Habitability and the Residence
Published in APLD Magazine — Design Online — April 2020
One of the things I find odd in academia and landscape architecture/design is the imbalance of types of spaces addressed through research. Not even just research but I think it extends to awards, exposure and more. Why is it that the park bordering the riverfront of “hometown USA” is seemingly more valuable than my own back yard? Not that if we asked that question to a mixed group of academics, planners, designers and architects, we would hear conscious suggesting there is a hierarchy (parks over homes), but that’s how it feels. We have people working for sustainable cities, campuses and other larger scale environments. Somehow collective human space trumps individual or family space. The public realm is taking precedence in many of our design disciplines over the private. I see it in research to a large extent, which is why I bring this up. I can find city planning, urban parks, sustainable campuses all over the place within the literature. However, when we want to narrow content to residential settings, never mind residential landscapes, the work becomes thin. I want to know why that is and how the places we call home impact a sustainable society.
Like many of you I have spent most of my career with the application of landscape design around a residential setting. Sure we all dabble in the public realm but many of us work in a market of plant friendly residential environments for our ‘bread and butter’. To a great extent the APLD services this market with us. Which to an extent I feel requires a niche skill-set just as any niche does. Here’s why I bring it up, according to the National Association of Landscape Professionals, 2018 was a record year with U.S., spending 47.8 billion on lawn and garden retail purchases alone. In 2019 landscape services generated over 99 billion in the U.S. (Mazareanu, 2019), and reached over 39 million U.S. homeowners in 2016. (Landscaping industry statistics, 2019). This is clearly not a small market with 95 million single-family homes scattered over our nation. This underpins why I recently have invested some energy into the study of sustainable residents, and to that extent how it takes shape within the landscape itself.
In that journey I have stumbled across some interesting work by a group of academics in Mexico (Landazuri, M., Mercado S. & Teran A.) that are doing research in environmental psychology around the sustainability of residential environments. They published work in the Suma Psicologica where they identify what gets a person attached to a home. This attachment, or the homes ability to support that attachment, is called habitability. The authors are looking at how a space is planned in a way that it encourages long-term habitability. They suggest that three areas of planning feed habitability: emotional, symbolic and behavioral.
Emotional reactions to something are not defined arbitrarily here. Physiologists have looked deep into this phenomenon and the fact that pleasure, arousal, and control are identified as the measures for pleasure can be traced to a pair of nerds in 1974 (Mehrabian and Russell) who proved it with their Emotional State Scale. To be clear, inhabitants subjectively assess emotional areas of habitability. Which means, that our designs can evoke emotional responses that are assessed by our client, and can then literally be measured by a shrink. Control and arousal feed pleasure and when pleasure is high the emotional connection of a planned personal space is stronger. And yes, they can also evoke poor emotions if poorly planned. What drives individual bias is, well, the individual.
When these researchers were starting their work they used some data from the 50’s that help us understand how people view a house. From that, they developed the two additional areas for habitability, Meaningfulness and values. Values are what an occupant from a dwelling actualizes, and meaningfulness is basically the measure (significance) of that value. So, people take values or observe values in a space, then feed it through a measure of significance to build symbolic value in a residence.
Behavioral areas I think are the easiest for us to digest and make most sense from a designer’s perspective. Operability is the ease at which we move in a space to do tasks. Functionality is one side of operability that relates to the arrangement of objects and spaces. Privacy is the other leg that feeds into operability in a way where we measure the control of information, given and received, while executing tasks. When these two together jive and measure strong operability is high. When operability is high our behavioral area for assessing a home is strong.
Figure 2. Adapted from Mercado’s model of habitability
Why does this matter? I’m glad you asked. A habitable place is a sustainable place. When researchers measured habitability against sustainability it was found that the more habitable the more sustainable. And, they are not the only ones with that theory. More and more research is showing the support for this cultural component of sustainability that requires the human connection for the spaces we plan, in order to be sustainable. Additionally, if a place isn’t providing its human connection then it is likely unsustainable. Humanity is an integral part of the natural environment. When we feel a deep connection to that environment we seem to do a pretty good job of sustaining it and vise versa. Likewise when a landscape is planned in a client centric way it has the likelihood of having a longer more productive shelf life. If we accept that, we now have some building blocks that help us understand how our clients are subconsciously assessing our work. They measure through, emotions, symbolism and operability. I have yet to prove this theory of interior habitability, but I suggest it’s a great place to start in understanding a habitable landscape for the human habitat.
In light of the current health outbreak, we are all now looking at homes in a new way. A mobile society, in numerous countries, is under curfew. Public spaces are being scrutinized and avoided. And the home is one of the few safe places to land for a number of us. Many of the word, and now Americans, are looking at the habitability of their homes in a new way. Some will have lovely inside and outside places to spend many isolated weeks, thanks to the likes of you. But, it won’t be simply the rain gardens that create sustainability in our landscapes this month. But, how the humans interact and respond to the unspoken pieces of a human habitat, which will give them the long-term attachments that in turn support the places you make. No more will the concept of ‘habitability making sustainability’ be an academic exercise but a life lesson we can all see in real time.