more traditionally formed the basis of decision making for town planning, environmental protection and enhancement are now seen as a basic requirement for 0272 4944/91/040359 + 13 $03.00/0
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good city planning. All these factors must have an impact on how cities are planned and designed; the problem for the planners and designers is to integrate these considerations so that satisfactory built environments are created. This is where the work of the environmental psychologist is so important. It is the experts in that field of study who are best able to research and give advice on what might constitute satisfactory environments in the wide range o f different circumstances with which the urban designer is involved. In the end studies of the problems associated with cities are not of themselves enough. Someone, and usually the professional designer, has to create a real physical environment in which people will live. It is the question of how these designers are to obtain the information they need to begin their attempts to make satisfactory settings for human life, that is addressed in this review essay and particularly the role that environmental psychologists play in the provision of this information. Some of the issuesthat are of concern to urban designers are introduced here as are a few of the methods that designers use to generate ideas. The problems that designers have in gaining information about the user's needs are broached and the sources they traditionally tap for their ideas introduced, although in only a very brief overview for the benefit of those who have never worked with designers. Finally as an illustration of the role that environmental designers could play in influencing rather than just recording events, some recent and mainly American books which deal with various related aspects of environmental design of relevance to environmental psychologists, are discussed. Cities can be thought of as complex organisms but ones which are in reality far from understood. The impact of our present cities on people and the quality of their lives, on natural resources and on the physical and natural environment has been shown to be damaging in many circumstances (This Common Inheritance H M Government, 1990). Yet, with the continued and even accelerating drift in many parts o f the world from the countryside to the city, we seem almost powerless to halt this damage, no matter how carefully we plan the way cities expand. Traditional planning methods have not solved the problems and so ideas are at present developing about city planning which are based on a different approach. The common theme of the new ideas is that future city planning should be linked to the notion of developing a more sustainable way of life (EC, 1990). In the main sustainability is understood to be about limiting environmental damage by working within the constraints imposed by the physical and natural environment and doing so within the limitations imposed by economic and social factors. In basic terms sustainability is quite simply based on the concept that everything people do on the land (and in the sea) is limited by nature and that every decision taken about changing land use, changing the way the land is managed, or changing the elements that compose the environment, has an impact, not just on particular aspects of the environment, hut on the totality of the environment. It is the concept behind the field of study known as Environmental Planning, this has developed as an academic and professional discipline to tackle the link between mankind, the land and nature. Environmental planning (Beer, 1990) is sometimes referred to in the literature as Landscape Planning (Fabos, 1985). It can be seen as a way o f thought, almost a philosophical approach to planning which is as applicable to towns as it is to rural areas. It is an approach which allows planners, politicians and the public to realize that all decisions on land-use planning and land management must be based on the fullest
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possible understanding of the interaction between man and nature. It is a concept which, unlike that behind the traditional British and U.S. urban planning systems, ensures that environmental considerations take precedence at all times. Environmental planning aims to ensure that any new land-uses occur where they will do least environmental damage and in such a manner that the management of the new environment leads, where possible, to an enhancement of the environment and quality of life. It is, therefore, concerned with people and their needs as much as with the physical and natural environment which create the settings within which those needs can be met. It is as concerned with the role which perception of places plays in our daily activities as it is with identifying the more commonly considered social and economic requirements. The environmental planning approach to cities allows those involved in decision making--the planners, politicians, economists and those involved in social issues to include such things as the need for clean air, clean water, adequate land for food production and for the protection of finite natural resources in the planning process for the sustainable city. The factors least often discussed in the present literature on sustainability appear to be the social factors, in particular the effect of people's perception of the quality of their lives on the way they adapt to city life. The degree to which people are satisfied with what the environmental planners and designers produce when solving the problem of creating human habitats needs to be further investigated. A growing literature is available on the link between perception of places and people's likely level of satisfaction with the place or space. It is this which needs to be fed into the environmental planning process and made available to those who design the specific settings (Beer, 1990). The information generated by those involved in environmental psychology has, however, too rarely had a direct influence on how cities are planned. They have studied and reported on the urban dwellers' perception of and reaction to the quality of their daily lives for many decades, but this has had little influence on how the individual parts of the city are designed. Some writers have begun to attempt to bridge the gap between the often rather theoretical knowledge produced by the scientists and social scientists and the needs of the designers. The latter seek firm information on the sorts of places which they should provide for people; as a result they often find it difficult to see how to apply the findings of the environmental psychologist to specific environmental design projects. The fault lies with neither side, there is just such a basic difference between how designers and scientists think (Greenbie, 1974). The designer's approach is inevitably different as the economic requirements of projects make it necessary to work within severe time and cost constraints; they do not have the time to undertake substantial new research in relation to each project. If they are to use the information which the environmental psychologist can provide, they need ready access to the information from the social studies which allow them to make decisions on their drawing boards. It is making the environmental psychologists' research findings accessible to designers which will be a key factor in ensuring that future environmental designs are more sensitive to the users ~needs. Work by Greenbie (1981), Alexander and his team (1977) and more recently Kaplan and Kaplan (1982, 1989) have given urban planners and designers a better understanding of the questions they should be asking of the sociologists and psychologists. Other writers such as Cooper Marcus and Sarkissian (1986), who have brought together the findings from a vast range of social studies relating to housing issues, have interpreted sociological information in a manner
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accessible to designers. Mostyn (1979) and Harrison and Burgess (1988), who have examined the information available on people's attitudes towards nature and open space in the cities, as well as having undertaken substantial research projects in this area, have also produced information in a manner which can feed directly into the planning and design process for cities. The need to plan cities that can provide satisfactory experiences of urban life is beginning to be seen as central to the future planning of cities as can be seen in Europe in the reawakening of interest in the quality of life in the city by the EC and national governments (EC, 1990). Therefore, designers need to be trained to understand where to find the information that will help them make the necessary planning and design decisions. Equally, sociologists and psychologists have to attempt to further understand how the planners and designers operate (Lawson, 1980), so that the information they produce is accessible and has a direct impact on the environments which are built for people. Why Has the Way in Which the Design Profession Operates Tended to Limit Use of Information from Environmental Psychologists Taking Britain as an example, the professions of Urban Design and Landscape Architecture can be seen to differ from that of Town Planning. The fields of interest overlap but the training is often very different. Town Planners are now more commonly concerned with developing theories about city planning and policies to ensure those theories are put i n t o practice; Urban Designers and Landscape Architects are concerned more specifically with making places, that is with the detailed layout and design of specific sites. They are the people who conceive of and make the environments in which people will actually move about. Urban Designers and Landscape Architects differ also from the Architects, in that they are more concerned with external spaces than with the interior of buildings. They do, however, fully recognize that what happens inside the buildings inevitably influences the use of and quality of the outside spaces and that the buildings designed by the Architect frequently form the edges of the spaces which they design, with all the ramifications that has in terms of people's perception of the space. To complicate the issue some Town Planners are Urban Designers just as some Urban Designers and Landscape Architects are also Architects and Civil Engineers, but in Britain at least a substantial number of Town Planners have had nothing more than a very basic training in design. A further complication specifically relevant to the U.K. is that a great deal of design work is done by developers. Many of these do not use fully trained designers and this can cause many difficulties, as the developer's proposals are veted by a development control process, staffed in many instances by planners without adequate training in urban design or environmental planning (Beer, 1983). Urban Designers and Landscape Architects have to search specifically for a means of bridging the gap between the often rather theoretical aims of the planning process and the need to produce specific environmental settings for particular people at a given moment in time. This search is inevitably complex and requires great determination on the part of the designer. To work out user needs for a particular project is a difficult task requiring time and effort. For this reason the approach that developed in the 1970s and 1980s was one of developing design guidelines which could be used to save design time. Many local authorities have produced detailed design guidelines for housing, for
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instance the Design Guide for Residential Area (Essex County Council, 1973) and central and local government have done so for roads (see Residential Roads and Footpaths, Design Bulletin 32. DOE, 1979). Such guidelines have had a major impact on the appearance of British towns (Booth, P., 1983). The design guidelines were liked by many because it was so much easier to apply them without too much questioning, rather than to undertake original thinking about specific design issues. Guidance has also been available from literature such as Fairweather's A. J. Metric Handbook (1970) and Site Planning by Koppelman and de Chiara (1984). Such books have been devised to give the designers straightforward information on design issues. This approach does nothing to make the designer consider the real needs of the individual who will live in and use the spaces that are being designed. It is a long way from the principles of Site Planning first set out in the 1960s by Kevin Lynch (Lynch & Hack, 1984). Combined with the concepts about design as an 'art form' that the professional design students learn when they are students, this 'design kit' method of urban design can be seen to explain why the settings produced by the process are so often inadequate and inappropriate, if not alienating for the user. Concepts relating to design as an 'art form' are basic to all design teaching on Urban Design and Landscape Architecture courses. Perhaps, because this is also the aspect of the course with which students struggle most, there is a tendency for the art side to be seen as the most important. Students very soon learn that so much subjectivity is involved in the 'art' side of design, that many concentrate on finding a way of designing which meets the requirements of the design teachers, rather than the site and its users. Instead of seeing the need for applying artistic principles as part of the design process, such students can come to see it as an end in itself despite everything that their teachers do to try to contradict this perception. It can be appropriate to be designing a place as predominantly an art form, but only in those few circumstances when the Client and User require a space to be a 'piece of art'. To be effective, the artistic principle of design as described in books such as Basic Principles of Landscape Architectural Design (Booth, K., 1983) and Architecture: Form, Space and Order (Ching, 1979) and To~vscape (Cullen, 1961) must be seen as part of the palette of design skills used to make environmental settings and not the totality of the designer's skills. People perceive spaces and places in such complex ways that just to treat them as a piece of art, which has a certain scale and is decorated in a certain way, will almost always fail to produce the type of environmental setting that people love to visit or are proud to live in. The art element of design is that which adds the special pleasure of being in or looking at particular places, but above all the place has to allow the people who use it to feel that the space supports and does not inhibit the activities they wish to be involved in. The approach that relies on the application of artistic principles to urban design has failed in many cases to produce satisfactory human habitats because it does not recognize the complex way in which people react to their environments.
