Describes thirteen cases in which architects, city planners and designers used psychological theory and research to make their work more responsive to the needs of people.

Architects, city planners and other design professionals have used theory and research from psychology and other behavioral sciences to make their work more responsive to the needs of the people who use the buildings, parks and city streets they help to shape. This book describes in detail thirteen cases in which that approach was followed. It analyzes the use of environmental design research in each case, demonstrating how it has made a positive contribution in these cases and how its use can improve design and planning processes in general and thus the quality of the built and natural environments.

The inception of this volume can be traced to a series of Environmental Psychology Colloquia presented at the University of California, Irvine, dur ing the spring of 1974. These colloquia were held in conjunction with Social Ecology 252, a graduate seminar on Man and the Environment. Although the eight colloquia covered a wide range of topics and exemplified a diversity of research techniques, they seemed to converge on some common theoretical and methodological assumptions about the na ture of environment-behavioral research. The apparent continuities among these colloquia suggested the utility of developing a manuscript that would provide a historical overview of research on environment and be havior, a representation of its major concerns, and an analysis of its concep tual and empirical trends. Thus, expanded versions of the initial presen tations were integrated with a supplemental set of invited manuscripts to yield the present volume of original contributions by leading researchers in the areas of ecological and environmental psychology.

Following upon the Handbook of Japan-United States Environment-Behavior Research, published by Plenum in 1997, leading experts review the interrelationships among theory, problem, and method in environment-behavior research. The chapters focus on the philosophical and theoretical assumptions underlying current research and practice in the area and link those assumptions to specific substantive questions and methodologies

This volume is an outgrowth of research on the relations between human beings and their environments, which has developed internationally. This development is evident in environment-behavior research studies conducted in countries other than the United States. See Stokols and Altman (1987) for examples of such work in Australia, Japan, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United King dom, the former Soviet Union, and Latin and North America. The international development of this research area is also evident in the establishment of profes sional organizations in different countries such as the Environment-Behavior De sign Research Association (EDRA) in the United States, the Man-Environment Research Association (MERA) in Japan, the International Association for People-En vironment Studies (lAPS) in Great Britain, and the People and Physical Environ ment Research Association (PAPER) in Australia. This volume focuses on environment-behavior research within Japan and the United States as well as cross-cultural studies involving both countries. As we note in detail in Chapter 1, the conference on which the work presented herein is based was preceded by three Japan-United States conferences on environment-behavior research, the first of which took place in Tokyo in 1980. As currently conceived, the present volume stands alone as a compendium of a Significant proportion of cross-cultural research on environment-behavior relations in Japan and the United States that has been developing over the last 15 years. As such, we envision the volume as a basic interdisciplinary reference for anthropolgists, archi tects, psychologists, SOCiologists, urban planners, and environmental geographers.

Illustrating his points with many references to actual projects, John Zeisel explains, in non-technical language, the integration of social science research and design. The book provides a provocative text for students in all the fields related to environm