Biophilia and Adolescents’ Sense of Place in Australian Vertical Schools

Abstract

This article describes the place relationships adolescents have with natural elements in recently developed ‘vertical schools’ in Australia: a relatively new school typology in the country, generally considered to be over four storeys high. Vertical schools are being built in Australia’s largest cities in response to the need for new schools where land is scarce. Drawing on qualitative research into the place relationships that adolescents have with their learning environments in two Australian vertical schools, this article explores the ways young people seek closer associations with nature in multi-storey educational settings. The research adopted a phenomenological approach to ‘place research’, asking what makes a place a place? Further, it recognised that places have the capacity to shape the ‘becoming’ of a person, that ‘becoming’ happens when there is a certain resonance between a place’s cycles, and that identity is created out of difference. As such, ‘place as complex adaptive assemblage theory’ was employed to study the interplay between location and experience in selected vertical schools, also drawing on the earlier theoretical work of Relph (1976), who suggested that the essence of a place lies in the unselfconscious intentionality that defines places as profound centres of human existence. Photovoice was employed as a method to elicit insights into the relationships adolescents have with their school as place. Students created photo essays to document their place relationships, revealing deeply insightful personal reflections on their school as place and the meanings they associate with it. Specifically, the article reports on what thirteen adolescent students communicated about the biophilic experiences afforded by their vertical school, including how it influenced their ‘becoming’. The findings demonstrated that the participating students not only valued relationships with natural elements, but actively sought biophilic experiences on a regular basis. The desire for more frequent and more significant interactions with natural materials and cycles was common across most students, indicating that the relatively limited biophilic experiences available to students in vertical schools is a challenge that should be addressed in future multi-level educational environments.

1. Introduction

This article reports findings from a Ph.D. study into the place relationships of thirteen adolescent students at two Australian vertical schools, with a focus on what they communicated about their relationships with the biophilic elements in and around their schools.

Historically, Australian schools have adopted a horizontal form, featuring generous outdoor environments that have included playing fields and courts, pathways, garden beds, courtyards, seating nooks, and swimming pools in some schools. These outdoor areas have afforded students the opportunity to encounter plants and other natural elements, including large established trees and shrubs that reflect changing seasons. Many primary schools have vegetable patches and kitchen-garden clubs where students, parents/carers, and other school community members can grow fresh produce, including fruits and vegetables, and prepare meals. These ground-level settings also offer exposure to weather events, including sunny and rainy days, especially on campuses featuring distributed buildings.

By contrast, newly developed vertical schools on small parcels of land tend to offer limited outdoor space and experiences, and therefore fewer opportunities for contact with nature. Vertical schools have been emerging in Australia since 2018 in response to the need for new schools in the country’s largest cities. For example, Sydney is under acute pressure to provide more inner-city schools. The Greater Sydney Commission [1] predicts that the number of children in the city will increase by 41% by 2039. Across the country, it is predicted that an additional 700 new schools, not just vertical, will be required between 2016 and 2036 to accommodate an additional one million school-aged students [2,3]. In response, the country’s education authorities have begun building larger schools on smaller sites, especially in inner-city locations.

Vertical schools are tall—generally considered to be over four storeys—but are not defined by this attribute alone. Carroli et al. [4] argued that the morphology of this ‘new’ school typology can best be understood in relation to the building’s height, its spatial configuration and use, and its urban context. With respect to height, Taylor [5] suggested that schools taller than six storeys should be considered high-rise, while Newton [6] delineated between mid-rise vertical schools (four to seven storeys) and high-rise vertical schools (including up to seventeen storeys in the Australian context).

The following research question was investigated: How do adolescent students experience a sense of place in Australian vertical schools? Seeking understandings of students’ experiences of place in relation to their schools’ physical attributes, both biophilic and non-biophilic, was the overall objective of the research, with a particular orientation towards how these experiences may impact identity formation and becoming. The findings offer insights into students’ place experiences, the values they associate with their school as place, and the types of relationships that exist between students and their school’s physical attributes. Amidst other project findings, this article narrows the focus to report specifically on students’ biophilic place relationships at their schools, following the strong emergence of biophilic relationships in the data.

2. Biophilic Design and Schools

2.1. Biophilia

Erich Fromm, a German American social psychologist, developed the term ‘biophilia’ to describe a “passionate love of life and all that is alive” [7] (p. 525). Subsequently, American biologist Edward Wilson [8] argued that human beings have a natural affinity for life and biophilia is the essence of our humanity, binding us to other living things. More recently, the term has come to refer explicitly to people’s relationships with nature. Indeed, Kellert [9] (p. 3) defined biophilia as “the inherent human inclination to affiliate with natural systems and processes, especially life and life-like features of the nonhuman environment”.

2.2. The Biophilious Person

The origins of the term biophilia lie in Fromm’s desire to describe the antithesis of death. He contrasted Freud’s ‘death instinct’ and the necrophilous character (e.g., Stalin, Hitler, and Himmler) with its opposite, ‘life instinct’. Fromm [7] (p. 525) argued that life instinct is the “effort of Eros to combine organic substance into ever larger unities, whereas the death instinct tries to separate and to disintegrate living structure”. He proposed that the ‘biophilious person’ has a desire for further growth, to construct rather than retain, to be more than to have more, to be capable of wondering, to see something new rather than to seek confirmation in the old, and loves the adventure of living more so than certainty.