The Environmental Design Process There is a need for the site planning and design process described in detail in Lynch and Hack (1984) and Beer (1990) to be more fully understood, as that is one which is based on understanding the users' needs. To summarize, this design process first identifies the essential components of the design by analysing the Town Planners' and the Clients' briefs. It is from this that a list of the user requirements in relation to the specific design
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problem is developed. These requirements are then studied to determine the qualities that the environment should possess if it is to meet the activity and experiential needs of the user. Questions such as what will it be like to walk to the post office, what will it be like for the children to cycle to school, where will people be able to sit in the sun and watch the world go by, help the designer using this process to identify the best way to design. Urban design problems differ from architectural problems as usually the designer cannot identify the individuals who will use a particular environmental setting. A best guess often has to be made about the characteristics of the users and for that reason the traditional research projects of the environmental psychologist are inappropriate. A good designer has to be aware o f a myraid of different possible design solutions, to know what has worked elsewhere and what users have liked and disliked. Once the user needs are understood, the site is then studied in detail looking at its physical and natural environment and looking at the social and cultural context within which the site occurs. The designer then attempts to relate the users' needs to the site in a way which does least damage to the physical and natural environment. The design solution grows out of the designer's understanding of the interaction between the site and its users. Where the site does not already provide the right characteristics for the type of environmental setting required by the user, then that has to be designed as a new environment; where the characteristics of the site already provide a suitable setting for a particular activity, then that is where it should be located if the project permits. In most cases a full understanding of the physical and natural environment, together with the need to integrate the site with the existing land uses surrounding it, presents the designer with a series of'design fixed points' and in such cases the designer's freedom of action is limited. The good designer does not see this as a disadvantage, in fact it is the process of fitting the future uses to the existing site which creates the possibility of such diversity of design solutions and so creates those fascinating differences between different parts of the city which help us to know where we are in a city. For this reason, each design has to be done independently because each site and its users create a different problem for the designer. It is possible to identify in almost every developed country urban design schemes which have gone badly wrong. Wrong because people have rejected them as suitable human habitat. For instance, throughout the world many 'slab blocks' of apartments which have only been built in the last 20 years, and were initially praised for their new approach to designing housing, have had to be demolished (Cooper Marcus & Sarkissian, 1986). This is perhaps the most obvious example of the failure of the designers to produce solutions to meet the needs of individual users and groups of users, but it is also possible to see a similar process at work in relation to shopping centres, social facilities and parks. It can, of course, be argued convincingly that such failures are not entirely the fault of designers, for they inevitably have to work within given political and economic objectives over which they have no control. However, these designs were made as settings for human life by designers who would have had all the arguments they needed to convince the politicians, and those who held the purse strings, that the design approach being pursued would not work, if they had read the sociological and psychological literature available from the 1960s. The cost to society of ignoring the information available on the sorts of environments which people like to live in and use is immense. It will continue to grow unless designers can be better informed when they do design work for clients and public authorities. They need the information to explain what is likely to happen if certain sorts of environmental
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settings are produced for given groups of people and so explain the costs to society of pursuing a given design solution. They need to know when they should be arguing for different approaches to the maintenance of the environmental settings. Too often the construction of a design is not backed up by adequate maintenance arrangements and as a result the place does not work for the user, even though it was well designed. From the mid-1960s an increasing amount of evidence has been available from postoccupancy evaluations and the failure of this evidence to have a direct impact on the design process is very worrying. It signifies a continuing failure of communication between the scientist and the designer. \
Identifying Useful Sources of Information for Urban Design It is only possible here to deal with a very small proportion of the recent literature dealing with urban design-related issues. The books discussed are:
Common Places: Community Ideology and IdentiO, in Anwrican Culture, D. M. Hummon (1990), which deals with how people describe the place in which they live.
