ABSTRACT
The papers in this section touch on a number of important common themes. They are concerned with ways of conceptualizing those aspects of environment, and those aspects of human behavior that offer greatest promise of illuminating a general systems theory of man-environment relations that will allow prediction and control of the human consequences of physical design. Some of the contributions focus on relevant dimensions of human behavior, such as territoriality, and basic life-support behaviors such as eating, sleeping, defense and reproduction. Others focus more on ways of describing aspects of environmental structure that seem to influence human behavior in important ways, such as flexibility with respect to the amounts of space available and the ways in which the same space may be arranged under changing circumstances. All of the papers contrast adaptive and maladaptive patterns of behavior, and perceive that patterns of relationships between the structure of environments and the structure of human behavior determine whether the human behavioral repertoire grows or diminishes in amount and competence. There is not, as yet, any general agreement about the languages that are most suitable to the description of these patterns of relationships. Each paper offers suggestions in this matter, but the suggestions are quite diverse. The technical languages used by the various authors seem to be more diverse than their underlying concerns and emerging conceptual insights. This is characteristic of the state of conversation in this field at this point in time. As concern continues to shape new concepts, new concepts will begin to shape plans for experiences -experiences organized and controlled so that they will ultimately constitute experiments. As this evolution proceeds, words and concepts will be increasingly viewed as tools, to be shaped by the consequences of their use. In the meantime, the provocative and diverse statements of our authors constitutes an essential step in the evolution of a new field of enquiry.
