Environmental Psychology

How are we affected by the cities and built environment around us?

I want to explore psychology through the lens of place, how we are affected by the physical and social structures which surround us. Often the discourse surrounding the future of cities concerns itself with technology: self-driving cars, self-heating side-walks, smart cities, it's too easy for people to get caught up in the latest technological panacea. Instead we should be thinking how to design spaces that make people happy, create community, and reduce stress, for our minds are the most important technology of all.

Each week we will likely cover a different reading together, take notes, and discuss what we have discovered. I would also like to find a way to create a collective artefact each week or month, whether that is condensing our learning into a blog post/twitter thread, developing our own Pattern language of environmental psychology, or some other kind of project which coalesces what we have learnt into tangible form.