Community Environmental Psychology

1. Community Environmental Psychology

2. What is Neighborhood? • Is a psychological concept? • Not every physical or legal area is a neighborhood. • One psychological dimension of neighborhoods is their spatial-cognitive nature

3. What is Neighborhood? • Neighborhood has boundaries  Within these boundaries, neighborhood • may be urban/suburban; • may contain industrial, commercial, and/or residential development; • may have underdeveloped areas and/or developed parks; • may be old or new, graced with quiet tree-lined streets or split by major roads; • May include varying percentages of high-rise, low-rise, and single-family as residences.

4. Downtown vs. suburban • Downtown neighborhoods contain more mixed land uses, traffic and parking problems, noise, crowding, stress, danger, pavement, and mess. e.g, Chow Kit, Pudu

5. Types of Neighborhood: • The integral neighborhood • The parochial neighborhood • The anomic neighborhood

6. The integral neighborhood • has much face-to-face interaction • much cohesiveness from neighborhood support of local interest and values, and • much participation in organizations outside the neighborhood.

7. The parochial neighborhood • is like the integral neighborhood except that it has fewer ties to outside organizations • it is inwardly facing and may even discourage participation in the wider community.

8. The anomic neighborhood • has little face-to-face contact, • little identification and few ties to the outside world.

9. Satisfaction & Confidence • Satisfaction is related to neighborhood confidence • which is positively related to staying instead of moving • a greater social cohesion among residents. • Satisfaction can be measured by asking about to what extent of positive social relations, clear and symbolic interaction, and strong attachment in the neighborhood. • Neighborhood satisfaction is composed of residents’ satisfaction with the neighborhoods’ physical conditions, political climate, convenience (e.g., access to schools, work, and shopping), and social relations

10. Neighborhood Satisfaction & Attachment

11. Factors that influence neighborhood satisfaction: • Personal influences • Physical influences • Social and Security influences • Cultural influences

12. Personal influences • Beliefs of the improvement of their current neighborhood • A higher interest level for their neighborhood • They feel at home • Adaptation to the level of neighborhood • Ownership or renting • Stage of life.

13. Physical influences • Is it noisy, expensive, downtown, split by major transportation routes, smoggy? • Other key factors • visual quality • Aesthetics • Green space

14. Social And Security Influences • Social network can create satisfaction. • Safety fears, e.g: • parental concerns about possible traffic accidents involving children • widespread fear of crime (theft, rape, drug abuse, illegal activities such as gambling and prostitution). • Adakah anda lebih suka membeli rumah di sekitar Chow Kit atau Taman Universiti?

15. Cultural influences • a congruence between residents’ culture • the era with which they identify • the physical form of the community

16. Place Identity and Place Attachment • Place Identity and Place Attachment • refers to an individual’s incorporation of place into the larger concept of self. • We develop special bonds with certain settings that have deep meaning for us

17. Sources Of Place Attachment • Genealogy link persons with places through the historical identification of a place with a family. • Loss and destruction  sometimes build or strengthen place attachment. • Ownership • Cosmological place attachment refers to a culture’s religious and mythological views on person-place attachment. • We may attached to a place where we make a pilgrimage • Narrative: place attachment can develop through stories

18. Community Urbanization and Stress

19. Community Urbanization and Stress • Have higher rates of mental illness: schizophrenics • William Rohe – model of connection between community design and mental health. • Physical stressors: high density, through streets, poor upkeep of public places, a lack of community meeting places, and high-rise residences.

