What you'll learn

• What the built environment and urban renewal mean in environmental psychology.
• How physical settings can affect stress, recovery, social interaction and wellbeing.
• The key research: Ulrich (1984) View through a window may influence recovery from surgery.
• How to apply this topic to real design improvements in hospitals and communities.

Starting point: environmental psychology

Environmental psychology is the study of how people interact with their physical surroundings. In this topic, you are not just asking, “Do people like nice buildings?” You are asking a more psychological question:

How can places shape behaviour, emotion, stress, health and social wellbeing?

This is part of the social side of environmental psychology because buildings and neighbourhoods influence how people relate to others: whether they feel crowded, safe, supported, isolated or in control.

How the built environment affects wellbeing

The built environment can affect us through several routes.

1. Stress and overload

Some environments act as stressors, meaning they place demands on people that may feel unpleasant or difficult to cope with. Examples include noise, crowding, lack of privacy, poor lighting, confusing layouts and pollution.

Crowding is the subjective feeling that there are too many people or too little space. This is different from density, which is the objective number of people in a space.

2. Restoration and nature

Some environments are restorative, meaning they help people recover from stress or mental fatigue. Natural views, trees, water, daylight and quiet outdoor spaces may reduce arousal and provide a “positive distraction”.

This is important for health settings such as hospitals, because patients may already be stressed, anxious and physically vulnerable.

3. Social support and control

Design can also encourage or block social wellbeing. For example, a housing estate with safe communal gardens may encourage neighbour contact. A badly designed estate with dark stairwells and no shared spaces may increase fear and isolation.

A key idea here is perceived control: the feeling that you can manage your surroundings. Even small design features, such as clear signs in a hospital or access to a quiet room, can reduce stress because people feel less helpless.

Urban renewal

Urban renewal can improve wellbeing if it removes environmental stressors and gives people better access to healthy spaces. For example, replacing derelict land with a park may encourage exercise, social interaction and relaxation.

However, it can also have negative social effects. If regeneration leads to higher rents and local people are pushed out, this is called gentrification. In that case, the physical environment may improve, but community wellbeing may suffer because social networks are disrupted.

Key research: Ulrich (1984)

The key study for this topic is Ulrich (1984), “View through a window may influence recovery from surgery.”

Ulrich investigated whether a natural view from a hospital window could influence recovery after surgery. This is a classic study because it links a simple design feature — what patients can see from bed — to measurable health outcomes.

The diagram below shows the logic of Ulrich’s comparison: similar surgical patients were compared according to whether their window view was of trees or a brick wall.

Aim

Ulrich aimed to test whether patients recovering from gall-bladder surgery would recover differently depending on whether their hospital room window looked out onto trees or a brick wall.

Method

This was a quasi-experiment. A quasi-experiment is a study where the independent variable is naturally occurring rather than randomly allocated by the researcher.

The independent variable was the type of window view: trees or brick wall. The dependent variables were indicators of recovery, including length of hospital stay, nurses’ notes, pain medication and minor complications.

Ulrich used hospital records from patients in a Pennsylvania hospital. The sample included 46 patients recovering from the same type of surgery. Patients were matched as closely as possible on important factors such as sex, age, smoking status and weight.

This was a matched-pairs design, meaning participants in one condition were paired with similar participants in the other condition to reduce participant differences.

Materials and measures

Ulrich used existing medical records. Recovery was operationalised, meaning turned into measurable indicators, through:

• number of days spent in hospital after surgery
• nurses’ positive or negative evaluation notes
• number and strength of analgesics, which are pain-relieving medicines
• minor post-surgical complications

Results

Patients with a tree view tended to recover better than patients with a brick-wall view. They had:

• a slightly shorter hospital stay
• fewer negative comments in nurses’ notes
• less need for strong painkillers
• somewhat fewer minor complications

The overall pattern suggested that a natural view may support recovery.

Conclusion

Ulrich concluded that views of nature may have beneficial effects on health and recovery. A likely explanation is that natural scenes reduce stress and provide a positive distraction from pain, anxiety and the hospital environment.

Evaluating Ulrich (1984)

Strengths

Ulrich’s study has strong ecological validity, meaning it took place in a real-life setting rather than an artificial laboratory. The patients were actual hospital patients recovering from real surgery, so the findings are useful for hospital design.

The study also used practical, measurable outcomes such as hospital stay and medication use. This makes the research more scientific than simply asking patients whether they liked the view.

The matched-pairs design is another strength because it reduced some participant variables. Matching patients on factors such as age and smoking status makes it less likely that differences in recovery were due only to obvious health differences.

Weaknesses

A key limitation is internal validity, meaning whether the study can confidently show that the independent variable caused the change in the dependent variable. Because patients were not randomly assigned to rooms, there may have been confounding variables, which are uncontrolled factors that also affect the results.

For example, the tree-view rooms may have differed in noise, light, temperature, staff attention or location on the ward. Any of these could have influenced recovery.

The sample was also small and taken from one hospital in the USA. This limits generalisability, meaning the extent to which findings apply to other people, places and times.

Some measures were more objective than others. Length of stay and medication records are fairly concrete, but nurses’ notes may involve judgement and could be affected by staff expectations or recording habits.

Ethics

Using hospital records raises ethical issues around privacy and confidentiality. Under the BPS Code of Human Research Ethics, researchers should respect participants’ dignity, protect confidential data and avoid harm.

Ulrich’s study was low risk because it used existing records and did not deliberately deny treatment. However, if conducted today, researchers would need careful ethical approval, anonymisation of records and strong justification for using patient data.

Application: designing for health and wellbeing

The application part of this topic asks you to use research evidence to improve real environments.

One clear example is evidence-informed hospital design. Hospitals could include:

• patient rooms with views of trees, gardens or sky
• healing gardens that patients, visitors and staff can access
• natural light and reduced noise
• clear signs to reduce confusion
• spaces for both privacy and social support
• nature images where real outdoor views are not possible

This does not mean every building must be surrounded by woodland. The key is to apply the psychological mechanism: reduce stress, increase perceived control and support restoration.

Urban renewal can also be applied beyond hospitals. For example, a city might improve wellbeing by creating parks, safe walking routes, community gardens and well-lit public spaces. These changes could increase exercise, reduce fear of crime and strengthen social contact.

But AO3 evaluation is essential: renewal should involve local residents. If changes are imposed from above, they may reduce community identity or displace the people they were meant to help.

AO1, AO2 and AO3 focus

For AO1, describe the background, Ulrich’s study and the application clearly. Include key terms such as built environment, urban renewal, wellbeing, quasi-experiment and matched-pairs design.

For AO2, apply the theory to a new source. If a scenario mentions a noisy hospital, crowded housing or lack of green space, link the feature to stress, restoration, control or social support.

For AO3, evaluate. Useful points include ecological validity, real-world usefulness, sample limitations, possible confounding variables, ethics and whether findings generalise across cultures and settings.