Our Future Environment

Thinking back to “third places” and the social and physical interaction that occurs there it is important to understand ways residents make the city manageable and meaningful and that trees and sidewalks are important for our physical and social environment. In order for us to study, understand and actually ‘see’ this interaction we need a way to map and record such interaction. The behavioral mapping technique is one way to observe how residents are already using their public sidewalk space and layer that interaction on top of a map of already existing tree stock. If trees are important to urban residents, as we have learned from the previous study, it is useful to observe if Crown Heights residents are already congregating in high density tree stock areas or if they are not then we can consider planting more trees in already desirable public spaces.
The behavioral mapping technique was conceived and first used by Ittelson, Rivlin and Proshansky (1970, 659) as a way to describe and visually represent observed behavior. This technique usually includes a base map (floor plan or spatial layout), predetermined codes to describe behavior such as sitting, walking, talking, or eating, and a predetermined system of observing people for a short length of time. Behavior is then coded onto the visual map in real-time and later analyzed. Ittelson and colleagues used this technique in a small-scale hospital environment.  Hill (1984) compares behavioral mapping and traditional questionnaires and discusses the complexity in using the mapping technique in a large-scale city environment. Hill describes his behavioral mapping technique as tracking and recording the subject’s movement by drawing a line corresponding to the subject’s observed movement on a base map. “It is possible to make observations from as much as one to two blocks away and from the side of the street opposite to the one on which the subject is walking. In crowded conditions, the observer must move closer to the subject, but the crowd itself masks the presence of the observer.” Although Hill began this examination of behavioral mapping (and introduces it as such) in a negative light he does discuss the conceptual and empirical richness of behavioral mapping and how it allows a full data set to emerge. Hill concludes with the notion that behavioral mapping is useful according to what data researches need in a setting and how controlled or uncontrolled researchers desire their ‘laboratory’ to be.
In my own work with Dr. Roger Hart, an environmental psychologist at the City University of New York Graduate Center, and other environmental psychology graduate students, we have implemented and evaluated the use of behavioral mapping in a midtown Manhattan public park. This work is not published and is currently ongoing, thus I am able to discuss this in a very real sense. This behavioral mapping project began with a discussion about our research question and who potential participants might be. Our questions centered around mothers, caregivers and the children in their care. We were also interested in how these participants utilized different and distinct sections of a public park. In our base map, we carefully mapped the location and type of shrubs, trees, seating areas and other structures. The park itself is not large enough to present an overwhelming challenge and thus we divided the park into subsections, which we individually observed (and eventually swapped for inter-reliability). We did not draw a line to track participant movement, as Hill describes, but instead used codes and recorded participant activity in a manner similar to what a snapshot would capture. We carried maps of each park section and recorded only the first five seconds of each activity among each participant in our field of vision. The idea of behavioral mapping, in our project and others conducted in the CUNY Environmental Psychology department, is to create a snapshot within a specific time frame to represent how different ‘types’ of users are using the same space differently or similarly. This same method can be used in Crown Heights to map how residents are using their sidewalk space and where trees are located.

Filed under: environmental planning on April 5th, 2008