Susan Saegert

The Graduate Center of the City University of New York

EDRA and I met not at the birth but when it was a young and callow fellow full of promise, enthusiasm, energy and divergent tendencies. In the allocated six minutes, I will reflect on what I have learned and the shared project that has grown through the Environmental Psychology Program at CUNY. EDRA remains a close sibling of the births 50 years ago of both endeavors. Board members, participants in the conferences and EDRA members include a steady stream of Environmental Psychology students, alumni, and faculty. We share practical goals of improving environments and the use of systematic research to understand what aspects of environments work best and why. Yet, in many ways the Environmental Psychology Program at the CUNY Graduate Center and EDRA have grown apart. The Environmental Psychology developed at the Graduate Center began with aninterest in bringing empirically based investigations of environmental design into the practice of architecture and the actual design of places. But the program also grew out of a critique of existing psychology as being based on unrealistic assumptions about the relationships between people and their environments. The interdependence of behavior and environments was a touchstone of this critique. It led different members of the program in different directions but remains a constant and still diverges from mainstream psychology’s treatment of individuals as the site of dynamic causality in their responses to environmental opportunities, constraints and presses, or as the determining factor of interest in perception, cognition, affect, and behavior. More and more this tendency has been further winnowed down to a part of the body,especially the brain, or algorithms analogous to computer programs. As the Environmental Psychology program grew our understanding of both environments and behavior became imbued with the collective, culturally and politically economically produced nature of both people and the environments we inhabit. Biology is not denied, it is contextualized. The program came to include over timenot only architects and landscape architects but also an anthropologist, city planners, sociologists and geographers. My own research expanded from its early stages of lab experimental and field quasi-experimental studies of human crowding to issues of gender and the environment, and then community- based partnerships to find ways that people living in problematic environments can collectively create better alternatives. The rest of this summary highlights some main moments and lessons in that journey.

Moment one: Harlem in the early 1980s: I’m studying abandoned buildings by talking with people who live in them. WHAT?

Definitions of people, behaviors, and environments are a matter of perspective, experience, and concern. People living in the devastation of buildings and neighborhoods abandoned by capital and the state were not just responding to the conditions in which they lived, but actively trying to organize at multiple scales to change them. Cooperating with research on the effects of either the environmental conditions they lived in or the effects of public policies on their lives was only of interest if their views of the situation and the policies and their actions to improve their lives and conditions were front and center. Researchers, policy makers and even housing and community advocates saw their neighborhoods and homes as abandoned; the people I met nonetheless inhabited the so-called abandoned spaces and were actively remaking the environment. Their agency within networks of other residents, activists, histories of dealing with discrimination and harsh conditions, and the genealogy of activism in New York City were as much a part of them as their brains, their habits, their individual stress exposures, their coping skills etc. Coping was not an individual phenomenon nor was it the goal; they aimed to change their individual and collective relationships to their homes, the state and capital and were in the process of remaking the physical and social buildings and neighborhoods.

Moment two: Finding Philosophical Pragmatism

While immersed in the environment I was studying and working with people who knew much more about the environment in useful ways, I found that the research traditions and theories thatI had learned in social psychological graduate school were beside the point. Environments and people are co-constituted at every level; agency is a distributed and often uncertain property of the engagements of people with each other, institutions, laws, financial instruments, buildings etc.. Outcomes were not only uncertain but not really outcomes, rather moments in the uncertain unfolding of contingencies of satisfying and distressing, even life-threatening and life-changing events, that give onto other events.

Read against the background of Marx, Latour, Bourdieu and other social theorists, the work of John Dewey, as well as William James and Charles Sanders Peirce offered me guidance in “a way of knowing in a world without certainty” (Westbrook, 1991, p. 357). I will point to three of the starting points I gained from these Pragmatists:

1. There are no moments of time that are the “before” condition. Everything we experience and those we study come to us within the language, habits, experiences and contingencies we have learned to expect. There are no moments out of time when our “brain” is working on something but only always our brains are working with all that is going on in us and around us. We and the environment are continuous with each other and within each together. William James argued against the A causes B form of causation. The thing of interest required backward reconstruction because of the many things including our own thought processes that brought into being the idea and experience of the outcome. (James, 1907).