2.3. Biophilic Design

Biophilic design attempts to translate people’s inherent affinity for natural systems into the built environment [8,9,10]. Two well-documented approaches to describing and documenting biophilia in the built environment have emerged in the past ten years. Kellert [9] proposed that biophilic design should be considered in relation to two dimensions, an organic or naturalistic dimension, and a second dimension related to people’s connections to and sense of place. Alternatively, Ryan and collaborators [11,12] have developed Biophilic Design Patterns and categorised biophilia according to cognitive, physiological, and psychological health responses to it. They identify nature in the space, natural analogues, and nature of the space as three important dimensions of the concept. Approaches such as these have informed the architectural design industry as it has adopted a biophilic sensibility over the past decade.

2.4. Research into Biophilic School Design

Research into the biophilic design of schools has a relatively short history, with academic interest in the topic concentrated within recent years following biophilic design research in other design sectors (e.g., commercial buildings). In 2021, Ghaziani et al. [13] proposed ten biophilic design patterns for schools, arranging them according to nature in the space and natural analogues. In 2022, Watchman and colleagues [14] formulated a visual biophilic design vocabulary for schools, proposing a common graphic language to enable researchers and designers to describe biophilic spaces through shared terms and logic. In 2023, Aminpour [15] found primary children attending vertical schools in Australia have an affinity for biophilic elements across the categories of direct experience of nature, indirect experience of nature, and the nature of the space. Meanwhile, Mohammed et al. [16] highlighted a lack of biophilic features across six preschools in Duhok, Iraq. With only limited research into biophilic school design—including its influence on students and their learning—there remains significant scope for further research in the field.

2.5. The Benefits of Natural Elements in Schools

Although research specifically into biophilic school design is limited, research into the relationships between young people and nature is more extensive, indicating that young people benefit from natural elements in their schools, including:

• The presence of natural features, with young people perceiving the restorative effectiveness of school playgrounds in correlation with the number of trees and volume of vegetation present [17,18].
• Diminished psychological stress at schools that are ‘greener’ [19].
• Views through windows to green landscapes, increasing student attentiveness and assisting with stress recovery [20].
• Contact with nature at school, promoting cognitive ability and enhancing working memory [21].
• Exposure to natural stimuli, as opposed to urban stimuli, improving working memory [22].

The presence of natural elements may be acutely felt in urban schools, where the relative ‘greenness’ of the surrounding areas may influence school-wide academic performance [23]. Indeed, Amicone et al. [24] found that students at urban schools who encounter natural environments in their break times return to class with increased sustained and selective attention relative to their counterparts in built-up environments. Dense plantings of trees appear to have the most impact, with tree cover density being positively associated with adolescents’ academic performance. Hodson and Sander [25] found that tree cover correlated with better reading scores, when compared with lawns, shrubbery, and water bodies, while Li et al. [26] found tree cover density within a one-mile radius of urban high schools was positively associated with test scores and college readiness. While correlations between biophilic relationships and test scores may be an indirect measure of the influence of natural elements in and around schools, it is interesting to see several studies making such connections.

3. Adolescent Identity Formation, Biophilia, and Place

A key task of adolescence is to develop a coherent sense of self and identity [27]. Through an ever-cycling process of movement from the stable to the new, the adolescent’s identity morphs and emerges. Branje and colleagues [28] describe this as a process by which young people come to know who they genuinely are. What emerges is a subjective feeling of self-sameness and continuity over contexts and time. The adolescent becomes aware of their distinctiveness and uniqueness, a coherence and similarity forms regarding who they are across various domains, and there develops a continuity over time and across situations [29].

The places adolescents inhabit impact their emerging identities. Bissell [30] (p. 272) writes about affective relationships, being the development of an affective atmosphere that is perceived and sensed through the body and forms part of ‘the ubiquitous backdrop’ that affects the ways in which spaces are inhabited. Schools, as places, may play a key role in adolescent identity formation.

4. Connecting Theories to Explore Adolescents’ Biophilic Place Relationships

To date, students’ biophilic place relationships with schools have not been a topic of known empirical research. However, connections between theories about adolescent identity formation, Fromm’s ideas about the biophilious person, and place relationships, such as explored by researchers including Dovey [30,31,32], provide a fascinating theory base for investigating adolescents’ biophilic place relationships.

As outlined above, a desire for growth, to construct rather than retain, to be more than to have more, to be capable of wondering, to see something new rather than to seek confirmation in the old, and a love of adventure are key attributes of Fromm’s biophilious person [7] and brings into the frame the process of movement from the stable to the new, as accompanies the emergence of adolescents’ identities. Here, further connections may be made to Dovey’s [33] ideas about the becoming of places. For Dovey, places become; they are assemblages that stabilise dwelling while also encompassing lines of movement and processes that promote something new. He suggests that places become where zones of order, uniformity, familiarity, and a sense of home are challenged and destabilised, where new movements, along with inventiveness and curiosity, challenge and dissolve established boundaries. Ever-emerging processes of places becoming, he contends, occur in the resonances of tensions between the existing and the new.

In this article, it makes sense to seek understandings of adolescent place relationships in a way that considers the tensions that exist between the existing and stable versus the new and the emerging. A brief introduction to place theory below further explores these ideas as a basis for this research.