Public Places and Spaces, Human Behaviour and Environment, Advances in Theory and Research, Vol, 10, I, edited by I. Altman and E. H. Zube, 1990. People Places: Design Guidelines for Urban Open Space, Carolyn Francis and Clare Cooper Marcus (1990), which discusses the different characteristics found in a variety of typical city places. The Politics of Park Design, Galen Cranz (1989), a recently reissued book which traces the link between politics and changing social objectives and the design of parks. Tile Pedestrian and the Cio', Carmen Hass-Klau (1990), which looks at how changing ideas on the design and planning of roads have influenced the form and workings of the city. The Meaning of Gardens, edited by M. Francis and R. Hester (1988), which reports on a conference on the role of gardens in our lives. Any settlement is basically composed of buildings, the spaces in between, and the tracks (the roads and footpaths) linking the buildings with each other and with the world outside the settlement. Interspersed between these are open spaces and major lines of communication and the often left over undeveloped corners of land which are found in many cities. At its simplest the city can be seen as a patchwork of landscapes (i.e. settings) for human lives. Each landscape zone has a character of its own which results fi'om the relationship between the built objects, the scale of the built objects, the paved surfaces, the areas of open land and the vegetation. Each zone provides different possibilities for supporting or otherwise the activities of daily life and the occasional visitor. Each zone allows the users to perceive it in a different way from other zones. We are aware of the city landscape changing as we move from one landscape zone to another even though the changes are often quite subtle. It is the very diversity of city landscapes which creates the attractions of the best cities. The diversity adds to the undoubted fascination of cities for most who live in them and visit them. That some of these diverse city landscape zones create satisfactory human habitats and others fail to do so is the basis of the books reviewed here. The way we understand the place in which we live is a very important aspect of city planning and design, lnhis book, Common Places: Community Ideology and ldentity in
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American Culture, Hummon (1990) deals with the issues involved in how Americans conceptualize and interpret society and the self. He sees the way that people talk about the place in which they live and the places that others inhabit as one way in which people make sense of reality. Talk about small towns becomes a characterizing of a way of life and how society works. Debates about suburbs and cities are seen to draw on people's own commitment to competing values. Questions about where one lives in fact become queries about who one is. Hummon sees such discussions of the value that people put on different communities as central to community ideology and as identifying with American culture. He suggests that our evaluation of the varying images of the place which belong to each community changes as community ideology alters. In his book he sets out popular American belief about cities, suburbs and small towns in terms of present-day community ideologies. He looks at how people construct a sense of identity based on their communities and how they perceive and explain their own and other different communities' problems. Hummon's work has been particularly useful in that he has not just asked people about their reactions to their own type of communities but he has also asked them how they think about other communities. Through this he addresses the important question about what motivates people to choose to live in one community rather than another. It does not suggest that one type of community is better than another, only that they' are different. It is important for city planners to understand the different expectations of people who live in different communities if they are to provide satisfactory planning and design solutions. There is never a 'perfect' design solution, only one that appears more appropriate for some of the people some of the time. The problems which face the designer of public spaces are manifold. The work that has been done by Altman and Zube provides useful insights into the problems involved in attempting to design satisfactory public places and spaces. They edited the series, Public Places and Spaces, Human Behaviour and Environment, Advances in Theory and Research. Volume 10 of that series, published in 1989, contains a useful collection of 11 articles addressing issues related to public spaces. It deals with the wide-ranging scope of public spaces which encompass a broad array of settings, including urban streets, plazas and squares as well as malls, parks and natural settings. This series also includes national parks and forests and wilderness areas in the understanding of the word public places. The series is interesting as it brings together work from a multitude of disciplines including architecture, geography, landscape architecture, natural resources, psychology, sociology and urban design, and is a good example of how a multi-disciplinary approach can lead to a better understanding of the issues involved, 'space' and 'place'. The book provides a wealth of information about design, planning and management of American places and spaces, and as such provides information of great use to those involved in the field of environmental planning and design. The book includes articles on such issues as the perception and aesthetics of urban streets and their associated buildings, the market place and its activities as a community event, the urban setting as a playground, the way in which malls, plazas and squares work for their users, as well as articles on the design and planning of parks. People Places, by Francis and Cooper Marcus (1990), attempts to take the information from researchers, including many environmental psychologists, and present it;in a format which is accessible to the site planner and designer. It is the sort of book that all urban designers and landscape architects should have beside their
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drawing board. It has been designed to indicate the issues that must be dealt with in the planning and detailed design of a wide range of city spaces. Unlike the earlier books on site planning, which present guidelines almost as rules, this book is not prescriptive. Instead it is set out so that the designers professionals and students as well as local community groups have to think hard about the specific problems of a site and its users before developing a programme for its future development. It is also the sort of book that the environmental psychologists should study if they are to develop an approach to presenting their findings which will ensure that designers are familiar with them. If we take the example of open space in cities, there has been a lot of recent questioning of the way in which open spaces are provided (Harrison & Burgess, 1988). We are only just beginning to recognize that there is something amiss in our present system of providing open space, and authors such as Galen Cranz (1989) have provided a useful insight into the historical development of open space planning in cities. In her book, The Politics of Park Design: A History of Urban Parks in America, which was first published in 1982 and reissued in t989, she sets out the sequence of developments from the mid 19th century when it first became considered good planning practice to allocate parts of the city as parks. Initially these parks were intended for the improvement of the living conditions of the masses in the city; over time they came to be understood as providing more specifically for people's recreational needs. The result of this change in the way of thinking about such spaces meant they were designed in very different ways. Park design followed a sequence from the provision of pleasure grounds in the period 1850--1900, to the reform park in the period up to 1930, to the recreation facility provided from then up to about 1965. Cranz defines the present stage of park design as the provision of open space systems. She relates the way the parks were set up, run and designed in the different periods to political concepts rather than any user-led decision making. Most writings on urban park design such as ParksJor People, Whittaker & Brown ( 1971 ), and Anatomy of a Park, Rutledge (1971 )--are aimed at designers and give little information about the socio-historical development of park design. Cranz's book, together with Chadwick's (1963) book, The Park and the Town, are therefore useful to designers in enabling them to understand the 'whys' of the past approaches to park design. In her studies she identifies ideas about the purpose of city parks and recognizes the failure amongst planners, landscape architects and academics to reach any consensus in their approach to park design. She initially approached the question why parks have been designed in different ways because of her work as a playground designer. She says '... this book is the story of what I learned and attempts to fill part of the unexplained gap regarding the role of city parks within American social structure and the intellectual and moral life of the culture.. 2. As such it '... is more concerned with the construction of models and the internal logic of the type itself than an ordinary narrative history would be'. She selected three cities -New York, Chicago and San Francisco-----as case studies and evahmted their approach to the provision of parks through studying the information in the archives, in the park professionals' written reports, and the articles and books written about the physical and social planning of each city. She links her findings to the common social problems of each period as perceived by park theorists and thus gives interesting insights as to why the parks of different periods have such different appearances and work in such different ways for different groups in the population. She also scrutinizes the development of ideas on the
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role of parks and relates this to changes in society, describing how those ideas have been realized in the activities which the parks were designed to support. She also shows how these ideas influenced the form of the park. Cranz's book, however, neglects to a large extent the role of 'nature' in park design. A further major element in the city is the paved surfaces--the roads and walkways-which provide for physical communication between buildings and between different parts of the city and the city and its hinterland and beyond. In the past towns often grew in an organic fashion at nodal points on pre-existing routeways; more recently the routeways have been planned along with the developments they are to serve so that their positioning and scale has been determined by the city planning process. Despite this intention to plan for vehicular and pedestrian movement, the problems associated with the phenomenal growth in car ownership have continued to escalate to the extent that traffic has come to be seen as a malign impact on the quality of urban life. Hass-Klau (1990), in her book The Pedestrian and City Trq~'c, has examined the history of planning for traffic through contrasting experiences in the U.K. with those in Germany. She investigates why in Germany pedestrianization seems to have been more readily accepted, why they have invested so much more heavily in public transport systems, and particularly why they have been so much more successful in introducing traffic calming measures to restrict the damage the car can do to the quality of life in residential areas. For British urban designers and traffic engineers there is much to be learnt from this comparative study, and the author has also included some information on developments in the U.S.A. to add further insight into this issue. Concern for the safety of pedestrians in urban