Understanding Environment Impacts on People via Environmental Psychology: Three Basic Principles.

Increasing evidence describes significant instances of urban environment impact on people. The field of environmental psychology aims at systematically study how the places people study, work, heal, and live in can exert crucial effects, by carefully detailing such consequences: from individual’s cognition to her/his affect and behaviour. By briefly overviewing some of the main projects carried out or still ongoing at CIRPA, as well as examples from a broader literature, the aim is to show that when a specific urban place (whether workplace or school, hospital or residential neighbourhood, etc.) improves (vs. impoverishes) a urban quality (whether natural, built, functional, social), specific positive (vs. negative) consequences derive at various levels, by considering different target users too. The main option is survey, by means of questionnaire and multivariate analyses; in some cases, field or laboratory experiments test specific cause-effects relations. All presented results demonstrate specific effects of urban planning and urbanization features on people well-being: sometimes these effects can be main and direct, some other times they can be mediated and moderated by other variables. A meaningful process and outcome framework for environment’s features and person’s features is proposed on the basis of three main principles characterizing the relevant scientific knowledge. 1) The structure of the environment-person effect: valence, generalizability, set (positive, general, simple vs. negative, relative, cumulative effects). 2) The process of the environment-person effect: direct and indirect (mediated) effects. 3) The timing of the environment-person effect: short or long-term exposure, with immediate or chronic effects (spill-over and cross-systems). Some examples are offered to illustrate each case, across a range of different methods.