5. A Brief Introduction to Place Theory

5.1. Origins of Place

Heidegger’s [34] foundational contribution to contemporary thinking about place is his notion of Dasein, meaning ‘being there’ or ‘being in’. For him, ‘being’ (existence) cannot be thought of simply in terms of occupying space as a container. Rather, there is a connection between a person and a place, a continuity between person and place, that is premised on the requirement of ‘being-there’—in place. Following this line of thinking, Relph [35] (p. 43) concluded that:

The basic meaning of place, its essence, does not therefore come from locations, nor from the trivial functions that places serve, nor from the community that occupies it, nor from superficial or mundane experiences … The essence of place lies in the largely unselfconscious intentionality that defines places as profound centers of human existence.

Such a phenomenological approach to understanding place is not that interested in the unique attributes of places, nor is it primarily concerned with social forces. Rather, it seeks to “define the essence of human existence as one that is necessarily and importantly ‘in-place’” [36] (p. 158).

As Cresswell suggests, “this approach is less concerned with ‘places’ and more interested in ‘Place’” [36] (p. 158). “So, rather than asking what this place or that place is like, the phenomenological approach to place asks what makes a place a place?” [36] (p. 96). Further, Malpas [37] (p. 13) argues that place is “the frame within which experience is to be understood” and is “integral to the very structure and possibility of experience” [37] (p. 31). In summary, Seamon [38] (p. 29) concludes that in this sense “places are spatial-temporal fields that integrate, activate, and interconnect things, people, experiences, meanings and events”.

5.2. Place as Complex Adaptive Assemblage

Doreen Massey’s paper, “A Global Sense of Place” [39], marked a shift regarding how place might be considered. Her work disrupted the Heideggerian premise that place is pre-given and deep-rooted. Instead, she argued that places are open, progressive, and global; that they are outward-looking, defined by multiple and fluid identities; and their character is derived from connections and interactions, rather than origins and boundaries. Massey’s work has been widely cited as a plea for a new conceptualisation of place as open and hybrid, “a product of interconnecting flows—of routes rather than roots” [36] (p. 234).

Aligned with such thinking, a conceptualisation of place as ‘assemblage’ has evolved over recent years, drawing upon the earlier work of Deleuze and Guattari [40]. Dovey [31,32,33], along with McFarlane [41], are prominent proponents of assemblage thinking when seeking to understand place relations. They argue assemblage thinking is not so much interested in the formation of a place itself, rather in the interactions and processes—the relations—between the social and the material elements, and the resultant temporalities and possibilities that present themselves as a result. Dovey argues for adopting an approach to understanding place that is “deep seated in everyday life without being deep-rooted in fixed origins … grounded in the particularities and practices of everyday life” [33] (p. 30).

Referencing Deleuze and Guattari [40], and DeLanda’s [42] interpretation, Dovey [33] outlines a way of thinking about place that seeks to replace Heidegger’s ‘being-in-the-world’ with Deleuzian ‘becoming-in-the-world’: a more dynamic and open sense of place as a multiplicitous assemblage. He notes that the term ‘assemblage’ is a translation of the French ‘agencement’, which is synonymous with the words ‘layout’, ‘arrangement’, or ‘alignment’, and to some degree, ‘agency’. Assemblage thinking is relational, and assemblages are dynamic, they change and adapt over time. The flows of life that give them their intensity and sense of place are important. In the context of urban research, Dovey suggests that:

An assemblage is a whole that is formed from the interconnectivity and flows between constituent parts wherein the identities and functions of both parts and wholes emerge from the flows, alliances, and synergies between them. For Deleuze ‘It is never filiations which are important, but alliances, alloys’ [43] (p. 69) and ‘Don’t ask what it means, show how it works’ [33] (p. 22).

Dovey [33] explains that assemblage thinking also has connections to the science of emergence, complex adaptive systems, and resilience thinking [44,45,46]. He argues that:

“Places can be understood as complex adaptive systems where over time a regime or identity with certain characteristics emerges, settles down and becomes more or less resilient. Resilience is defined as the capacity of the system to adapt to change without crossing a threshold into a new ‘regime’ or ‘identity’ [46] (p. 32)” [33] (p. 28).

Resilience in this sense is not the capacity to maintain or return to a single stable state but rather a dynamic capacity to move between a range of adaptive states without crossing a threshold of no return. In this sense, an enduring place identity develops as an emergent regime, sustained by complex sets of relations and adaptive capacities. Dovey [33] has taken complex adaptive systems theory (derived from the physical sciences) and assemblage thinking (which resists any reduction of place to a science) and argues that there are many interconnections between the two and that a ‘complex adaptive assemblage’ is a useful way of understanding place.

6. Research Design

6.1. Case Study Design

A case study methodology was used to investigate how adolescent students experience a sense of place in Australian vertical schools. As discussed above, this article focusses on their relationships with the biophilic elements in their schools, as emerged in the data. The case study methodology was employed to gain in-depth understandings of a contemporary phenomenon within its context, while also offering scope to expand and generalise theory [47].

6.2. Case Study Sites

Two case schools were recruited: City School and Inner-Suburban High School. Pseudonyms are used for the schools and individual participants to protect their identities. The characteristics of these vertical schools are presented below.