areas is not new. For instance, Unwin and Parker, who designed the first garden cities in Britain early in this century, incorporated a high level of concern for the pedestrian in their layouts. The new towns, too, incorporated many ideas intended to reduce the adverse impact of traffic. However, in most cases the problems associated with the growth in the volume of traffic were not understood and the approach of building ever larger highways persists in holding sway in Britain, despite evidence from the U.S.A. and Germany that it rarely solves the problems. Hass-Klau successfully shows how the different historical and political development of city planning in Britain and Germany has been responsible to a large extent for the different approaches to traffic planning. This book does not deal directly with people's perceptions of the problems caused by traffic in towns and its impact on the quality of their lives but this is and will remain a vital research area for those involved in environmental psychology. The Meaning o/" Gardens: Idea, Place and Action (edited by Mark Francis and Randolph T. Hester Jr, 1990) is a book based on papers given at the Meanings of Gardens Conference held at the University of California in 1987. The ideas presented there have been taken further in this book and expanded to provide a useful definition of the roles that gardens play in people's lives and in society. As with the book edited by Altman and Zube mentioned above, this book is particularly useful because it presents such a wide spectrum of ideas--landscape architects, architects and psychologists are amongst those who have contributed to the debate. Private gardens form such an important element of most Western cities that they need to be researched in more detail. In the U.K., U.S.A. and Australia, for instance, they account for a very high percentage of the developed land in most cities. In reality, they are the forgotten
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element of many urban design and urban planning proposals, in contrast to parks and public gardens and woodlands, which are all recognized in the planning studies and proposals as elements of concern to town planning. The private garden is probably the most used urban space, as householders enter and leave it daily as they work around the house or relax in the garden. It is highlY valued by most householders, as for instance can be seen in those countries where people of relative affluence have some choice of housing and opt in large numbers to buy into housing areas where gardens are provided. This has a strong influence on urban form. For example, the vast spread of cities such as Perth and Melbourne in Australia has more to do with people's determination to have a garden adjacent to their house than it has to do with the number of people in those cities. In much of suburban U.S.A. the same pattern of sprawling development has occurred for much the same reasons. Even in Britain, where higher housing densities are normal even for private housing because of a very tight development control system and because of the high development costs, almost all recent housing outside city centres has gardens, albeit small ones. The book Meaning of Gardens differs from almost every other book about gardens as it is not about how they have been or should be designed or about the types of plants that can be used but about their importance as a place for people. It has a much more philosophical approach than that normally associated with literature on gardens, which in fact makes it more useful to urban designers and landscape architects when they are at the planning rather than design phase of a project, as it gives them useful arguments as to why gardens are a necessary part of city planning. It covers the history of the garden but in an unconventional way by looking at how people have understood the garden as part of their daily life. It looks at how we perceive the garden today. It contains a fund of ideas about the garden's role in our lives, viewing it both as an everyday place and as a public place. The book is well illustrated, in a way which makes the information in the various chapters more accessible. Whilst to the casual reader some of the more philosophical papers might seem irrelevant to their interests they contain a wealth of ideas and information which challenge and stimulate. The popularity of the garden is not new. One of the authors points out that the concept of the garden was first committed to the written word over 4000 years ago. The words used to express the idea at that early stage were ones which showed people understood the garden as a 'captured' piece of the landscape with connotations of a place 'to protect, to shelter, to save' and as 'a place in which to survive' (Stein in Francis & Hester, 1990). The importance of the garden as a special sheltered place has continued to today. Throughout the papers the theme of the garden as a substitute for nature recurs. The garden is dealt with as a symbol and metaphor (Cooper Marcus in Francis & Hester, 1988) to illustrate this link. It is also dealt with more literally by other authors who show the many different ways in which the garden plays a role in people's lives. The many different levels of awareness involved in our reaction to the garden are also explored. The authors show that the garden provides for satisfying and diverse experiences for urban dwellers in particular. It creates a satisfying and diverse contrast to the often over-ordered and over-simplified public space through which people must travel daily. In this book the garden is seen as a place where people can do practical things like grow vegetables and flowers: it is a place people associate with health, both mental and physical; it is a place that is seen as a satisfactory experience to be in and a
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place which through the ever-changing nature of plant material allows for endless fascination. It is a place where people are aware of many sensual and aesthetic pleasures--noise, touch and smell as well as visual. The book has a useful section on the restorative properties o f the garden and of the act of gardening. The garden's therapeutic value is recognized, as is the role gardens play in people's lives by allowing them the opportunity to have control over their own external environment--a very important factor for urban dwellers in particular where so much of the environment appears hostile and out of the control of the inhabitants. The fact that 'you can be yourself in your own garden' probably makes them such a vital part of the city environment. The books discussed here are just a few of those that the urban designer will refer to when involved in the planning and design process. They are a useful starting point for any.environmental psychologist interested in becoming more effectively involved in the process of city planning or the detail of design. In Conclusion
This review article has been concerned with the flow of information fi'om the environmental psychologists and others from related disciplines to those responsible to making the design decisions. It has only dealt with a small part of the growing body of literature on the relationship between people and the settings for their daily lives. It is written from the point of view of the urban designer and landscape architect needing to understand how designs must be developed if user needs are to be more effectively met in the site planning and design process. It has become urgent that we find new ways of addressing the problem of planning and design in the cities. Cities are changing so fast that we barely seem to have time to think about the problem before we have to tackle specific issues. These are partly related to bad planning and design decisions in the past and partly related to wider social and economic problems. Not all our planning has been wrong; cities in Britain are by and large cleaner and better places in which to live than they were 40 years ago. Many of our present concerns can be recognized as the result of higher expectations from those who live in the cities. However, this still leaves us with the problem of how to plan to meet these higher expectations and the higher levels of general affluence to which most people aspire. Owen (1991) has suggested that we are at the stage where general planning policies can be seen to be well intentioned but too vague to help improve the quality of the environment at the local level. It is at this local level, at the stage of making design decisions about specific sites, that the environmental psychologist's expertise can be so useful to the designer. However, this is only if designers and researchers can find a way of communicating more effectively. References
Alexander, C. et al. (1977). A Pattern Language. New York: Oxford University Press. Beer, A. (1983). Development control and design quality, part 2. 7~)wn Planning Review, 54/4. Beer, A. (1990). Environmental Planningjor Site Development. London: Spon, Chapman and Hall. Booth, K. (1983). Basic Elements qf Lands'cape Architectural Design. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Booth, P. (1983). Development control and design quality, part 1. Town Planning Review, 54[3. Chadwick, G. (1966). The Park and the Town: Public" Landscape in the 19th and 20th Centur&s. London: Architectural Press.
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Cooper Marcus, C. & Sarkissian, W. (1986). Housing as (f People Mattered. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Ching, F. D. K. (1979). Architecture: Form, Space andOrder. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold. Cullen, G. (1961). Townscape. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold. Department of the Environment (DOE) (1979). Residential Roads and Footpaths, Design Bulletin 32. London: HMSO. EC (1990). The Green Paper on the Urban Environment. Brussels: Commission of the European Communities. Essex County Council (1973). Design Guide Jor Residential Areas. Chelmsford: Essex CC. Fabos, J. G. (1985). Land-Use Planning,fi'om Global to Local Challenge. London and New York: Dowden & Culver, Chapman and Hall. Fairweather, L. (1970). and later editions. AJ Metric Handbook. London: Architectural Press. Francis, M. & Hester, R. (1990). The Meaning of'Gardens: Idea, Place and Action. Cambridge, MIT Press. Greenbie, B. (1974). Design for DiversiO'. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Greenbie, B. (1981). Spaces: Dimensions o[the Human Landscape. New Haven: Yale University Press. Harrison, C. & Burgess, J. (1988). Qualitative research and open space policy. The Planner, 16 18. H M Government (1990). "Fhis Common Inheritance: Britain's Environmental Strategy--white paper. London: HMSO. Kaplan, S. & Kaplan, R. (1982). Humanscape, Environments for People. Ann Arbor: Ulrich. Kaplan, S. & Kaplan, R. (1989). Experience of Nature, a Psychological Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Koppelman, L. E. & de Chiara, J. (1984). Time Saver StandardsJor Site Planning. New York: McGraw-Hill. Lawson, B. (1980). How Designers Tbink. London: Butterworth Architecture. Lynch, K. & Hack, G. (1984). Site Planning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Mostyn, B. (1979). Personal Ben¢f~'ts and SatisJiTctions Derived fiom Participation in Urban Wildl([~ Pr~/ects. London: NCC. Owen, S. (1991). Planning Settlements Naturally. Chichester: Packard. Rutledge, A. (1971). Anatomy ~/'a Park. New York: McGraw-Hill. Whittakcr, B. & Brown, K. (1971). Parl(s/br People. London: Seeley.
R E V I E W ESSAY
URBAN DESIGN: THE GROWING INFLUENCE OF ENVIRONMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY ANNE R. BEER University o f Sheffield, Sheffield SIO 2 U J, U.K.
Common Places: Community Ideology and Identity in American Culture. D. M. Hummon, New York: State University of New York, 1990, £ 17.95. ISBN 079-1402754. Public Places and Spaces. Human Beha viour and Environment, Advances in Theory and Research. Edited by I. Altman and E. H. Zube, Vol. 10, I. New York: Plenum Press, 1989, £30.00. ISBN 0-306430797.
