OUR SPATIAL NEEDS

Think of the very high level emotional needs we expect space to help us to satisfy. Most of us hate being bored, and want some form of amusement or entertainment. We might see this as a need for stimulation, and we demand that the spaces around us should provide this. On the whole we also seek to avoid high levels of uncertainty and change, and we require a degree of stability and structure in our lives. We might see this as a need for security, and so we require a space to keep us secure.

Most of us seem to have a strong desire to belong somewhere. Many people I have known who have traveled widely in their lives describe an increasingly strong need to return to their roots in later life. We might see this as a need for identity and to belong somewhere, or in other words a need to be located somewhere. All these are examples of needs that a space we inhabit can help to satisfy.

Robert Audrey was the first to suggest that not only do we seem to have these three important needs but also that this could help to explain the reasons for territorial behavior.

• Stimulation
• Security
• Identity

Stimulation

Stimulation is perhaps the most obvious and simplest of the three to understand; however, it turns out to be rather more fundamental and less of a luxury than at first we might think. At its most extreme, boredom is not just dull, it is plain downright dangerous.

Experiments in sensory deprivation go to extraordinary lengths to deprive their subjects of receiving any information from the outside world at all. However, most subjects find the experience very painful psychologically! Subjects placed in a darkened, silent and odorless space to test stimulation. In some cases they are loosely clothed, including soft gloves, to avoid any sensation of touch. In such cases subjects usually report vivid images flooding into their minds, soon turning into what we would recognize as hallucinations. Most subjects ask to be released from such awful environments in a remarkably short time. Hence, it shows how stimulation by any means makes feel us lively.

Security

We all have a very deep and fundamental need for a degree of stability, continuity and predictability in our lives. It might sound exciting not to have this, but just imagine how stressful it would be to lead a life of constant flux and unpredictability. We depend for our sanity upon knowing the rules, as it were. It is said that the two most stressful things in life are moving house and going on holiday!

Identity

One of the most fundamental forces at work in our psychological makeup is the need to create and maintain our own identity. This was wonderfully explored by Erving Goffman in his study of the ‘presentation of self in everyday life’ (Goffman 1959).