Occupying a nine-storey repurposed office building, City School (Figure 1) is an independent non-denominational school catering to students from Reception to Year 12 (all compulsory school years in Australia). The school is located in Melbourne, Victoria, adjacent to an historic park/gardens, and experiences the city’s mild-temperate climate. The school features 1500 square metres of outdoor recreation space across three terraces, in addition to extensive indoor settings. The school opened progressively from 2016 and 2018, and now has an enrolment of 750 students from Reception to Year 12.

Featuring four buildings, the tallest being seven storeys high, Inner-Suburban High School (Figure 2) is in the warm-temperate climate of Brisbane, Queensland. It caters to students from Years 7 to 12 (secondary school years in Australia). The campus design includes five ‘learning hubs’ centred around a green courtyard. The school opened in 2021 and has an enrolment capacity of 1600 students. At the time of data collection, the school was operating with students in Years 7 to 9 only and had an enrolment of 950 students.

6.3. Biophilic Design of the Case Schools

Two of the three Biophilic Design Patterns identified by Ryan and collaborators [11,12] are apparent at both case schools: ‘nature in the space’ and ‘nature of the space’. Neither offer ‘natural analogues’.

At City School, nature in the space is offered via three large outdoor terraces and the neighbouring park. The terraces offer direct access to sunlight, breezes, and extensive views to the park, the sky, and beyond. While the school’s building features few plants, students utilise the neighbouring park and its many established trees and seasonal planting beds for the occasional lesson, and during breaks. Almost all rooms of the school feature views of the park. The nature of the space is offered via prospective refuge [48], with the facilities offering a range of nooks from which students can be alone or gather with friends to enjoy the extensive views of the park and city in comfort and safety.

Figure 1. City School [49].

Figure 1. City School [49].

The provision of nature in the space is more immediately apparent at Inner-Suburban High School, which features several large outdoor terraces affording views to the city, a neighbouring park, and Mt Coo-tha in the distance. Large plant beds feature on each terrace, offering students close contact with living shrubs. Some terraces are open to the sky, while others are covered. Those that are covered feature tall ceilings or atriums, promoting an abundance of natural light and the free flow of breezes. The school’s buildings are arranged around a large central courtyard containing trees, shrubs, and climbing plants, while the school’s perimeter also features trees, shrubs, and climbing plants. The neighbouring historic park features large established trees and fronts the Brisbane River. Many rooms feature views of the park, the city, or Mt Coo-tha. Like City School, Inner-Suburban High School provides opportunities for prospective refuge (nature of the space) through its many nooks that offer views within the school and some beyond.

Figure 2. Inner-Suburban High School [50].

Figure 2. Inner-Suburban High School [50].

7. Data Collection Method

Photovoice was employed to collect data. This method situates cameras in the hands of research participants and invites them to visually represent and communicate their lived experiences to others [51]. Thirteen students from across the two schools were guided through a series of five workshops to document and share photo essays about their place relationships with their schools’ environments.

Participants engaged in the following workshops to create their photo essays:

• Workshop One: Photovoice ethics; the power of photography; photographic composition.
• Workshop Two: Developing themes in photography; storyboarding and how to create a photographic essay; accompanied photography at school.
• Workshop Three: Identifying the ‘issue’; examples provided of artists and professional photographers who communicate an important issue through a collection of photographs; further storyboarding and emergence of themes; second accompanied photography to refine images.
• Workshop Four: Strengthening and personalising the message through editing and composition.
• Workshop Five: Presentation of photo essays and group discussion, providing the researcher the opportunity to ask clarifying questions.

The data set included each participant’s presentation slides and description of their experiences, along with an audio recording and transcript of the accompanying group discussion.

Students were recruited from Years 9 and 10 by calling for volunteers following a school-based presentation of the research project. A total of thirteen students volunteered to participate, including seven from City School and six from Inner-Suburban High School. While not participants, local teachers assisted with logistics, co-hosted workshops, and assisted the Ph.D. researcher to establish rapport with the students.

To conclude the data collection phase in each school, posters of the students’ photo essays were exhibited to each school community. Students, parents, community members, and representatives from the relevant education authorities attended the launches of these exhibitions. Accompanying these events, the Ph.D. researcher engaged the participants in feedback sessions where the findings of the entire project were communicated back to the participating students, seeking confirmation and/or additional feedback on what had been found.

8. Analysis

Narrative analysis was employed to analyse the data collected, which included students’ photo essays and transcriptions of focus group discussions. Narrative analysis is a methodology in which “stories are used to describe human action” [52] (p. 5) and is grounded in the assumption that stories “constitute a fundamental form of human understanding, through which individuals make sense of themselves and of their lives” [53] (p. 22). Riessman [54] (p. 3) suggested that through the process of constructing a narrative, events perceived by a storyteller to be important may be “selected, organised, connected, and evaluated as meaningful for a particular audience”. This approach required the researchers to focus on “particular actors, in particular social places, at particular social times” [55] (p. 428), and to construct their own narrative to detail the student participant’s experiences in relation to the research question.

Polkinghorne [52] argued that these narratives are not meant to attempt to be objective or neutral depictions of the participant’s life stories, rather their construction is influenced by the researcher’s own experiences, views, and priorities. Indeed, they are influenced by the ‘narrative terrain’ of the research [56], i.e., the data produced through the dynamic and collaborative interactions between researchers and participants.

When adopting a narrative analysis approach, Sharp et al. [57] (p. 871) advised the use of direct quotes when developing key points to ensure participants’ voices are present and to ensure “the narrative is grounded in data and authentic in tone”. Overall, the analysis goal was to identify categories and themes common to the stories conveyed by the participating students through processes that included constant comparison [52].

