Talking about the modern city, we could describe it as a particularly intriguing field of research and study for the human behavior. Public places within the urban web, open or closed, delimited or not, organized and drawn according to the principles of the architecture or areas freely structured and placed within the city’s outline, are constantly developed to areas with flow of movement and standpoints. Representative examples of such public places are the waiting areas. These are areas which daily accommodate crowds of strangers, whose stay can be for a time interval of a few minutes or a couple of hours long. Areas that are described by intense human action and mobility, also assume the development of communication relations, human contacts and interactions.
The approach and study of human behavior within a space, as well as the interactions between people and environment has been achieved with the help of basic concepts of the environmental psychology. Concepts like personal space, the dominance of space and the appropriation, are trying to interpret and explain the human reactions and behaviors. It was followed by an empirical research in selected waiting areas, like bus stops, at the bus station of the city of Volos as well as at the airport and harbor stations of the city of Thessaloniki. The detailed recording and analysis of human relations and the regular and systematic observation of the people’s activities and behaviors that move within the aforementioned areas, contribute to the analysis process and the comprehension of the interaction that exists between people and environment.
The objective of the research study was the observation of the human behavior at the mass transportation waiting areas as well as its analysis and interpretation always in relation to the characteristics of each area. Up to which degree and in what way does the structure and the organization of an area influence and determine the behavior of an individual and how does the behavior of the individual within the area affect its rearrangement?