People Places, Design Guidelines for Urban Open Space. By Carolyn Francis and Clare Cooper Marcus. New York: van Nostrand Reinhold, 1990, £31.50. ISBN 0-442319290. The Polities of Park Design. By Galen Cranz. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989, £13.50. ISBN 0-262-030861-t. The Pedestrian and the City. By Carmen Hass-Klau. London and New York: Belhaven Press, 1990, £39.50. ISBN 1-85293-121-3. The Meaning of Gardens. Edited by M. Francis and R. Hester. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988, £39.95. ISBN 026-2061279. Anne Beer is Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Sheffield. Her special interest is the intelface between planning and design and the role a proper consideration of environmental planning issues could play in the town planning proeess. She is' a Town Planner and involved in current practice and applied research through the work of the Environmental Consultancy (~]the University of SheffieM of which she is a Director. She has recently begun work on an interdisciplinary rfsearch projeet aimed at reassessing the role of open space in cities in relation to the social and economic costs and the impact on the physical and natural environment of the present level o)Cprovision. Her book Environmental Planning for Site Development (Spon, Chapman Hall) was published in 1990.
The need for a new approach to design in cities has been increasingly recognized by the public and politicians as well as town planners. An interesting series of articles in the journal Town and Counto' Planning (December, 1990) serves to illustrate the many strands of thought that are involved in any consideration of how to plan and design for the cities of the future. The Green Paper on the Urban Environment (EC, 1990) produced by the Commission of the European Communities is another example of this increasing concern. Alongside considerations of the cultural, social and economic issues which have more traditionally formed the basis of decision making for town planning, environmental protection and enhancement are now seen as a basic requirement for 0272 4944/91/040359 + 13 $03.00/0
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good city planning. All these factors must have an impact on how cities are planned and designed; the problem for the planners and designers is to integrate these considerations so that satisfactory built environments are created. This is where the work of the environmental psychologist is so important. It is the experts in that field of study who are best able to research and give advice on what might constitute satisfactory environments in the wide range o f different circumstances with which the urban designer is involved. In the end studies of the problems associated with cities are not of themselves enough. Someone, and usually the professional designer, has to create a real physical environment in which people will live. It is the question of how these designers are to obtain the information they need to begin their attempts to make satisfactory settings for human life, that is addressed in this review essay and particularly the role that environmental psychologists play in the provision of this information. Some of the issuesthat are of concern to urban designers are introduced here as are a few of the methods that designers use to generate ideas. The problems that designers have in gaining information about the user's needs are broached and the sources they traditionally tap for their ideas introduced, although in only a very brief overview for the benefit of those who have never worked with designers. Finally as an illustration of the role that environmental designers could play in influencing rather than just recording events, some recent and mainly American books which deal with various related aspects of environmental design of relevance to environmental psychologists, are discussed. Cities can be thought of as complex organisms but ones which are in reality far from understood. The impact of our present cities on people and the quality of their lives, on natural resources and on the physical and natural environment has been shown to be damaging in many circumstances (This Common Inheritance H M Government, 1990). Yet, with the continued and even accelerating drift in many parts o f the world from the countryside to the city, we seem almost powerless to halt this damage, no matter how carefully we plan the way cities expand. Traditional planning methods have not solved the problems and so ideas are at present developing about city planning which are based on a different approach. The common theme of the new ideas is that future city planning should be linked to the notion of developing a more sustainable way of life (EC, 1990). In the main sustainability is understood to be about limiting environmental damage by working within the constraints imposed by the physical and natural environment and doing so within the limitations imposed by economic and social factors. In basic terms sustainability is quite simply based on the concept that everything people do on the land (and in the sea) is limited by nature and that every decision taken about changing land use, changing the way the land is managed, or changing the elements that compose the environment, has an impact, not just on particular aspects of the environment, hut on the totality of the environment. It is the concept behind the field of study known as Environmental Planning, this has developed as an academic and professional discipline to tackle the link between mankind, the land and nature. Environmental planning (Beer, 1990) is sometimes referred to in the literature as Landscape Planning (Fabos, 1985). It can be seen as a way o f thought, almost a philosophical approach to planning which is as applicable to towns as it is to rural areas. It is an approach which allows planners, politicians and the public to realize that all decisions on land-use planning and land management must be based on the fullest
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possible understanding of the interaction between man and nature. It is a concept which, unlike that behind the traditional British and U.S. urban planning systems, ensures that environmental considerations take precedence at all times. Environmental planning aims to ensure that any new land-uses occur where they will do least environmental damage and in such a manner that the management of the new environment leads, where possible, to an enhancement of the environment and quality of life. It is, therefore, concerned with people and their needs as much as with the physical and natural environment which create the settings within which those needs can be met. It is as concerned with the role which perception of places plays in our daily activities as it is with identifying the more commonly considered social and economic requirements. The environmental planning approach to cities allows those involved in decision making--the planners, politicians, economists and those involved in social issues to include such things as the need for clean air, clean water, adequate land for food production and for the protection of finite natural resources in the planning process for the sustainable city. The factors least often discussed in the present literature on sustainability appear to be the social factors, in particular the effect of people's perception of the quality of their lives on the way they adapt to city life. The degree to which people are satisfied with what the environmental planners and designers produce when solving the problem of creating human habitats needs to be further investigated. A growing literature is available on the link between perception of places and people's likely level of satisfaction with the place or space. It is this which needs to be fed into the environmental planning process and made available to those who design the specific settings (Beer, 1990). The information generated by those involved in environmental psychology has, however, too rarely had a direct influence on how cities are planned. They have studied and reported on the urban dwellers' perception of and reaction to the quality of their daily lives for many decades, but this has had little influence on how the individual parts of the city are designed. Some writers have begun to attempt to bridge the gap between the often rather theoretical knowledge produced by the scientists and social scientists and the needs of the designers. The latter seek firm information on the sorts of places which they should provide for people; as a result they often find it difficult to see how to apply the findings of the environmental psychologist to specific environmental design projects. The fault lies with neither side, there is just such a basic difference between how designers and scientists think (Greenbie, 1974). The designer's approach is inevitably different as the economic requirements of projects make it necessary to work within severe time and cost constraints; they do not have the time to undertake substantial new research in relation to each project. If they are to use the information which the environmental psychologist can provide, they need ready access to the information from the social studies which allow them to make decisions on their drawing boards. It is making the environmental psychologists' research findings accessible to designers which will be a key factor in ensuring that future environmental designs are more sensitive to the users ~needs. Work by Greenbie (1981), Alexander and his team (1977) and more recently Kaplan and Kaplan (1982, 1989) have given urban planners and designers a better understanding of the questions they should be asking of the sociologists and psychologists. Other writers such as Cooper Marcus and Sarkissian (1986), who have brought together the findings from a vast range of social studies relating to housing issues, have interpreted sociological information in a manner