9. Place as Complex Adaptive Assemblage: A Twofolds Analysis

Place as complex adaptive assemblage thinking [31,32,33] guided the narrative analysis process. The key to thinking about place as assemblage is the concept of twofolds. This suggests that places stabilise dwelling and being while promoting processes of becoming. Tensions operate at all places between a ‘stabilised zone of order’, which encompasses uniformity, familiarity, and fixed identities, and ‘lines of movement’, which promote the emergence of new identities. The ‘stable’ and the ‘new’ are not to be considered as conceptual oppositional binaries, rather they fold over each other in a complex mix of relations. Figure 3 represents Dovey’s twofolds, which outline the characteristics of ‘stabilised being’ and ‘processes of becoming’.

Places offer stability by being fixed (striated), rooted and singular (hierarchical and arborescent), formal, and territorialised. Conversely, they promote becoming when there is a degree of ‘slipperiness’ in their lines of movement (smooth), and through being networked, rhizomic, informal, and deterritorialised (when erosion takes place). Informed by this line of thinking, being is not pre-given but is the outcome of becoming. As such, Dovey [31,32,33] suggests that it is through the ever-ongoing enfolding of the stable and the new that places and people become.

Places feature multiple parts and it is the relationships between these parts that stabilise being or promote becoming for different people. The relationships between a place’s parts can be intense in an invigorating way or an oppressive way, imposing power over someone, or affording power to them. Alternately, there can be a resonance in the interaction amongst a place’s parts, resulting in a coherence in a person’s sense of place. Determining which relies upon a person’s desire at that place. As such, the same parts, and the relationships between them, may result in varied senses of place. While commonalities may exist across different people’s senses of place, everyone enters a place with their own desires, and it is these desires that engage with the relationships between a place’s parts that informs a person’s sense of place within a particular context [31,32,33].

To identify, evaluate, and compare the complexities inherent within students’ photo essays according to place as complex adaptive assemblage thinking [31,32,33], an analytic frame was developed. This arranged the theory according to its six elements (power/desire, assemblage, territoriality/segmentarity, rhizome/tree, twofold, and sense). For each photograph and its accompanying text, images, words, or phrases were analysed using the frame to identify thematic clusters. This approach provided a robust method by which to analyse photographs and texts related to varied settings in each school with a degree of uniformity, thus enhancing reliability and replicability.

10. Biophilia and Adolescents’ Sense of Place in Two Vertical Schools

Across the two case schools, the characteristics most commonly discussed by participants related to biophilia. All students identified biophilic elements when presenting their photo essays and were eager to share their personal responses to the elements they had identified. When they spoke of their relationships with biophilia, they described themselves, their emergence, settling down, and the formation of personal resilience. The types of relations students experienced with biophilia at each case school are outlined below.

10.1. City School

At City School, participants metaphorically reached out to the gardens adjacent to their school and commented that they felt “more open” because of them. They valued the “green” against the “grey” and expressed their love of lessons in the gardens. One student explained that the gardens are part of his school and that they make him feel “inspired”. Another stated that the gardens represent “freedom” for her.

Such biophilic place relationships were mediated by the school’s boundaries. The experience of the rhizomic, organic, supple, and soft biophilic elements of the gardens was valued by participants for its ameliorating effect on the city’s striated, strict, rigid, and hard elements. Mediating this experience were multiple restrictions; some were due to the morphology of the school’s building and its separation from the gardens by a busy city street, while others were due to the school’s security practices.

The tension between rhizomic and striated, organic and strict, supple and soft—the “green” and “grey”—was experienced by each participant differently. Three participants were frustrated and felt their contact with the gardens was restricted and the boundaries imposed a “power over” them. Conversely, the remaining four students experienced a resonance between the gardens and the city, with one student particularly valuing the restrictions and perceived security offered by the school’s building, promoting a “power to” her.

10.2. Drawn-Tight Boundaries and Restricting Access to Biophilia

Sam, Fiona, and Charlotte expressed a strong desire to connect to the gardens adjacent to their school. All three also expressed their desire for closer affective relationships with the gardens and commented on the limiting effect of the school’s multiple boundaries, which they reported to exhort a power over them, restricting their agency and contact with nature.

The drawn-tight boundaries of the school’s security practices were represented by Sam in his photograph of the gardens (Figure 4). Taken through a tiny hole, only millimetres in diameter, Sam pressed hard up against the balustrade of one of the school’s outdoor terraces to photograph the gardens. He had a strong visual connection with the gardens but felt separated from them. He commented, “this photo feels as though the barricades enclosing the terrace separate the school”. He added, “I guess it’s like…um… that separation from the gardens”. Sam felt restricted from the gardens and framed them by enclosing them in a ring of steel. Sam’s photograph of student-only stairs (Figure 5) featured one of the school’s security cameras prominently in the foreground. He commented that at school, “the cameras overlook everything”, and that he felt “enclosed” and “isolated”.

