Environmental Psychology: Design Guidelines for Residential Neighborhoods and Planned Communities

Key Topics

• Growth of mass-produced suburban housing developments in the US after WWII: affordability and profitability goals
• Concerns among residents and urban planners about the monotony and sprawl of American tract-housing developments
• Emergence of the New Towns and Intentional Communities movements in the US during the 1960s, and the New Urbanism in the 1990s; gradual emergence of “master planned communities” in the US -- growing awareness of the “power of place” and its relevance to building cohesive communities
  • Individualized (1960s)
• Incorporation of environmental psychology concepts and findings into practical design guidelines for creating more positive residential communities

Mass Production of Suburban Housing Tracts Following WWII

• Developers had a huge opportunity here with the influx of people returning from the war
• There was a surge of optimism people wanted to start families
• There was this ideal of owning your own home and having your nuclear family live in your own space so they began to develop places like Levittown, New York which was one of the first massively planned tract housing communities in the US
• Started on Long Island and then when a US Steel opened a plant in Morrisville, Pennsylvania, the Levitt brothers moved in there
  • Saw a captive market of workers that were going to be moving there, living there, and they created Levittown, Pennsylvania
• Planned Communities Movement
  • One of the foremost proponents of that was Ray Watson, the first president of the Irvine Company
  • Pictured doing some of his early design work for the city of Irvine
  • There was a dedication of his papers and a lot of his resources to the UCI library because he’s been a supporter of the urban planning program at UCI
  • There’s a million dollar endowed fellowship campaign within PDD to assist students in urban studies and planning
• Erit Mayor
  • Did her master’s of urban regional planning in social ecology and PPD 
  • Did a study of planned communities namely Irvine’s Woodbridge as compared to Fountain Valley so she did a comparative study of people’s reactions to those 2 places and some of the symbols and themes you find in plant communities are typified by Woodbridge where you have a very heavy emphasis on natural elements (2 human-made lakes, some views of the mountains, bike trails that surround the lakes, clear branding with the name of the village, fence and the small wall that goes around much of that property, etc.)

Research on Planned Communities in the US

• Irvine, California: emphasis on developing a strong sense of place through design guidelines
• Columbia, Maryland: emphasis on promoting and sustaining racial integration
• Woodlands, Texas: emphasis on habitat preservation and organic architecture and community planning

Environmental Psychology Concepts-- A Basis For Design Guidelines

• Systems theory and social ecology
• Person-environment fit (or congruence)
• Environmental symbolism; place-based and virtual settings
• Environmental determinism; moderators of environmental influence
• Physiological and psychological stress, learned helplessness, overload 
• Density and crowding; ceiling density, carrying capacity
• Privacy, personal space, territoriality
• Spatial proximity, functional distance, friendship formation
• Intimacy gradients and defensible space
• Impact of environmental stressors on behavior and health
• Cognitive and behavioral mapping; imagability, legibility
• Personality and environment (stimulation seeking, hardiness)
• Environmental attitudes and assessments
• Place identity, physical traces, identity claims
• Behavior settings, over- and understaffing; third places
• Influence of human behavior on environmental quality
• Operant reinforcement, feedback, social norms, social praise
• Human response to natural and technological disasters

Arcology

• The fusion of architecture and ecology, emphasizing compact 3D settlements to counter urban sprawl and conserve natural resources

The Planned Community of Reston, VA

• Featuring a walkable downtown with human scale
• How do you make a community human scale and walkable and comfortable for pedestrians
• A lot of emphasis on sittable space on street trees, an ice rink in the middle of the town where people can gather around and watch the kids skate, vendors where people set up shop and it creates a kind of social space that humanizes and bring that those tall buildings down to more of a human scale

Irvine’s Urban Design Implementation Plan

• A policy-oriented package of urban design goals, principles, policies, and suggested design guidelines for elements having majors impacts on the city’s form and character
• Key Elements
  • Hierarchy of roads
  • Separating people from the freeway, high volume traffic, down to the inner cul-de-sacs that go through the residential areas
  • Freeways, north-south and east-west arterials, village collector roads, and cul-de-sacs
  • Streetscape design
  • To make the different levels of road very imageable and legible to people so they know where they are 
  • Gradient from public to private
  • Going from one level of publicness or formality to a more private neighborhood so they texture the pavement. They put a kind of landscaping that announces that you’re going through an entry point to create that kind of gradient
  • Open space plan
  • The idea of creating several villages that people can choose among where they want to live
  • Residential villages
  • Village collector road, activity corridor which serves as sort of your high density nodes, people-made lakes to bring people into contact with nature, the university town center plan which originally when it was designed was intended to be much more mixed-used that we’re going to be people living on top of the shops in the shopping center but that didn’t quite past the muster with the planners
  • Recreational areas
  • Civic center
  • Commercial centers
  • Different age groups accommodated

