1 Introduction to Environmental Psychology

Living in the Mall

Beginning in the 1960s, many American cities saw people moving away from their downtown areas and out into suburbs. At least, they saw a certain type of person moving away from their downtown areas and out into the suburbs. Following World War II, many returning soldiers had taken advantage of the provisions in the GI Bill – a bill that gave benefits to soldiers that fought in World War II. Some popular provisions included down payment assistance on a house and tuition money to go to college. Those that were able to take advantage of the GI Bill saw an increase in their earning power and personal wealth. However, many of the provisions in the GI Bill were not made available to returning soldiers if those returning soldiers were people of color. Many policy decisions worked together to place obstacles in the way of people of color for accessing G.I. Bill benefits. The housing policy of Red Lining in which neighborhoods where many people of color lived were specifically sectioned off from being eligible for down payment assistance is one example. Regardless of the specific policies, the time after World War II saw an increase in the wealth gap between white Americans and people of color. And as white Americans built wealth and earning power, they started to use that increased wealth to buy housing farther away from the city, in suburbs. This phenomenon came to be called “White Flight” and referred to the large number of white, generally upper-middle class residents that began leaving downtowns across the country; choosing instead to set up residence in suburbs that were mostly filled with people of their same race and social class. Many research articles, books, movies, etc. have been written on the topic and its implications for a wide variety of audiences. Our focus here is on the systems that must respond to these large-scale changes.

Suburbs are usually governmentally independent of the neighboring city. By this I mean that they typically have their own mayor, city council, city departments, and city services that are separate from the large city nearby. They may tie into the larger systems, such as the water and sewer system, but generally that comes at a cost. And that cost is typically paid by property taxes that residents of the suburb pay to their suburban city council rather than to the government of the large city. So when white, moderately wealthy residents began to move away from downtown areas, they tended to take a reasonably large share of property taxes with them. This meant the large city government no longer had the revenue needed to provide essential city services like transportation, nor could it deal with problems that can be unique to cities like large-scale homelessness. Over a 30-year period, this led many downtowns across the United States to decay leading to a perception of downtown areas as dirty, unsafe, and of lower social class.

During the 1990s many cities started programs to rejuvenate their downtown areas. Many of these programs involved tax breaks for doing things like renovating historic buildings, starting businesses that provide essential services like grocery stores and pharmacies, and in some cases encouraging large businesses to establish business downtown and helping with “reclamation” of the land – a term that can mean everything from cleaning up vacant lots to forcing poor residents from their homes and knocking those homes down to clear space for the large business.

Our specific story begins in Providence, Rhode Island. Like many cities, the downtown area of Providence had experienced White Flight and the repercussions of it. And, like many cities, they started providing tax incentives for large businesses to move into the downtown area. One of the businesses that took Providence up on its offer was a large-scale shopping mall. The city leaders of Providence hoped that a large shopping mall would encourage white, wealthy people to return to the downtown area and provide a much-needed boost to city revenues. By-and-large, it worked. But our story is not about that.

Our story is about Michael Townsend, a starving artist who lived in a small, run-down apartment about a half mile away from the new shopping center. Michael took morning runs and part of his route would take him around the construction site of the new mall. He watched over the course of months as construction proceeded on the shopping mall. He started to notice patterns in the way everything was constructed. As an artist, he was quite good at understanding spatial relationships. He started to catalogue which spaces would be useful for what purpose. He could recognize that one space was likely a large store, another space a small store, another space a maintenance room, and still another space a hallway or connecting area. And then one day he noticed that there was one area that didn’t seem to be the right size or shape for anything in a mall. In fact, it seemed to be entirely negative space – defined only by what it was not. It wasn’t a large store, it wasn’t a small store, it wasn’t a utility room or connecting hallway. It seemed to be nothing.

Construction was completed on the mall in 1999 and it began doing exactly what city leaders had hoped it would do. People with money to spend started returning to the downtown area. Soon, other businesses started springing up nearby, bike trails were set up, and residents began moving back in a now typical pattern of gentrification. Our starving artist is still living in his more affordable living-space, but the end is coming quickly. New residents are clamoring for a grocery store to be built and they have found a developer willing to make it happen. The only problem is that the developer wants to build the grocery store on the land currently occupied by the building in which Michael Townsend lives. Of course, Michael and the other residents attempt to resist this move, but in the end the building is knocked flat to establish a grocery store for the other residents.

Now with nowhere to go, Michael lives with friends on their couches for a while and looks for other places to live. Unfortunately, they are all becoming too expensive for him to afford on his artist’s income. Then, one night, he gets an idea. He decides that he is going to go looking for the negative space in the mall that he saw years before as they were building. He thinks it might even be possible to get into it from the outside. So, in the middle of the night, he and some friends go searching around the outside of the mall for a way into this negative space room. And they find it. It’s about 750 square feet, which isn’t huge but isn’t small by any means. It is exactly as they think it would be – a space in the mall representing the back side of many other walls. Nothing is finished, there is left over construction mess everywhere, but it is warm, dry, and the electricity is accessible. Possibilities start to form in their minds.

