ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the relationship between the spatial environment and people’s behaviour. Its focus is on how people use, structure and experience space to regulate social interaction, achieve their goals and reduce stress. The chapter concentrates on the main concepts of spatial experience: crowding, privacy, personal space, and territoriality. It looks at the theories and empirical research behind each concept, linking them into an interrelated system that allows people to control social relations. Privacy is a dialectic process, the regulation of which is often considered the key concept in that system, with crowding being the outcome of a lack of privacy and isolation the result of too much. Personal space and territoriality are the means to control and optimize levels interaction. Privacy serves several social and psychological functions including, for instance, personal reflection, creativity, intimacy, and facilitating the formation of self-identity. Using everyday examples, the chapter considers how the design of an environment can influence how people interact with one another. For instance, it considers the concepts of sociopetal and sociofugal space, which, respectively, help to inhibit and facilitate interaction.
