Environmental Perception and Behavioral Geography

Abstract

Three foci and combinations of them constitute the basis for nearly all of EPBG’s concerns: human activities, human experiences, and all forms of empirical surroundings. With these as fundamentals, this specialization is viewed as a working framework for exploring situations of people engaged in activities and having experiences in ordinary spatial and/or environmental contexts (Goody and Gold 1985, 1987; Aitken et al. 1989; Golledge and Timmermans 1990a, b; Aitken 1991, 1992; Kitchin 1996). For at least the 1960s and 1970s, common ways of exploring human geographic issues entailed framing them as spatial-like representations for observation and study. The main focus was on structural features of spatial patterns such as density differences, dispersions, clusters, arrangements, shapes, configurations, connectivities, and spatial hierarchies, among others, and the typical research goal was to describe and account for those features over time (Amedeo and Golledge 1986; Abler et al. 1971; Haggett 1966; Haggett and Chorley 1969). The reasoning employed in works such as these followed the ways in which the issues themselves were represented. It included examinations and evaluations of spatial co-variances, distance-decay regularities, contagious and competitive effects in spatial diffusions, spatial clustering in regionalizing and in regional ecologies, and more general applications of process-form type arguments. These approaches were largely structural in perspective and had few, if any, provisions for consideration of individual behavior and experience. Concurrent with this spatial-structural perspective, however, efforts were also being devoted to understanding human decision-making in spatial contexts. Consumer choices in market places, industrial and retail location decisions, trip determinations, competitive decision-making in space, and spatial-allocation determinations were some of the main topics investigated (Golledge and Stimson 1997). This emphasis on spatial decision-making no doubt generated the impulse for further behavioral research in geography. It did so largely through the effects of its successes and limitations, both of which provided many opportunities for thoughtful criticisms and explorations into additional behavioral issues. Its successes demonstrated that knowledge about people acting in spatial contexts could be gained by focusing on individuals as spatial decision-makers and studying their concomitant spatial search and learning processes (Golledge 1969; Golledge and Brown 1967; Gould 1965).