The social constitution of ecological psychology in the Netherlands

This chapter is about the influence of Harry Heft's empirical, theoretical, and historical work on the ecological movement in the Netherlands. We commence with a sketch of the formative years of the ecological approach in our country. In the 1980s, a group of opinionated human movement scientists at the VU Amsterdam found inspiration in the Gibsonian approach, mostly through the physical approach that was laid out by Kugler and Turvey. As the ecological landscape in the Netherlands changed however, Heft became one of the leading theorists in the ecological community. Heft wrote several eminent papers, showing the scope and power of a sociohistorical turn in ecological psychology. Heft's ideas about the nature of the environment, the primacy of the social, and the experiential aspects of human perception and action inspired many in the Dutch community. We discuss this work and highlight Heft's mark on recent ecological theorizing and experimenting in the Netherlands.