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accessible to designers. Mostyn (1979) and Harrison and Burgess (1988), who have examined the information available on people's attitudes towards nature and open space in the cities, as well as having undertaken substantial research projects in this area, have also produced information in a manner which can feed directly into the planning and design process for cities. The need to plan cities that can provide satisfactory experiences of urban life is beginning to be seen as central to the future planning of cities as can be seen in Europe in the reawakening of interest in the quality of life in the city by the EC and national governments (EC, 1990). Therefore, designers need to be trained to understand where to find the information that will help them make the necessary planning and design decisions. Equally, sociologists and psychologists have to attempt to further understand how the planners and designers operate (Lawson, 1980), so that the information they produce is accessible and has a direct impact on the environments which are built for people. Why Has the Way in Which the Design Profession Operates Tended to Limit Use of Information from Environmental Psychologists Taking Britain as an example, the professions of Urban Design and Landscape Architecture can be seen to differ from that of Town Planning. The fields of interest overlap but the training is often very different. Town Planners are now more commonly concerned with developing theories about city planning and policies to ensure those theories are put i n t o practice; Urban Designers and Landscape Architects are concerned more specifically with making places, that is with the detailed layout and design of specific sites. They are the people who conceive of and make the environments in which people will actually move about. Urban Designers and Landscape Architects differ also from the Architects, in that they are more concerned with external spaces than with the interior of buildings. They do, however, fully recognize that what happens inside the buildings inevitably influences the use of and quality of the outside spaces and that the buildings designed by the Architect frequently form the edges of the spaces which they design, with all the ramifications that has in terms of people's perception of the space. To complicate the issue some Town Planners are Urban Designers just as some Urban Designers and Landscape Architects are also Architects and Civil Engineers, but in Britain at least a substantial number of Town Planners have had nothing more than a very basic training in design. A further complication specifically relevant to the U.K. is that a great deal of design work is done by developers. Many of these do not use fully trained designers and this can cause many difficulties, as the developer's proposals are veted by a development control process, staffed in many instances by planners without adequate training in urban design or environmental planning (Beer, 1983). Urban Designers and Landscape Architects have to search specifically for a means of bridging the gap between the often rather theoretical aims of the planning process and the need to produce specific environmental settings for particular people at a given moment in time. This search is inevitably complex and requires great determination on the part of the designer. To work out user needs for a particular project is a difficult task requiring time and effort. For this reason the approach that developed in the 1970s and 1980s was one of developing design guidelines which could be used to save design time. Many local authorities have produced detailed design guidelines for housing, for
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instance the Design Guide for Residential Area (Essex County Council, 1973) and central and local government have done so for roads (see Residential Roads and Footpaths, Design Bulletin 32. DOE, 1979). Such guidelines have had a major impact on the appearance of British towns (Booth, P., 1983). The design guidelines were liked by many because it was so much easier to apply them without too much questioning, rather than to undertake original thinking about specific design issues. Guidance has also been available from literature such as Fairweather's A. J. Metric Handbook (1970) and Site Planning by Koppelman and de Chiara (1984). Such books have been devised to give the designers straightforward information on design issues. This approach does nothing to make the designer consider the real needs of the individual who will live in and use the spaces that are being designed. It is a long way from the principles of Site Planning first set out in the 1960s by Kevin Lynch (Lynch & Hack, 1984). Combined with the concepts about design as an 'art form' that the professional design students learn when they are students, this 'design kit' method of urban design can be seen to explain why the settings produced by the process are so often inadequate and inappropriate, if not alienating for the user. Concepts relating to design as an 'art form' are basic to all design teaching on Urban Design and Landscape Architecture courses. Perhaps, because this is also the aspect of the course with which students struggle most, there is a tendency for the art side to be seen as the most important. Students very soon learn that so much subjectivity is involved in the 'art' side of design, that many concentrate on finding a way of designing which meets the requirements of the design teachers, rather than the site and its users. Instead of seeing the need for applying artistic principles as part of the design process, such students can come to see it as an end in itself despite everything that their teachers do to try to contradict this perception. It can be appropriate to be designing a place as predominantly an art form, but only in those few circumstances when the Client and User require a space to be a 'piece of art'. To be effective, the artistic principle of design as described in books such as Basic Principles of Landscape Architectural Design (Booth, K., 1983) and Architecture: Form, Space and Order (Ching, 1979) and To~vscape (Cullen, 1961) must be seen as part of the palette of design skills used to make environmental settings and not the totality of the designer's skills. People perceive spaces and places in such complex ways that just to treat them as a piece of art, which has a certain scale and is decorated in a certain way, will almost always fail to produce the type of environmental setting that people love to visit or are proud to live in. The art element of design is that which adds the special pleasure of being in or looking at particular places, but above all the place has to allow the people who use it to feel that the space supports and does not inhibit the activities they wish to be involved in. The approach that relies on the application of artistic principles to urban design has failed in many cases to produce satisfactory human habitats because it does not recognize the complex way in which people react to their environments.
The Environmental Design Process There is a need for the site planning and design process described in detail in Lynch and Hack (1984) and Beer (1990) to be more fully understood, as that is one which is based on understanding the users' needs. To summarize, this design process first identifies the essential components of the design by analysing the Town Planners' and the Clients' briefs. It is from this that a list of the user requirements in relation to the specific design
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problem is developed. These requirements are then studied to determine the qualities that the environment should possess if it is to meet the activity and experiential needs of the user. Questions such as what will it be like to walk to the post office, what will it be like for the children to cycle to school, where will people be able to sit in the sun and watch the world go by, help the designer using this process to identify the best way to design. Urban design problems differ from architectural problems as usually the designer cannot identify the individuals who will use a particular environmental setting. A best guess often has to be made about the characteristics of the users and for that reason the traditional research projects of the environmental psychologist are inappropriate. A good designer has to be aware o f a myraid of different possible design solutions, to know what has worked elsewhere and what users have liked and disliked. Once the user needs are understood, the site is then studied in detail looking at its physical and natural environment and looking at the social and cultural context within which the site occurs. The designer then attempts to relate the users' needs to the site in a way which does least damage to the physical and natural environment. The design solution grows out of the designer's understanding of the interaction between the site and its users. Where the site does not already provide the right characteristics for the type of environmental setting required by the user, then that has to be designed as a new environment; where the characteristics of the site already provide a suitable setting for a particular activity, then that is where it should be located if the project permits. In most cases a full understanding of the physical and natural environment, together with the need to integrate the site with the existing land uses surrounding it, presents the designer with a series of'design fixed points' and in such cases the designer's freedom of action is limited. The good designer does not see this as a disadvantage, in fact it is the process of fitting the future uses to the existing site which creates the possibility of such diversity of design solutions and so creates those fascinating differences between different parts of the city which help us to know where we are in a city. For this reason, each design has to be done independently because each site and its users create a different problem for the designer. It is possible to identify in almost every developed country urban design schemes which have gone badly wrong. Wrong because people have rejected them as suitable human habitat. For instance, throughout the world many 'slab blocks' of apartments which have only been built in the last 20 years, and were initially praised for their new approach to designing housing, have had to be demolished (Cooper Marcus & Sarkissian, 1986). This is perhaps the most obvious example of the failure of the designers to produce solutions to meet the needs of individual users and groups of users, but it is also possible to see a similar process at work in relation to shopping centres, social facilities and parks. It can, of course, be argued convincingly that such failures are not entirely the fault of designers, for they inevitably have to work within given political and economic objectives over which they have no control. However, these designs were made as settings for human life by designers who would have had all the arguments they needed to convince the politicians, and those who held the purse strings, that the design approach being pursued would not work, if they had read the sociological and psychological literature available from the 1960s. The cost to society of ignoring the information available on the sorts of environments which people like to live in and use is immense. It will continue to grow unless designers can be better informed when they do design work for clients and public authorities. They need the information to explain what is likely to happen if certain sorts of environmental
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settings are produced for given groups of people and so explain the costs to society of pursuing a given design solution. They need to know when they should be arguing for different approaches to the maintenance of the environmental settings. Too often the construction of a design is not backed up by adequate maintenance arrangements and as a result the place does not work for the user, even though it was well designed. From the mid-1960s an increasing amount of evidence has been available from postoccupancy evaluations and the failure of this evidence to have a direct impact on the design process is very worrying. It signifies a continuing failure of communication between the scientist and the designer. \
Identifying Useful Sources of Information for Urban Design It is only possible here to deal with a very small proportion of the recent literature dealing with urban design-related issues. The books discussed are:
Common Places: Community Ideology and IdentiO, in Anwrican Culture, D. M. Hummon (1990), which deals with how people describe the place in which they live.