These friends begin a process of turning this negative space within the mall into a livable space. First, they need a way to access the room during the daytime. They can’t be seen sneaking around the mall during the day, wiggling into cracks from the outside. They find the exact type of hidden doors that the mall uses and install one to create an interior entrance to their negative space room. Now they can come and go at most hours. They clean everything up, splice into the electricity, and begin to live in the walls of the downtown mall of Providence, RI. And the mall has most things they need to live. You can buy nearly anything at a large-scale mall like this and nobody questions you if you are walking through the mall with big things – for example beds, a china hutch, and a sectional couch. There is a bathroom down the hall and the is a food court is easily accessible for meals. When you aren’t paying rent, prepared food is more affordable, after all. The line-up of people living in this room changes over time – someone would move out and someone else would move in. But in general, this situation holds over the next four years (See this link for a news story with photos of the “apartment”).

They are eventually discovered. Security guards find their room and begin asking questions about who might be occupying this space. They find a collection of photographs and use them to identify mall shoppers that match the photographs. Eventually, Michael is found and arrested by the police. However, once in court most of the criminal complaints are thrown out. Michal receives probation on a trespassing charge and is banned for life from the mall.

Environmental Psychology

Welcome to Environmental Psychology. Environmental Psychology is the study of how people and places interact and intersect with one another. It involves both the natural environment – environments that exist with limited human disruption – and the built environment – environments specifically engineered by people. Environmental Psychology is a very applied field in this regard. In some ways, that makes the structure of this book easier to write because many of the concepts can be illustrated with stories like the one that opened this chapter. In fact, this is the way the entire book will be structured. Each chapter will begin with a story that will be helpful to understanding the concepts inside the chapter. Then, as the concepts are explained, I will refer back to specific elements of the story as a way to reinforce the concepts you will be learning. All of the stories in this book are generally true, but as with most stories there will be elements that are rounded off, taken out, or added that deviate from the complete and absolute truth. You might find it useful to search for additional information about each story to add to your full understanding of the context surrounding each one.

Transactions

The story of the group of friends living in the walls of the mall is useful to understand the concept of transactions. Transactions are situations in which people enter a space and – by virtue of being humans – alter or change an environment. But then, because the changes made by the people, the environment also changes in response. The changing environment forces people to change their thoughts, feelings, and actions to respond to the new environment that they now inhabit. In other words, transactions represent feedback loops in which people change the environment and the environment changes the people in potentially strange and unpredictable ways.

To illustrate the concept of transactions further, let’s go back to our story about the mall residents. Let’s pick up the change to the environment in the 1990s. In this case, the people making the change are the city leaders of Providence. They change their tax structure to entice businesses to move back to the city center. City leaders have a goal of increasing revenue for the city so they can provide more city services. By bringing the shopping mall to downtown Providence, they largely succeed in that goal. Businesses begin to grow and prosper. People begin to return to the city center to live. As they do, they increase property values bringing up property tax revenue. But this change in environment now has effects that cascade through the environment. As the neighborhood gentrifies, the new residents want close access to things they need, like a grocery store. Previously, the people living in the downtown area either simply accepted that getting a grocery store built was not going to happen that day and that the trip to getting groceries would be a long trek by either car or public transportation. They had very little power or influence over civic or business decision makers to get a grocery store built anywhere close to them. The new residents were not willing to accept this and do have influence over those leaders. After all, the new residents living there was the whole point of the city investing in the mall in the first place. And as such, they demanded a grocery store and were listened to.

And now our feedback loop turns again. The grocery store is built and those that were living in the run-down buildings that were knocked down to make room for it must adapt to their terrible change in circumstance. And here the feedback loop becomes unpredictable. No one could have predicted that one of the people displaced by the grocery store would have both the knowledge of the negative space room and the where-with-all to break into it. No one could have predicted that they would have the skills and attention to detail needed to build an interior entrance. But they did. And they used those skills to adapt to an environment that had changed underneath them.

Now, the environment begins to change the people that live in the negative-space room, due to the new constraints and opportunities. The group must become more insular. They have an idea that living in the walls of a mall is not typical or “normal” behavior and if they are found, police and the courts will likely become involved. They must be very careful who they tell about their residence and who they bring over. They need to adapt to when they can come and go from their residence to correspond to hours in which the mall is open. In this case that wasn’t terribly difficult as the mall was open late to accommodate late-night movies at the movie theatre and opened early for older residents to use the space as a walking track. But there were about four hours during the middle of the night in which they could not be seen in the main area of the mall as no one was supposed to be there – the doors were all locked and guards were monitoring security cameras.

