Cultural Assumptions Underlying Concept-Formation and Theory Building in Environment-Behavior Research

Abstract

Focuses on the nature of urban planning, especially on the guiding principles that transformed traditional Japanese towns into modern urban structures. Longitudinal ethnographic data on a city renewal project was sued as an exemplar case to examine working assumptions underlying modern urban planning. Analyses of naive concepts or naive psychology in the discourse of urban planning and environmental design in general, both by professional and lay people, were also conducted. In accordance with basic premises of cultural psychology, which posits that cultures (or culturally constituted realities) and psyches (or reality constituting psyches) make each other up, the authors focus on collective representations as clues to hidden assumptions in both academic endeavors and praxis of the environmental design field. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (chapter)