2. There are no separate “faculties” of perception, affect, cognition and behavior….they are intertwined and unfolding together. (Dewey, l896).

3. Individuals, the concept of individuals, the phenomenological experience of being an individual and the social expectations for who individuals are and what individuals are responsible for, come into being through long historical processes. (Dewey, 1916/1944).

Examples of a few implications:

Racialized Apprehension of Space

Babies are born into situated, social/material environments. They/we come to see act, inhabit the world through socio-material engagement and the rewards and punishments of ouractivities. Values and understandings of environments emerge through experiences and social knowledge (right, wrong or questionable) of the opportunities, constraints, satisfactions and pain that occur in them or is expected. These processes do not go on entirely within individuals but rather include laws, financial arrangements, social practices including police practices. The relations among categories of people and with the political economy are perceptually and consequentially real in direct experience. (See Brown, 2019)

KidsPlayinginBrooklynBridgePark

Kidsplayinginmodelpublichousing

OneofthestillgreenlawnsatGowanus Houses, goingfast.

Production of Spatial Imaginaries and Affordances

Our field aims to contribute to the design of “better spaces”. This formulation includes so many questions. A few of these questions areas follows: 1) better for whom; 2) as judged by whom; 3) how are our own interests reflected and affected by the designs?

One frequently encountered issue concerns community organizing against proposed urban and building designs beloved by their creators and the political and financial interests that promote them. Such community reactions have been dismissed (though not dealt with) as NIMBYism. That term conflates and judges many different routes to disagreement. These routes should instead be unpacked and understood as aspects of the real existing and future environment. They may indeed arise from a desire to promulgate white and class hegemony but that makes them the more potent from a predictive point of view. They may also arise from a variety of valid protests against the continuation of historically frequent environmental injustice. And also a mix of both.

Below is an example of a contested vision promoted by New York City politicians, and urban planners. Design consultants have been enlisted and developers are enthusiastic. It includes some affordable housing (not actually affordable to many but more so than many “affordable” housing units built by private developers in order to build more upscale housing units). The development plans are for the banks of the Gowanus Canal, an as of yet unremediated Superfund site. The designation of the Gowanus as a superfund site solidified cooperation among diverse actors in the community and derailed Bloomberg administration rezoning but it is back with the current mayor. Why then are community residents ranging from those living in public housing through long-term, mostly white and often over 50 residents and environmental activists so upset? Can it be resolved ?So far participatory planning led by governmental agencies has failed to seem like more than window dressing on development schemes.

Proposed vision for Gowanus Canal

NYCHA Gowanus House

Gowanus Draft Zoning Proposal Open House (Photo: Nathan Hase

An activist group hijacked the NYC Department of City Planning‘s (DCP) Gowanus Draft Rezoning Proposal open house Wednesday night, staging their own meeting.

References

Brown, T. (2019). Racialized Architectural Space: A critical understanding of its Production, Perception and Evaluation. Architecture, Media and Society 15 (3).

Bingham , B.&Opotow,S. (in press). The Influence of Public Policy onCommunity Well-being. Caroline Clauss-Ehlers, Editor.

Cambridge Handbook of Community Psychology.

Dewey, J. (1896). The reflex arc concept in psychology. Psychological review, 3(4), 357-37.

Dewey, J. (1916-1944). The individual and the world (pp. 291-305). In Democracy and education. New York: Free Press

James, W. 1907. What Pragmatism means. Pp. 209-227.In Thayer, H.S. (Ed) 1970.Pragmatism: the classic writings. New York: A.J. Thayer. (Published by Mentor Books)

SusanSaegert,SaturdayMay252019.BehaviorSettingsandPlaces: Difference, conflict and democracy within standing patterns of behavior. EnvironmentalDesignResearchAssociation50thAnnual conference, Metro Tech,Brooklyn.

Westbrook, R.B. (2005). Democratic hope: Pragmatism and the politics of truth. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press.

https://pardonmeforasking.blogspot.com/2019/02/badly-donecity-planning-badly-done.html