These systematic changes are the essence of transactions. People are always changing their environment, experiencing the systematic effects of those environmental changes, and then adapting to the new or additional changes that those systematic effects bring. It is a constant feedback loop. This means that when Environmental Psychologists begin to study a situation, they are usually looking for these consistent feedback loops to be present in a situation. This makes an Environmental Psychologist uniquely adept at systematic thinking and to exploring unexpected systematic effects. However, it also means that it can be very difficult to obtain the sort of experimental control that is often expected of psychologists that primarily do their research in laboratories.

Research Methods

Research into Environmental Psychology topics often takes a more applied perspective on problems. As mentioned above, it can be very difficult to establish the sort of experimental control that many scientists expect when dealing with feedback loops. Feedback loops mean that the situation or context that you start with, what are sometimes called the initial conditions, are always changing and never the same from one trial to the next. It can be very difficult to know that any intervention actually caused the change that an environmental psychologist is observing.

Because of the difficulty in establishing causation, Environmental Psychologists often design studies to maximize external validity. External validity refers to ensuring that whatever outcomes are discovered are applicable to a wide variety of situations and contexts. Maximizing external validity comes with a trade-off. When we maximize external validity, we tend to minimize internal validity. Internal validity refers to establishing that a relationship between two variables absolutely exists. Internal validity can also refer to the process of establishing that one element of that relationship is a cause and the other is an effect. When we discuss relationships in science we simply mean that we observe two different things – maybe it’s traffic accidents and whether a bike lane is present or absent. These two variables – accidents and bike lanes – are said to be related to one another if a change in one seems to be matched by a change in the other. So, in this case if we add a bike lane do traffic accidents go down? If they do, accidents and bike lanes could be said to be in a relationship. Studies designed to clearly establish relationships must be done with extreme control. This means that everything else about the context of the situation must be exactly the same as it was before we changed something – in this case adding a bike lane. But that can very difficult to achieve in applied settings. Maybe the the bike lane being there makes some drivers nervous and causes them to choose to take another route on their commute. This could lower the number of cars driving on the street, which could be the true cause of the reduced accidents we observe.

The closest that Environmental Psychologists generally come to establishing internal validity is often through quasi-experiments. Quasi-experiments look like true experiments on their face, but are very often missing a key element of a true experiment – random assignment.

When we design an experiment, we generally go about it by making multiple groups and then inducing a change in one of the groups while keeping the other one(s) the same. By formal logic, we can infer that if we notice a difference in the group we changed, but not in the other groups, then whatever we changed was the cause of the difference. However, to make that formal logic work, all the groups must be as similar as possible before we start. Random assignment is how we make that happen. When we randomly assign people to the different groups, the things that make all the people different from one another in those groups tend to average out. So, even though the people in the groups might all be different, the groups themselves should generally be equivalent to one another because all those differences should be equivalent.

Quasi-experiments lack random assignment. We still have two or more groups, and we still observe a change in one of those groups while doing our best to maintain the other groups as the same. However, we are not in control of who is in each group. In the field of Environmental Psychology, this is likely because the people already belong to a group and researchers have no power to change those group memberships. Imagine a researcher who wants to understand how crowding in schools leads to changes in learning outcomes. You are not going to be able to randomly assign some students to an overcrowded school and others to an undercrowded school, especially if you predict that students at the overcrowded school are not going to learn as well as the students in the undercrowded school. There would be a long line of upset parents out your office door, and that would only be the first of your many problems if you tried to run this study. Instead, you will need to find schools that are already overcrowded or undercrowded and observe changes between these schools.

However, researchers have a problem when they want to interpret results from quasi-experiments. Because the people in the study were not randomly assigned between the groups, we have no way of knowing if the groups are equivalent in all other ways except the thing we are studying. Overcrowding on its own might be the cause of lower learning outcomes, but there are other explanations. Overcrowded schools are often overcrowded because they are in underfunded areas. Would funding perhaps be the cause of the lower learning outcomes, and if we just gave this school enough money to function the overcrowded nature of the school simply would not matter. From our example, we do not know the answer to that question because we couldn’t make the schools equivalent in every other way but their level of crowding.

The focus of Environmental Psychology experiments is generally on external validity. The studies you will read about in this book are often highly applicable. They have been studied in many different contexts with many different people and tend to work out in similar ways. However, we are never quite sure exactly why the relationship we are seeing exists. We know that bike lanes tend to reduce traffic accidents between automobiles and bicycles. We just don’t know why. Maybe bike lanes make vehicle drivers more aware of bicyclists, maybe bicyclists act in safer ways when bike lanes are present, or maybe bike lines potentially reduce car traffic on the roads they are built on. There are any number of possible reasons and the way we tend to study these relationships does not allow us to rule all of them out. The research highlighted in this book will generally focus more on the How than the Why because that is the research that is typically done in this field.

Summary

Environmental Psychology is the study of transactions between humans and the environment. Transactions are feedback loops between human action and the environment. The focus on transactions makes Environmental Psychology a very applied field and studies within Environmental Psychology tend to maximize external validity and generally overlook deficits in internal validity.