Fiona yearned for closer contact with the gardens. For her, they were boundless and seemed to go on forever. She commented that “freedom is out of reach”, and she was “furious”. Referring to the photograph in Figure 6, she commented, “there’s the city in the background, City Gardens in the middle; freedom is out of reach; jealous of so many other schools with so much freedom and space to move around … we’re confined to this small space”. She directed her frustration at the school’s “prison-like gates” that exerted “power over” her (see Figure 7). The gates were seen to dominate the school, were intimidating in scale, and removed agency from those entering and exiting the school. Fiona explained that “… it feels very prison-like; gates restrict us from being free; confused and furious. Why are we stuck in this building”?

While Charlotte was reassured by the school’s security measures, she also agreed with Fiona, commenting that:

There’s obviously the idea of freedom because we can go out at lunchtime. But it also feels restricting because we have a security guard and stuff. There’s a freedom of being in the city yet restricted by the gates. Isolated from the rest of the city … there’s obviously the idea of freedom, but it’s kind of restricted at the same time and there isn’t that much connection between us and the community.

Charlotte spoke of her lessons in the gardens and wished for more of them as she felt “more open”, “inspired”, and “optimistic” when there.

10.3. Strong Visual Connection to Biophilia and a Resonance between the "Green" and the “Grey”

The remaining four participants described their affective relationships with the biophilic elements on offer in the gardens adjacent to the school. Lucas was proud of “his school’s open fields” and “huge spaces” that were “never sad” and left him feeling “optimistic”. He explained:

My first photo shows a super extreme … like hard … view of the city. And it’s like a really bad rainy day with the whole sky grey. Yeah, but I like the centre … the image has City Gardens, which is always like super green. I’ve never seen it like sad … except the trees in winter. What I like is that it conveys what it is like being schooled in the city, because it’s with super contrast with all the other buildings.

The morphological boundaries and school security practices did not limit these four students in the same way that had reduced the agency of other students. All four valued the visual connections with the gardens, as afforded by the building’s large windows. Charlotte loved lessons in the gardens, depicting her art lesson there (Figure 8). While Lucas observed a lesson through one of the windows and expressed that he felt the boundary of his school extended through the public gardens to the edge of the more distant city buildings. He described “the almost endless views to the buildings in the background … almost making it feel like a border to our land” (Figure 9).

Both Lucas and Emma felt connected to the park, with Lucas valuing its “super green” in contrast to the “grey” city. Emma appreciated the “coming together” of the “man-made” elements and “nature” (Figure 10). She elaborated:

Here, nature and the man-made environment have come together and we’re lucky enough to have access to both … like an urban city and the materials from there and we’ve also got City Gardens as a natural park that we can go to hang out.

Figure 10. The “coming together of man-made and nature” (Emma).

Figure 10. The “coming together of man-made and nature” (Emma).

Ishan appreciated his strong visual connection with the gardens and enjoyed this experience with his friends from the eighth floor. During focus groups, he pushed back against the comments made by peers, asserting, “I do not feel totally disconnected to nature or isolated or trapped”. Referring to the image in Figure 11, he commented, “It (the ‘cloud shapes’) look heavenly … they do look good … it’s not like you’re trapped in one building, right? Because you can go out and stuff”. Ishan was “connected” to and appreciated the “nice-nice view” he and his friends had from the eighth floor at lunchtimes, where he felt “cosy” and “safe” (Figure 12). Ishan explained:

There’s like chairs and stuff which you would like. Sometimes at lunch you can go there and eat and you have this nice-nice view. It’s really just about how we’re not totally disconnected from nature because we can still … it’s right next to us and we do go there like during lunch if you want to. It’s pretty colourful and it’s not totally isolated. You can see lots of City Gardens as you walk along Level Eight past the mirrors, which means you see lots of the gardens.

Freya went further than Ishan in expressing her appreciation of the school’s security practices. They promoted “power to” her and she was “grateful” to have a visual connection to the gardens while being ‘shielded from possible dangers’ (Figure 13). She explained:

I am really grateful that we get to have such a different view from all the other schools … that would just have views of ovals and the ground level … While we have views of the cityscape … and City Gardens as well. The security measures taken when I enter the school make me feel safe and comfortable. I think the gates displayed at the front emphasise how much the school cares about the wellbeing and safety of its students, which brings me joy.

Figure 13. Visual connection with City Gardens from level seven (Freya).

Figure 13. Visual connection with City Gardens from level seven (Freya).

10.4. Inner-Suburban High School

At Inner-Suburban High School, participants highly valued the incorporation of biophilic elements throughout their school and made personal connections with the interactions between the school’s biophilic and manufactured elements. One student commented that without plants, school would be “boring”. Another found the biophilic elements “beautiful” and “calming”. Several students drew analogies between their emerging selves and the capacity for plants to grow, move, and change within a fixed setting.

The adolescents’ biophilic place relationships were found to be mediated by the massive scale and volume of the school’s buildings. A twofold relationship between the precision and permanence of the school’s glass, concrete, and steel structures and the suppleness, growth, and change in the living plants was clearly apparent in the ways students discussed their experiences, also revealing a tension between the permanence afforded by manufactured parts, arranged in strict and precise ways, and the potential for something new and unknown afforded by plants and changes in the weather.

Desires and experiences of place varied across the five student participants. One found the scale of the facilities highly intimidating and limiting for herself and the plants that grow on and around the facilities, holding a “power over” her and them. Three found a resonance in the interplay between the manufactured and natural elements, with the building’s scale seeming to not affect them. The fifth student suggested the potential for plants, especially trees, to have “power over” the buildings, despite their smaller scale.