Public Places and Spaces, Human Behaviour and Environment, Advances in Theory and Research, Vol, 10, I, edited by I. Altman and E. H. Zube, 1990. People Places: Design Guidelines for Urban Open Space, Carolyn Francis and Clare Cooper Marcus (1990), which discusses the different characteristics found in a variety of typical city places. The Politics of Park Design, Galen Cranz (1989), a recently reissued book which traces the link between politics and changing social objectives and the design of parks. Tile Pedestrian and the Cio', Carmen Hass-Klau (1990), which looks at how changing ideas on the design and planning of roads have influenced the form and workings of the city. The Meaning of Gardens, edited by M. Francis and R. Hester (1988), which reports on a conference on the role of gardens in our lives. Any settlement is basically composed of buildings, the spaces in between, and the tracks (the roads and footpaths) linking the buildings with each other and with the world outside the settlement. Interspersed between these are open spaces and major lines of communication and the often left over undeveloped corners of land which are found in many cities. At its simplest the city can be seen as a patchwork of landscapes (i.e. settings) for human lives. Each landscape zone has a character of its own which results fi'om the relationship between the built objects, the scale of the built objects, the paved surfaces, the areas of open land and the vegetation. Each zone provides different possibilities for supporting or otherwise the activities of daily life and the occasional visitor. Each zone allows the users to perceive it in a different way from other zones. We are aware of the city landscape changing as we move from one landscape zone to another even though the changes are often quite subtle. It is the very diversity of city landscapes which creates the attractions of the best cities. The diversity adds to the undoubted fascination of cities for most who live in them and visit them. That some of these diverse city landscape zones create satisfactory human habitats and others fail to do so is the basis of the books reviewed here. The way we understand the place in which we live is a very important aspect of city planning and design, lnhis book, Common Places: Community Ideology and ldentity in
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American Culture, Hummon (1990) deals with the issues involved in how Americans conceptualize and interpret society and the self. He sees the way that people talk about the place in which they live and the places that others inhabit as one way in which people make sense of reality. Talk about small towns becomes a characterizing of a way of life and how society works. Debates about suburbs and cities are seen to draw on people's own commitment to competing values. Questions about where one lives in fact become queries about who one is. Hummon sees such discussions of the value that people put on different communities as central to community ideology and as identifying with American culture. He suggests that our evaluation of the varying images of the place which belong to each community changes as community ideology alters. In his book he sets out popular American belief about cities, suburbs and small towns in terms of present-day community ideologies. He looks at how people construct a sense of identity based on their communities and how they perceive and explain their own and other different communities' problems. Hummon's work has been particularly useful in that he has not just asked people about their reactions to their own type of communities but he has also asked them how they think about other communities. Through this he addresses the important question about what motivates people to choose to live in one community rather than another. It does not suggest that one type of community is better than another, only that they' are different. It is important for city planners to understand the different expectations of people who live in different communities if they are to provide satisfactory planning and design solutions. There is never a 'perfect' design solution, only one that appears more appropriate for some of the people some of the time. The problems which face the designer of public spaces are manifold. The work that has been done by Altman and Zube provides useful insights into the problems involved in attempting to design satisfactory public places and spaces. They edited the series, Public Places and Spaces, Human Behaviour and Environment, Advances in Theory and Research. Volume 10 of that series, published in 1989, contains a useful collection of 11 articles addressing issues related to public spaces. It deals with the wide-ranging scope of public spaces which encompass a broad array of settings, including urban streets, plazas and squares as well as malls, parks and natural settings. This series also includes national parks and forests and wilderness areas in the understanding of the word public places. The series is interesting as it brings together work from a multitude of disciplines including architecture, geography, landscape architecture, natural resources, psychology, sociology and urban design, and is a good example of how a multi-disciplinary approach can lead to a better understanding of the issues involved, 'space' and 'place'. The book provides a wealth of information about design, planning and management of American places and spaces, and as such provides information of great use to those involved in the field of environmental planning and design. The book includes articles on such issues as the perception and aesthetics of urban streets and their associated buildings, the market place and its activities as a community event, the urban setting as a playground, the way in which malls, plazas and squares work for their users, as well as articles on the design and planning of parks. People Places, by Francis and Cooper Marcus (1990), attempts to take the information from researchers, including many environmental psychologists, and present it;in a format which is accessible to the site planner and designer. It is the sort of book that all urban designers and landscape architects should have beside their
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drawing board. It has been designed to indicate the issues that must be dealt with in the planning and detailed design of a wide range of city spaces. Unlike the earlier books on site planning, which present guidelines almost as rules, this book is not prescriptive. Instead it is set out so that the designers professionals and students as well as local community groups have to think hard about the specific problems of a site and its users before developing a programme for its future development. It is also the sort of book that the environmental psychologists should study if they are to develop an approach to presenting their findings which will ensure that designers are familiar with them. If we take the example of open space in cities, there has been a lot of recent questioning of the way in which open spaces are provided (Harrison & Burgess, 1988). We are only just beginning to recognize that there is something amiss in our present system of providing open space, and authors such as Galen Cranz (1989) have provided a useful insight into the historical development of open space planning in cities. In her book, The Politics of Park Design: A History of Urban Parks in America, which was first published in 1982 and reissued in t989, she sets out the sequence of developments from the mid 19th century when it first became considered good planning practice to allocate parts of the city as parks. Initially these parks were intended for the improvement of the living conditions of the masses in the city; over time they came to be understood as providing more specifically for people's recreational needs. The result of this change in the way of thinking about such spaces meant they were designed in very different ways. Park design followed a sequence from the provision of pleasure grounds in the period 1850--1900, to the reform park in the period up to 1930, to the recreation facility provided from then up to about 1965. Cranz defines the present stage of park design as the provision of open space systems. She relates the way the parks were set up, run and designed in the different periods to political concepts rather than any user-led decision making. Most writings on urban park design such as ParksJor People, Whittaker & Brown ( 1971 ), and Anatomy of a Park, Rutledge (1971 )--are aimed at designers and give little information about the socio-historical development of park design. Cranz's book, together with Chadwick's (1963) book, The Park and the Town, are therefore useful to designers in enabling them to understand the 'whys' of the past approaches to park design. In her studies she identifies ideas about the purpose of city parks and recognizes the failure amongst planners, landscape architects and academics to reach any consensus in their approach to park design. She initially approached the question why parks have been designed in different ways because of her work as a playground designer. She says '... this book is the story of what I learned and attempts to fill part of the unexplained gap regarding the role of city parks within American social structure and the intellectual and moral life of the culture.. 2. As such it '... is more concerned with the construction of models and the internal logic of the type itself than an ordinary narrative history would be'. She selected three cities -New York, Chicago and San Francisco-----as case studies and evahmted their approach to the provision of parks through studying the information in the archives, in the park professionals' written reports, and the articles and books written about the physical and social planning of each city. She links her findings to the common social problems of each period as perceived by park theorists and thus gives interesting insights as to why the parks of different periods have such different appearances and work in such different ways for different groups in the population. She also scrutinizes the development of ideas on the
