Nature of Order Webinar: The Contribution of Christopher Alexander to the Psychology of Place, Maria Lewicka

This will be presented on May 8, 2025 at 15:00 UTC.

Christopher Alexander is probably the most “psychological” architect I know, which is one reason why his views are a permanent part of my psychology courses. A pattern language appeals to human affordances and basic human needs: privacy and community, control and ownership, and belonging to a place. The organic building that Alexander posits, in contrast to the mechanistic vision of construction based on master plans that are independent of the context and history of a place, provides people with a sense of continuity – the foundation of identity. The principles of natural order, largely rooted in human biophilia, represent our evolutionary heritage, which explains their intuitive acceptance. Finally, in the last volume of "The Nature of Order," Alexander ventures into areas that have been the subject of psychological reflection since the beginning of the discipline – namely, the nature of the human self. In the fourth volume, we also find reflections on human consciousness, and motivational psychologists will easily recognize the phenomenological descriptions of the experiences that accompany people in a “flow” state.

However, I do not want to discuss all these references to psychology at this meeting. Psychology is an empirical science, so it is not surprising that a psychologist fascinated by Alexander's theory is attempting to transform it into a research program. This is particularly interesting because Alexander posits the universality of human aesthetic judgments and preferences, which is an empirical thesis. An additional reason for trying to translate Alexander's claims into the language of measurable indicators is the strong entanglement of his theory in the philosophical debate about the essential versus anti-essential nature of reality and human cognition. This also explains the frequent criticism of his views. Since this dichotomy has been the foundation of the research I have been developing for some time, in this paper I will present several studies conducted by our team, in which we investigate how individual principles of natural order are perceived by average respondents, whether and what overarching clusters they create, and how these relate to our criteria for assessing meaningful places. During the webinar, I will also share the challenges we encounter, welcoming ideas from the meeting participants.

 Maria Lewicka is a professor of social and environmental psychology at the Institute of Psychology, Nicolaus University in Toruń. Initially her research interests were in cognitive psychology (human rationality, cognitive biases and errors), currently they are in social and environmental psychology. At present her studies concern: (1) Place attachment and place identity; (2) Theories of place, place meaning, and their implications for people’s attitudes and behaviors; (3) Collective memory of places in Central-Eastern Europe, with particular focus on Poland, Ukraine, and Lithuania. Her book Psychologia miejsca (Psychology of place) published in 2012 initiated research in people-place relations in Poland. In 2023 she was awarded the FNP (Foundation for Polish Science) Prize for her research on place attachment and place memory.  The FNP Prize is awarded for significant advancements and scientific discoveries that shift cognitive boundaries and open new perspectives for research.

Place preferences: Which of these three places are the most liked and the least liked by study participants?