10.5. Forceful Domination of Manufactured Parts over Natural Parts

Amelia felt her affective relationship with the biophilic elements at her school was constrained and exerted a forceful domination over her and the plants. She commented that what the school offers “is not really natural because it was just added there to make the school look better”. She reported feeling frustrated by the presence of manufactured parts where “plants should be” (Figure 14 and Figure 15). She explained:

This is red, which is sort of like the opposite of green, if you think about it … So, it’s kind of like the red is the opposite of the greenery and it does not belong there. That is a bush out of the bush. So, the nature is confined to the space too and even where it is confined it still has things entering its space. It’s basically the artificial things can go wherever it wants, but the nature can’t go where it wants.

She resented the presence of a prominent drain (Figure 14), commenting that it “should not be where nature goes”, and a red fire hydrant within a planting bed (Figure 15), “which is sort of the opposite of green”. Just as the plants were displaced, so too was Amelia. The school’s entrance presented an intensity of order, rigidity, and scale (Figure 16) and she felt that agency had been removed from the plants and, by extension, herself. Amelia expressed her fear, intimidation, isolation, and loneliness at attending the vertical school. She said:

When I first came to this school, I found it rather scary, then when I came for a second time, I was terrified again … it was … pretty scary because like, you know, it was loud, it was big. It’s a big school, and it’s very tall, which is rather different from other schools. So yeah, doesn’t really have the feeling of a school.

Her photograph “Unbench” (Figure 17), showing a view from the underside of one of the school’s benches, related to her experience of being dominated and overwhelmed at school.

10.6. Resonance between Permanence and Precision of Manufactured Parts Versus Suppleness, Growth, and New Possibilities

Isabella, Camila, and Aisha expressed their affective relationship to the biophilic elements when they drew analogies between the plants and their identities. Camila appreciated the idea that just as plants were free to grow in “any direction”, so was she. Aisha made a connection between plants’ capacity for “messiness” within an ordered environment and her emerging self.

All three of these students found a resonance in the tension between the permanence and precision of the school’s manufactured parts versus the plants’ capacity to disrupt. Isabella found a degree of “calmness” in the “exactly parallel lines” of the built forms. Figure 18 shows red lines she added to her photograph, emphasising her appreciation of the school’s uniformity. She explained:

Abra and I added the lines because it’s got the horizontal lines. I’m kind of a perfectionist, so I like when they’re exactly parallel, but the plants breaking it up is kind of nice. So it’s a bit less harsh, because our school is quite harsh materials. Yeah, I do like lines. Why? I don’t know. When they’re parallel and they’re perfect it makes me calm. It’s weird because I like plants which are imperfect, but I like lines that are perfect. So I’m kind of contradicting myself there.

She went on to add that she likes the plants and the way they “break up the grey harsh materials” and that without them, school would be “boring”. Isabella’s description captured the resonance she experienced in the tension between her school’s manufactured and biophilic elements.

Isabella, Camila, and Aisha also drew parallels between their growth and development and that of the school’s plants. Isabella commented that just like her, the plants had grown considerably since she started school. Wrestling with her self-identity, perceptions of herself, and her direction in life, Camila made connections between the unpredictability of plant growth and her own development within a highly planned and structured environment when explaining her photograph, “Trees in the Sky” (see Figure 19):

This photo is called “Trees in the Sky” because it’s what it looked like … it’s like a very specifically planned school … like all of the buildings in the background are very much architecturally planned, with the main plant in the front, that we have no way of planning where it’s gonna go. Like, it’s just gonna go wherever it wants to go. So, it’s kind of showing the way that even though everything can seem very precise, it’s always something you never know what’s going to happen.

Similarly, Aisha commented about her propensity to be “neat” yet “messy”, just like her school (see Figure 20). She said:

So, the levels are kind of parallel and then there’s stairs and green plants sticking out, and I guess that reflects me as a person. I seem neat sometimes, but then I have things sticking out and not perfect.

All three of these students found a personal resonance in the tension between the permanence, uniformity, and rigidity of the glass concrete and steel versus the suppleness and capacity for growth afforded by plants and how they promoted new possibilities. For them, their school’s massive volume and scale seemed not to be a factor, due to the presence of biophilic elements.

Figure 19. ‘Trees in the Sky’: plants on the third-floor terrace with neighbouring buildings in the middle-ground and city as a backdrop (Camila).

Figure 19. ‘Trees in the Sky’: plants on the third-floor terrace with neighbouring buildings in the middle-ground and city as a backdrop (Camila).

Figure 20. “Messiness” of the Junior Hub (Aisha).

Figure 20. “Messiness” of the Junior Hub (Aisha).

10.7. A “Foresty Vibe” Frames Manufactured Parts

Abra asserted that plants can frame, and perhaps even exert “power over” manufactured parts. While working on her photo essay, she realised the delight she found in one part of her school, especially relating to the way sunlight moves across the day (see Figure 21):

You can see the light crawling in from the right-hand side. This place never really had a meaning to me. Every morning, I would walk by it and like never pay attention to it. But when I got sent out to take photos, I really started paying attention to small spots of the school and realizing how beautiful they are. Although the school can be one of the places that most stress me out, moments that I capture like these really help me calm down.

