David Victor Canter (born 5 January 1944) is a psychologist. He began his career as an architectural psychologist studying the interactions between people and buildings, publishing and providing consultancy on the designs of offices, schools, prisons, housing and other building forms as well as exploring how people made sense of the large scale environment, notably cities. He set up the Journal of Environmental Psychology in 1980. His work in architecture led to studies of human reactions in fires and other emergencies. He wrote about investigative psychology in Britain. He helped police in 1985 on the Railway Rapist case. He was the Professor of Psychology at the University of Surrey for ten years, where he developed investigative psychology described in detail in Investigative Psychology