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role of parks and relates this to changes in society, describing how those ideas have been realized in the activities which the parks were designed to support. She also shows how these ideas influenced the form of the park. Cranz's book, however, neglects to a large extent the role of 'nature' in park design. A further major element in the city is the paved surfaces--the roads and walkways-which provide for physical communication between buildings and between different parts of the city and the city and its hinterland and beyond. In the past towns often grew in an organic fashion at nodal points on pre-existing routeways; more recently the routeways have been planned along with the developments they are to serve so that their positioning and scale has been determined by the city planning process. Despite this intention to plan for vehicular and pedestrian movement, the problems associated with the phenomenal growth in car ownership have continued to escalate to the extent that traffic has come to be seen as a malign impact on the quality of urban life. Hass-Klau (1990), in her book The Pedestrian and City Trq~'c, has examined the history of planning for traffic through contrasting experiences in the U.K. with those in Germany. She investigates why in Germany pedestrianization seems to have been more readily accepted, why they have invested so much more heavily in public transport systems, and particularly why they have been so much more successful in introducing traffic calming measures to restrict the damage the car can do to the quality of life in residential areas. For British urban designers and traffic engineers there is much to be learnt from this comparative study, and the author has also included some information on developments in the U.S.A. to add further insight into this issue. Concern for the safety of pedestrians in urban areas is not new. For instance, Unwin and Parker, who designed the first garden cities in Britain early in this century, incorporated a high level of concern for the pedestrian in their layouts. The new towns, too, incorporated many ideas intended to reduce the adverse impact of traffic. However, in most cases the problems associated with the growth in the volume of traffic were not understood and the approach of building ever larger highways persists in holding sway in Britain, despite evidence from the U.S.A. and Germany that it rarely solves the problems. Hass-Klau successfully shows how the different historical and political development of city planning in Britain and Germany has been responsible to a large extent for the different approaches to traffic planning. This book does not deal directly with people's perceptions of the problems caused by traffic in towns and its impact on the quality of their lives but this is and will remain a vital research area for those involved in environmental psychology. The Meaning o/" Gardens: Idea, Place and Action (edited by Mark Francis and Randolph T. Hester Jr, 1990) is a book based on papers given at the Meanings of Gardens Conference held at the University of California in 1987. The ideas presented there have been taken further in this book and expanded to provide a useful definition of the roles that gardens play in people's lives and in society. As with the book edited by Altman and Zube mentioned above, this book is particularly useful because it presents such a wide spectrum of ideas--landscape architects, architects and psychologists are amongst those who have contributed to the debate. Private gardens form such an important element of most Western cities that they need to be researched in more detail. In the U.K., U.S.A. and Australia, for instance, they account for a very high percentage of the developed land in most cities. In reality, they are the forgotten
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element of many urban design and urban planning proposals, in contrast to parks and public gardens and woodlands, which are all recognized in the planning studies and proposals as elements of concern to town planning. The private garden is probably the most used urban space, as householders enter and leave it daily as they work around the house or relax in the garden. It is highlY valued by most householders, as for instance can be seen in those countries where people of relative affluence have some choice of housing and opt in large numbers to buy into housing areas where gardens are provided. This has a strong influence on urban form. For example, the vast spread of cities such as Perth and Melbourne in Australia has more to do with people's determination to have a garden adjacent to their house than it has to do with the number of people in those cities. In much of suburban U.S.A. the same pattern of sprawling development has occurred for much the same reasons. Even in Britain, where higher housing densities are normal even for private housing because of a very tight development control system and because of the high development costs, almost all recent housing outside city centres has gardens, albeit small ones. The book Meaning of Gardens differs from almost every other book about gardens as it is not about how they have been or should be designed or about the types of plants that can be used but about their importance as a place for people. It has a much more philosophical approach than that normally associated with literature on gardens, which in fact makes it more useful to urban designers and landscape architects when they are at the planning rather than design phase of a project, as it gives them useful arguments as to why gardens are a necessary part of city planning. It covers the history of the garden but in an unconventional way by looking at how people have understood the garden as part of their daily life. It looks at how we perceive the garden today. It contains a fund of ideas about the garden's role in our lives, viewing it both as an everyday place and as a public place. The book is well illustrated, in a way which makes the information in the various chapters more accessible. Whilst to the casual reader some of the more philosophical papers might seem irrelevant to their interests they contain a wealth of ideas and information which challenge and stimulate. The popularity of the garden is not new. One of the authors points out that the concept of the garden was first committed to the written word over 4000 years ago. The words used to express the idea at that early stage were ones which showed people understood the garden as a 'captured' piece of the landscape with connotations of a place 'to protect, to shelter, to save' and as 'a place in which to survive' (Stein in Francis & Hester, 1990). The importance of the garden as a special sheltered place has continued to today. Throughout the papers the theme of the garden as a substitute for nature recurs. The garden is dealt with as a symbol and metaphor (Cooper Marcus in Francis & Hester, 1988) to illustrate this link. It is also dealt with more literally by other authors who show the many different ways in which the garden plays a role in people's lives. The many different levels of awareness involved in our reaction to the garden are also explored. The authors show that the garden provides for satisfying and diverse experiences for urban dwellers in particular. It creates a satisfying and diverse contrast to the often over-ordered and over-simplified public space through which people must travel daily. In this book the garden is seen as a place where people can do practical things like grow vegetables and flowers: it is a place people associate with health, both mental and physical; it is a place that is seen as a satisfactory experience to be in and a
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place which through the ever-changing nature of plant material allows for endless fascination. It is a place where people are aware of many sensual and aesthetic pleasures--noise, touch and smell as well as visual. The book has a useful section on the restorative properties o f the garden and of the act of gardening. The garden's therapeutic value is recognized, as is the role gardens play in people's lives by allowing them the opportunity to have control over their own external environment--a very important factor for urban dwellers in particular where so much of the environment appears hostile and out of the control of the inhabitants. The fact that 'you can be yourself in your own garden' probably makes them such a vital part of the city environment. The books discussed here are just a few of those that the urban designer will refer to when involved in the planning and design process. They are a useful starting point for any.environmental psychologist interested in becoming more effectively involved in the process of city planning or the detail of design. In Conclusion
This review article has been concerned with the flow of information fi'om the environmental psychologists and others from related disciplines to those responsible to making the design decisions. It has only dealt with a small part of the growing body of literature on the relationship between people and the settings for their daily lives. It is written from the point of view of the urban designer and landscape architect needing to understand how designs must be developed if user needs are to be more effectively met in the site planning and design process. It has become urgent that we find new ways of addressing the problem of planning and design in the cities. Cities are changing so fast that we barely seem to have time to think about the problem before we have to tackle specific issues. These are partly related to bad planning and design decisions in the past and partly related to wider social and economic problems. Not all our planning has been wrong; cities in Britain are by and large cleaner and better places in which to live than they were 40 years ago. Many of our present concerns can be recognized as the result of higher expectations from those who live in the cities. However, this still leaves us with the problem of how to plan to meet these higher expectations and the higher levels of general affluence to which most people aspire. Owen (1991) has suggested that we are at the stage where general planning policies can be seen to be well intentioned but too vague to help improve the quality of the environment at the local level. It is at this local level, at the stage of making design decisions about specific sites, that the environmental psychologist's expertise can be so useful to the designer. However, this is only if designers and researchers can find a way of communicating more effectively. References
Alexander, C. et al. (1977). A Pattern Language. New York: Oxford University Press. Beer, A. (1983). Development control and design quality, part 2. 7~)wn Planning Review, 54/4. Beer, A. (1990). Environmental Planningjor Site Development. London: Spon, Chapman and Hall. Booth, K. (1983). Basic Elements qf Lands'cape Architectural Design. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Booth, P. (1983). Development control and design quality, part 1. Town Planning Review, 54[3. Chadwick, G. (1966). The Park and the Town: Public" Landscape in the 19th and 20th Centur&s. London: Architectural Press.
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Cooper Marcus, C. & Sarkissian, W. (1986). Housing as (f People Mattered. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Ching, F. D. K. (1979). Architecture: Form, Space andOrder. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold. Cullen, G. (1961). Townscape. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold. Department of the Environment (DOE) (1979). Residential Roads and Footpaths, Design Bulletin 32. London: HMSO. EC (1990). The Green Paper on the Urban Environment. Brussels: Commission of the European Communities. Essex County Council (1973). Design Guide Jor Residential Areas. Chelmsford: Essex CC. Fabos, J. G. (1985). Land-Use Planning,fi'om Global to Local Challenge. London and New York: Dowden & Culver, Chapman and Hall. Fairweather, L. (1970). and later editions. AJ Metric Handbook. London: Architectural Press. Francis, M. & Hester, R. (1990). The Meaning of'Gardens: Idea, Place and Action. Cambridge, MIT Press. Greenbie, B. (1974). Design for DiversiO'. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Greenbie, B. (1981). Spaces: Dimensions o[the Human Landscape. New Haven: Yale University Press. Harrison, C. & Burgess, J. (1988). Qualitative research and open space policy. The Planner, 16 18. H M Government (1990). "Fhis Common Inheritance: Britain's Environmental Strategy--white paper. London: HMSO. Kaplan, S. & Kaplan, R. (1982). Humanscape, Environments for People. Ann Arbor: Ulrich. Kaplan, S. & Kaplan, R. (1989). Experience of Nature, a Psychological Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Koppelman, L. E. & de Chiara, J. (1984). Time Saver StandardsJor Site Planning. New York: McGraw-Hill. Lawson, B. (1980). How Designers Tbink. London: Butterworth Architecture. Lynch, K. & Hack, G. (1984). Site Planning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Mostyn, B. (1979). Personal Ben¢f~'ts and SatisJiTctions Derived fiom Participation in Urban Wildl([~ Pr~/ects. London: NCC. Owen, S. (1991). Planning Settlements Naturally. Chichester: Packard. Rutledge, A. (1971). Anatomy ~/'a Park. New York: McGraw-Hill. Whittakcr, B. & Brown, K. (1971). Parl(s/br People. London: Seeley.