Abra went on to describe the “shadowy places”, “the green”, the “shape of the tree”, and the “blue sky” that help her feel calm when she is stressed:

You can really see the green, and it’s not a very bright photo. I love dark photos a lot, like shady places, and you can really see the contrast of the colours and the green leaves. It really kind of gives a foresty vibe. In this photo, the leaves kind of framed the building, I guess. And you can see all the contrast, much like all my other photos, with the blue sky and the railings and the green leaves.

The scale and volume of the school were not front-of-mind for Abra. For her, the school’s biophilic parts dominated its manufactured ones. They afforded her a sense of calm and provided beauty in her everyday experience of school.

11. Discussion

The values students associated with their schools as places were found to be influenced by their desires. Some of the barriers at City School objected to by some students were embraced by others: restrictions and limitations for some were perceived to provide safety and security by others. Similarly, the scale and rigidity of Inner-Suburban High School’s built form was rejected by one participant, yet its rhythmic and regular form were valued by other students: oppression for one, but consistency and precision for others. Common to the students’ experiences of both settings were their schools’ biophilic parts, which were valued explicitly or implicitly by all.

When describing their affective biophilic place relationships, students spoke of “freedom”, “open fields”, and “huge spaces” that “never feel sad”. Students also expressed gratitude for strong visual connections to green spaces, and biophilic elements were identified as “beautiful”, offering openness, inspiration, and optimism. Such values mirror those of Fromm’s [7] biophilious person, as students expressed their desires for further growth, demonstrated their capacity to wonder and see something new, and indicated their love of the adventure of living.

Further, the biophilic parts of the two case schools were found to play a role in the ever-emerging processes of students’ becoming through their capacity to promote resonances of tensions between the fixed and malleable: the existing and the new. The schools’ becoming and the becoming of the students appeared to be influenced by the capacity of the biophilic parts to provoke new lines of movement. Participants’ photo essays indicated that biophilic elements stimulated inventiveness and curiosity, prompted challenge, and even dissolved established boundaries in the minds of some. In the students’ minds, each school’s biophilic parts played a key role in promoting something new.

By contrast, the schools’ manufactured parts, such as City School’s boundaries and Inner-Suburban High School’s scale and regular/rhythmic morphology, tended to stabilise dwelling. This provided uniformity, familiarity, and a sense of home in the experiences of several students. Yet, these same parts were also perceived as restrictive, limiting, and intimidating by others, as framed by different desires.

The biophilia associated with the two vertical schools tended to ameliorate the effects of their fixed manufactured parts, huge scales, and volumes—at least for most students. Biophilic elements proved in the minds of students to be formative parts of the place’s resilience and that of their emerging adolescence. Dovey [33] argues that by considering place as a complex adaptive assemblage, that a regime or identity with certain characteristics may emerge, settle down, and become more or less resilient over time. Evidence of such developments was found in the students’ photo essays, with students recognising established patterns of daily existence. For some, these created predictability and comfort, as they found resonance in the tensions and interplay between the school’s permanent and precisely manufactured parts and the suppleness and capacity for growth, change, and new possibilities of plants and green spaces. While for others, such experiences caused stress and anxiety. Nevertheless, it was universally agreed that the biophilic contributions to these complex adaptive assemblages were inherently positive.

12. Limitations

By design, this research sought to understand the personal place relationships of a small number of adolescent students with their vertical schools. The research methodology enabled students to describe preferred and non-preferred parts of their school, as determined by their daily experiences and desires. While this resulted in deep reflections about a few of the schools’ features, other features were not discussed. Additional students attending these schools may or may not have related to the same features in the same ways, or may have drawn attention to entirely different features of their school and associated place relationships. Nevertheless, the prominence of biophilic elements in the participating students’ photo essays strongly indicated the importance of such features in their minds. It seems highly likely that if given the chance to contribute to the research, other students would have also featured similar biophilic place relationships, although perhaps with more varied interpretations. Follow-up studies may wish to develop larger data sets involving more students based on the insights gained through this small-scale qualitative exploratory study.

13. Conclusions

Given the rapid emergence of vertical schools in Australian cities, this research was timely as it provided insights into the place relationships adolescent students have with these urban environments, including how they relate to often limited outdoor spaces and reduced contact with natural elements when compared to more traditional ‘low-rise’ schools.

The findings demonstrated that the participating students not only valued relationships with natural elements, but actively sought biophilic experiences on a regular basis. The desire for more frequent and more significant interactions with natural materials and cycles was common across most students, indicating that the relatively limited biophilic experiences available to students in vertical schools is a challenge that should be addressed in future multi-level educational environments. While these findings may help sensitise architects, educators, and education authorities to opportunities for improved school planning and design, the focus here has been on students’ place relationships and processes of becoming.

Adolescence is a ‘messy business’ and remaining in a stabilised state of being is not its objective. The malleability of plants and other biophilic parts, their capacity for change, movement, and growth in varied directions, along with their responsiveness to their circumstances, are all relatable for young people. Indeed, the students in this study strongly related their place experiences and the becoming of their identities to the biophilic elements in and around their schools, prompting these young people to reach out from their current states of being to something new. These processes of movement from the stable to the new aligned with the characteristics of Fromm’s biophilious person [7] and highlighted the role of natural elements in the environment in the emergence of adolescents’ diverse personal identities.

Based on the findings of this study, which indicate that biophilia in schools may influence students’ place relationships and related identity formation, further research into adolescents’ biophilic place relationships appears warranted. What effects are experienced and how these occur may be areas for further enquiry.