Territoriality, Privacy, and Personal Space in Urban Life

Introduction to Territoriality

In order to comprehend territory's significance — or that of any manifestation of territory, such as states, nations, homelands, or landscapes — it is useful to begin by considering the raw material that supports these structures. That raw material is known as space, which is extraordinarily difficult to define. Through territoriality, individual places are built, and this process enables individuals to utilize both the emotional and material dimensions of space. Boundaries are created when individuals establish territories; these boundaries simultaneously unite and divide space, along with everything it encompasses. By combining particular resources and certain individuals while separating them from others, symbolic meaning is given to the notions of "them and us" and "theirs and ours" (Penrose, 2002).

With regard to space's material power, territoriality converts resources essential to human survival into "our own" resources — essential for our own survival. This is vital because the availability of certain resources, and the inaccessibility of others, restricts the way individuals can live. This in turn reinforces the cohesiveness of the society demarcated by territory (Penrose, 2002).

Privacy as a Legal and Social Concept

A statutory right to privacy has been recognized by the nation's Supreme Court — a right extensive enough to protect abortion and the use of contraception. The Privacy Act was enacted by Congress in 1974 following extensive hearings. Discussion of privacy suggests a broad consensus regarding its importance and distinctness, and this consensus must hold coherently in three distinct contexts. First, a neutral notion of privacy should be maintained so that one can recognize when a lack of privacy occurs, making claims and debates about privacy intelligible. Second, privacy as a value should have coherence, because claims to legally protect privacy are forceful only if privacy losses are sometimes unwelcome, and if they are unwelcome for comparable reasons. Third, privacy should be a concept that is valuable in legal situations — one that allows recognition of occasions calling for legal protection, given that the law does not intervene to guard against all undesirable events (Gavison, 1980).

Ordinary speech suggests that we perceive privacy as a genuinely useful and coherent concept across all three contexts. Loss of privacy (identified by the first context), privacy invasions (identified by the second), and illegal breaches of privacy (identified by the third) are interrelated in that each is a subset of the preceding category. Using the same term across all three contexts reinforces the idea that all are interconnected. Reductionist evaluations of privacy — that is, evaluations that deny privacy's value as a distinct concept — dissolve these linguistic and conceptual relations (Gavison, 1980).

Personal Space and Its Defining Characteristics

The role of personal space has been the subject of various theoretical assumptions (see Evans & Howard, 1973). Relevant here are the views of Goffman (1971), Sommer (1959), Altman (1979), and Hall (1964, 1966), all of whom hold that personal space functions in a protective and regulatory manner in a person's interactions with others. Altman emphasized the significance of privacy. Hall associated personal space with a defensive "bubble" surrounding the individual. Goffman linked personal space directly to the person's self and to the vicissitudes of social interaction. Scholars have identified four characteristics that define personal space: it is moveable; its psychological and geographic core is the person's body; it demarcates itself from the surrounding environment through invisible borders; and intrusion by others into it arouses discomfort and causes the person to withdraw (Horner, 1983).

On the basis of several studies of body and ego boundaries, the dimensions of one's personal space vary in accordance with fluctuating organismic, social, and psychological conditions. Individuals are semipermeable in proportion to the degree of intimacy that exists between interactants. Personal space behaviors are, finally, a crucial aspect of self-communication (Horner, 1983).

Population Density and the Growing Importance of Space

Populations are ultimately constrained by resources. Resource distribution and abundance define an environment's carrying capacity. Whenever a greater share of resources results in higher fitness, individuals must aim at securing resources for personal use, often excluding others through territorial defense (Sepulcre & Kokko, 2005). A complex relationship exists between population regulation and territoriality. At low population densities, every individual is capable of establishing a personal territory in a high-quality environment, with high reproduction rates and large territories. As population density rises, the costs of territorial defense escalate, causing territory size to contract. Reproduction decreases, and individuals settle in lower-quality environments that offered lower initial reproductive success. This shift to lower-quality habitats should ideally occur when reproductive success in low- and high-quality environments becomes equal; however, individuals may be excluded from high-quality environments before reproductive success has fallen that far (Both & Visser, 2003).

John Calhoun conducted research on population density in a rat colony (Straub, 2007). When sufficient living space existed, the rats behaved normally by all criteria; as population density rose, their social environment deteriorated. They fought; infant mortality increased; they became more territorial; and reproductive capacity declined. Some rats even became cannibalistic. Although these findings may not directly translate to human behavior under similar conditions, population density undoubtedly has real effects on populations.

Population density influences individuals and contributes to the psychological effects of crowding — where individuals feel limited and confined with reduced access to necessities. Crowding is associated with social withdrawal, increased criminal behavior, dysfunctional social interaction, and aggression (Stokols, 1972). To reduce the symptoms associated with crowding, preserving personal space and privacy, and honoring territoriality as a basic human social need, is essential. As space shrinks, personal space and privacy demand greater acknowledgment to prevent psychological harm. With limited personal space and privacy, individuals are likely to feel more competition, less control, and a greater tendency to respond negatively to minor irritations (Straub, 2007).

How space is perceived is an important factor in the experience of population density. If one perceives ample space, the effects of crowding diminish. Modifying how one perceives space can therefore prove as effective as actually making more space available. The crowding effects of population density are not inevitable (Straub, 2007), and constructing space in a way that makes it appear larger than it is may positively influence the psychology of crowding. Mitigating one's perception of crowding is consequential as space gradually becomes a scarce resource, and a perception of sufficient space has wide-ranging impacts on subjective health and well-being (Straub, 2007). When individuals perceive ample space, they report a greater sense of control over their environment and are therefore less susceptible to stress and anxiety.

References

Altman, I. (1979). Privacy as an interpersonal boundary process. In M. von Cranach, K. Foppa, W. Lepenies, & D. Ploog (Eds.), Human ethology (pp. 95–132). Cambridge University Press.

Augustin, S. (2009). Place advantage: Applied psychology for interior architecture. Wiley-Blackwell.

Both, C., & Visser, M. (2003). Density dependence, territoriality, and divisibility of resources: From optimality models to population processes. The American Naturalist.

Gavison, R. (1980). Privacy and the limits of law. The Yale Law Journal, 89(3), 421–471.

Goffman, E. (1971). Relations in public. Harper.

Hall, E. T. (1964). Silent assumptions in vocal communication. In D. Rioch & E. A. Weinstein (Eds.), Disorders of communication. Williams & Wilkins.

Horner, T. (1983). On the formation of personal space and self-boundary structures in early human development: The case of infant stranger reactivity. Academic Press.

Kaplan, R. (1984). Impact of urban nature: A theoretical analysis. Urban Ecology.

Maller, C., Townsend, M., Legar, L., Wilson, C., Pryor, A., Prosser, L., & Moore, M. (2009). Healthy parks, healthy people: The health benefits of contact with nature in a park context. The George Wright Forum, 26(2), 51–83.

Penrose, J. (2002). Nations, states and homelands: Territory and territoriality in nationalist thought. Nations and Nationalism, 8(3), 277–297.

Sepulcre, A., & Kokko, H. (2005). Territorial defense, territory size, and population regulation. The American Naturalist.

Sommer, R. (1959). Studies in personal space. Sociometry, 22, 247–260.

Stokols, D. (1972). On the distinction between density and crowding: Some implications for future research. Psychological Review, 79(3), 275–277. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0032706

Straub, R. O. (2007). Health psychology (2nd ed.). Worth.