ABSTRACT
Environmental psychology research on urban life has expanded to include postmodern perspectives of people and place as mutually constitutive. This work tends to explore urban places as spaces of negotiation and representation and as catalysts for meaning making. Environmental psychology is essentially the study of the human experience of place. It is a social science, the main focus of which is to understand people–environment interrelations. Other debates revolve around how to understand the nature of people–place interrelations and, specifically, what should be taken as the proper unit of analysis. Different perspectives have clear methodological implications for how urban phenomena are studied and understood. The pluralistic sensibility of environmental psychology has resulted in diverse explorations of city life, in terms of both methods and specific subject matter. In the end, although environmental psychologists might engage in debates about the merits or demerits of urban life and even about how best to go about studying it.
