ABSTRACT
Bill Kirk introduced the notion of the behavioural environment in a one-off special publication of the Indian Geographical Society, in which my own first-written though not first-published paper also appeared. Bill’s, resurrected from obscurity into a more prominent place in 1963, has become famous, whereas mine perished in welldeserved oblivion.1 In sketching relationships of what was then called ‘urban morphology’ to the terrain, however, I was, in fact, concerned with an aspect of the behavioural environment, and much of my later empirical work in Africa, the Pacific, and Malaysia has also been concerned with interpretation of the expression of human behaviour on the varied surface of the land. Now, over 30 years after I first became involved in this sort of work, is a good time to inspect it in the context of Kirk’s insight and of a review and thinkpiece about ‘the environment as perceived’ which I wrote in midstream, in the early days of the modern behavioural movement in geography.2
