History

The origins of the field can be traced to the Romantic poets, such as Wordsworth and Coleridge who drew attention to the power of nature and the significance of human interaction with it. Darwin pointed to the role of the environment in shaping evolution. This idea was quickly applied to human interactions with the surroundings. An extreme Victorian acceptance of this were 'environmental determinists' who insisted the physical environment and climate influenced the evolution of racial characteristics. Willy Hellpach is said to be the first to mention "environmental psychology". One of his books, Geopsyche, discusses topics such as how the sun and the moon affect human activity, the impact of extreme environments, and the effects of color and form (Pol, E., 2006, Blueprints for a history of environmental psychology (I): From first birth to American transition. "Medio Ambiente y Comportamiento Humano", 7(2), 95-113). Among the other major scholars at the roots of environmental psychology were Jakob von Uexküll, Kurt Lewin, Egon Brunswik, and later Gerhard Kaminski and Carl Friedrich Graumann.

The end of World War II brought about a demand for guidance on the urgent building programme after the destruction of war. To provide government planning requirements many countries set up research centres that studied how people used space. In the U.K. the Building Research Centre studied space use in houses and later noise levels, heating and lighting requirements. The glass maker Pilkingtons set up a daylight research unit, led by Thomas Markus to provide information on the influence of natural lighting in buildings and guidelines on daylight requirements. Peter Manning developed this further at the Pilkington Research Unit at the University of Liverpool in the 1960s. He studied offices, employing one of the first people to obtain a PhD in environmental psychology, Brian Wells. Markus went on to set up the Building Performance Research Unit at the University of Strathclyde in 1968 employing the psychologist David Canter who had been supervised by Wells and Manning for his PhD with the Pilkington Research Unit. Canter then went on to the University of Surrey to set up Environmental Psychology programme there in 1971 with the Department of Psychology. The head of that Department was Terence Lee who had conducted his PhD on the concept of neighbourhood under the supervision of Sir Frederick Bartlett at the University of Cambridge.

In parallel with these developments people in the US had begun to consider the issues in environmental design. One of the first areas was the consideration of psychiatric hospitals. Psychiatrists worked with architects to take account of the experience of patients who were mentally ill. Robert Sommer wrote his book on 'Personal Space' and Edward T Hall commented as an anthropologist on how people related to each other spatially. Amos Rapoport caused considerable interest amongst architects with his book 'House Form and Culture', showing that the form of buildings was not solely functional but had all sorts of cultural influences. This contributed to the emergence in architecture of 'post-modernism' which took the symbolic qualities of architecture very seriously. These early developments in the 1960s and 1970s were often seen as part of 'architectural psychology'. It was when Harold Proshansky and William Ittelson set up the Environmental Psychology program at the City University of New York on 42nd St New York that the term Environmental Psychology replaces Architectural Psychology as the widely used term for the study of the ways in which people made sense of and interacted with their surroundings. This was institutionalised when Canter established The Journal of Environmental Psychology in 1980 with Kenneth Craik a personality psychologist at the University of California at Berkeley. President Nixon's campaign to deal with depredations of the environment gave impetus to a change of direction in the field from aspects of buildings and making sense of cities to the broader issues of climate change and the impact of people in the global environment.