Incorporation of Howard’s Garden City Ideals in the Planning of in Irvine

• Provision of residential villages that emphasize recreation and proximity to nature
• Emphasis on safety, security, cleanliness, and order
• Separation of residential areas from high-volume automobile traffic

Ring Mall and Anteater Ballpark

• Campus third places that contribute to UCI’s ambiance and place identity

Dialectic Dimensions for Characterizing Human Settlements

• Individuality/Community
• Homogeneity/Diversity
• Order/Disorder

A Children’s Book about Environmental Psychology

• A parable about place identity and the tension between individuality and communality in planned communities

Laguna Beach, CA

• Compared to Irvine, CA and other Planned Communities:
  • Greater emphasis on individuality
  • Less concern about orderliness
  • Greater emphasis on diversity

Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities

• In terms of Altman & Chemers’ Qualities of Communities
  • Blend of individuality and community
  • Greater homogeneity than diversity
  • Strong emphasis on order and orderliness
• One of the features of a planned community is that it has a long range plan that goes out a hundred years 
• Says exactly what’s going to happen each year in terms of what’s going where, how the land is going to be used
• Elements related to housing, relating to commercial and retail space, relating to schools, churches

Ecological Theory of Crime

• Perpetration of crime requires:
  • The presence motivated offender/s and suitable targets  +  environmental opportunities to carry out the crime (e.g., absence of capable guardians, “lurkable” environments, lack of defensible space)

Cul de Sacs - Pros and Cons

• (+) Associated with lower crime rates
• (+) Strengthen secondary block territories and promote contact among neighbors
• (-) May confuse motorists and impede emergency vehicle access
• Landscaping is a very important part of the territorial system; can be as effective as a wall

Defensible Space

• Those features of an environment that serve to bring it under the control of its occupants; emphasis is on promoting residents’ opportunities for informal surveillance of secondary territories

Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED)

• Crime prevention programs at federal and state levels that combine Newman’s defensible space theory and environmental design recommendations with social, management, and law enforce strategies

Limitations of Defensible Space Theory and Research

• Environmental Determinism - ignores the cognitive and behavioral processes underlying defensible space

• Little attention given to the number of design factors necessary for defensible space and their relative importance

• Too much emphasis on “defensive” neighborhoods that are divided along class and ethnic lines rather than on cohesive and culturally integrated communities

• Methodological limitations related to sample selection and measurement issues

  

• Environmental Psychology focuses on these psychological and behavioral processes that link the environment to specific behavioral or health outcomes 

• If the environment includes certain kind of symbolic barriers, actual barriers, detectability factors, and physical traces of residents’ presence, it’s going to create cognitions or certain kinds of feelings and perceptions in residents and burglars’ heads and that determines whether there’s going to be victimization or security so the physical environment is mediated by these psychological processes that then explain whether crime occurs or not

Four Classes of Territorial Indicators

• Symbolic Barriers (e.g., welcome mats, personalized signs, color schemes)
• Actual Barriers (e.g., locks, alarms, guards, gates, walls)
• Physical Traces of Presence or Absence (e.g., lights on in the home, car in driveway, TV sounds, uncollected mail or newspapers)
• Detectability Factors (e.g., squeaky gates, barking dogs that influence the visual or auditory accessibility of a home and of people near or in the home)

Differences Between Burglarized and Non-Burglarized Homes

Symbolic Neighborhood Markers

• These prominent stone columns at a neighborhood entry point indicate a transition from the public territory of the sidewalk and pacific coast highway to the secondary territory of the neighborhood

Actual Barriers

• Actual barriers of Crystal Cove include a guard house and gate through which vehicles must pass to enter the neighborhood
• These features are designed to strengthen residents’ sense of community and security

Examples of Symbolic and Actual Barriers

• Changes in elevation and landscaping elements symbolically strengthen the boundary between secondary and primary territories in Crystal Cove
• The bars on the windows exemplify an actual barrier between the secondary territory of the front yard and the primary territory of the home

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