Environmental Perception

Environmental perception refers to the subjective ways in which groups and individuals perceive and evaluate their environment. As a subfield of cultural and behavioral geography, environmental perception is not limited to the natural environment; rather, it includes factors such as built structures, customs, values, and other individuals or groups. Thus, studies of environmental perception highlight the discrepancies between individual and group choices based on their perceived environment and their actual environment. Geographers who study environmental perception assume that an understanding of space and place is fundamental to how individuals and groups perceive and experience their particular environment and the resulting behaviors in which they engage as a product of this understanding.

Initially conceived from the desire to situate empiricist methodology within a theoretical framework and from the view of geography as a spatial science, the concept of environmental perception draws from a multitude of disciplines, including (but not limited to) experimental psychology, neoclassical economics, anthropology, history, and computer science. Kevin Lynch's famous book The Image of the City, published in 1960, is often cited as one of the seminal works of environmental perception. Lynch discussed mental maps of urban landscapes in Boston, Jersey City, and Los Angeles and argued that an individual's perception of a city is linked closely to his or her relationship with the city—the individual's age, gender, ethnicity, educational level, ability to drive, length of residence in the area, and so on. This led to a tradition of cognitive mapping and spatial perception. Similarly, William Ittelson argued that environments surround individuals at multiple scales and that those individuals do not observe the environment so much as they explore it. More recently, geographers have evaluated the role of environmental perception in environmental policy and risk assessment.