Abstract
This chapter considers whether individual well-being can be analyzed in the light of both social and cognitive rationales. In other words, it argues that individual well-being might depend on psychological dimensions that do not necessarily relate to constraint (vs. choice), frustration (vs. completing a project) or the physical or economic difficulty (vs. ease) in accessing a resource perceived as indispensible. Instead well-being might be shaped by adjustments to the socio-physical environment, with socio-cognitive processes of appropriation in actions (scripts, routines, etc.) and representations (social dispositions, cognitive schemata, anchorings, etc.) of an environmental context that can be illegitimate (vs. legitimate), unfulfilling (vs. fulfilling), painful (vs. enjoyable), or even impossible (vs. easy) for individuals. It follows that it is not the context of well-being that will be perceived as fulfilling, enjoyable or easy, but the processes of adjustment to that context. This approach to well-being is addressed on the basis of a study of the spatial routines of daily mobility in the city. The concepts of social legibility of geographical space, socio-cognitive accessibility of places and geographical replacement are used to describe and understand adjustments and person/surroundings congruences involved in the well-being of individuals in their relationship to urban space.
Translated from the French by Jean-Yves Bart
This chapter has received support from the Excellence Initiative of the University of Strasbourg funded by the French government’s Future Investments program.
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Notes
- 1.
For instance, Holahan (1982 p. 3) described environmental psychology as “an area of psychology whose focus of investigation is the relationship between the physical environment and human behavior and experience.”
- 2.
The ontosystem refers to intra-psychological processes and states; the microsystem pertains to the person’s close environment; the mesosystem is the locus of interaction between different microsystems (for instance, family and school for a child); the exosystem relates to the broader environment beyond the individual’s direct experience; the macrosystem refers to the cultural context that influences all the other systems).
- 3.
Portugali (1996), based on the concept of inter-representations network (IRN), refers to this intrapersonal space under the ambiguous term of “cognitive maps”.
- 4.
In the same way that someone who has learned to read may sometimes not be able to read on a regular basis or understand a text.
- 5.
It is worth remarking that, as these social trajectories are partly influenced by the social history of the residential area under study (which has experienced progressive gentrification since the 1990s), the ages of respondents vary according to the social trajectories observed.
- 6.
Seventy-four respondents from a residential area of Strasbourg built in the 1950s–1960s were asked to write down their mobility patterns during a 7-day period; information was collected from them every 48 h by phone.
- 7.
Programmed mobility patterns are those for which a choice is made between possible destinations accessible to the individual and for which decisions do not depend on the current context but on a more general spatio-temporal organization. Contextual mobility patterns are those that are neither routine nor programmed.
- 8.
For the purposes of the study, the “neighborhoods” are the smallest spatial units in the nomenclature of the French National Institute for Statistics (INSEE) – called in French Ilots Regroupés pour l’Information Statistique (IRIS).
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Ramadier, T. (2017). Adjustment to Geographical Space and Psychological Well-Being. In: Fleury-Bahi, G., Pol, E., Navarro, O. (eds) Handbook of Environmental Psychology and Quality of Life Research. International Handbooks of Quality-of-Life. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31416-7_16
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