20. Behaviors in the Community Environment • Anti-social Behaviour: • Community Design – Crime and vandalism are linked to or facilitated by certain aspects of the physical nature of a community

21. How to reduce crimes through community design? • More residential, with few thru’ streets & little public parking • To reduce passage by strangers through an area • Have less street signs indicate a residential area with more control by residents • Shorter apartments & less units per floor/total units so that residents know one another & who lives in the building • Close some of the entrances to the neighborhood, install speed bumps to slow down traffic, install gates with the neighborhood logo, divide the community into mini-neighborhoods with physical barriers • Install lights in the darker areas near the main corners • Have defensible space characteristics/ design • Increases visual surveillability of a building, esp for bank • Diversity increases public social interaction among residents, which thereby helps discourage crime

22. Weather • High temperatures /heat discomfort causes riots and other social aggression and violence

23. Air Pollution • Bad odors negatively affect mood and attraction to others. • A moderately bad odor was found to have facilitated aggression. • Higher levels of photochemical oxidants in the air were correlated with more domestic disputes and more instances of psychiatric disturbance

24. Helpfulness • Weather • We help when the weather is nice (?!) • Noise • Loud noise reduces helping behaviours • Number of People • Number of bystanders and prosocial behaviors • Community Design and the Immediate Surroundings • Women helped more in the complex settings and men helped more in the simple settings • Women are more likely than men to becooperative and helpful when the population density is high • Blind person was helped significantly more

25. Everyday Behavior Watching – by three modes • Responsive mode • We look in a receptive, passive manner and see people and things as a sensory experience, almost as a form of entertainment or recreation • Operational Mode • We look in a problem-solving way • We look around with purpose – look for signs and familiar landmarks • Inferential Mode • We look at the community as a medium of communication. • We look for social messages and make our inferences of the objects different from others. • We see an empty lot, the developer sees a building site

26. Everyday Behavior • Walking • Walking Velocity: V = .86 log P + .05, where V is velocity in feet per second and P is the population of the community. • However, pedestrian velocities was found to be reliably vary from the overall average under certain conditions. • Making decision: • When people walk, they also make many decisions, most of which are hardly conscious • E.g., when and where to cross the street.

27. Everyday Behavior • Hanging Out • Often occurs in the fourth environment (anywhere except home, playgrounds, other places meant for kids.) • Homeless and poor people also hang out on the streets • Familiar Strangers • e.g., commuters, pedestrians, shoppers, passengers. • Familiar strangers could lead us to help them in emergency because we know them for years

28. The Environmental Psychology of Shopping • Retail environment • Shopping is an essential human activity. • It has the following functions: social, recreational, and utilitarian

29. Forces that shape our shopping • Location, Size, and Attractiveness • Most shoppers choose the closest store that stocks what they want to buy. In general, they will select the largest store. • Gravitation Model  If all other factors are equal, consumers gravitate to larger stores and to closer stores. • Attractiveness of the product • Layout  spatial layout of supermarket • Be more sensitive to the social needs of shoppers • Emotional Impact • Store-induced pleasure and arousal • Density • Crowding in the shopping environment is another physical setting influence on consumer behavior • Display • Purchasing is affected by how goods are displayed. Shelf-height, end-aisle placement, and location within the store may affect normal buying and impulsive buying • Music • Slow music encourages shoppers to stay longer and to shop more goods

30. Community Environmental Design • Renovations to reduce fear of crime and actual crime: • assigned as much public space to the control of specific families, using both substantial and symbolic fencing • reduced the number of pedestrian routes through project and improved lighting along the paths • improved the project’s image and encouraged a sense of personal ownership by resurfacing the dwellings, giving different colors to individual dwellings

31. Plazas as Social Space • Plazas become more useful as the number of amenities rise • Features of successful plazas: • sittable space, • water (fountains and pools), • food stands, accessible food outlets • trees, • activities to watch (jugglers, mimes, and buskers) • sitting with sunny orientation (or a shady orientation in hot cities), • provide shelter from wind, • located on busy streets rather than hidden away

32. Bringing a neighborhood to Life Sidney Brower’s guidelines: 1. Keep the street front alive 2. Give residents things to do and places to be 3. Reduce the speed and number of cars 4. Residences should open to street, not from some central courtyard 5. Make parks more attractive to adults 6. Distinguish between home-based recreation and park activities