Colin Ellard - You Are Here

Congestion pricing

It looks as though there is an imminent vote on congestion pricing in Manhattan -- the idea being to charge drivers who enter the central business district of Manhattan Island during extended business hours a surcharge of $8.  The intention is to decrease traffic and pollution in the core, and there will also be a nice economic benefit estimated to be well into the 8 figure range from the time that will be saved by the decrease in gridlock congestion.

Just as the idea was controversial in London when introduced, so it is in Manhattan.  I'm not qualified to comment on the economics of this measure, though the experience of London suggests that congestion pricing should work.  I can say that as a resident of a mid-sized North American city where there are few congestion problems in the core (because we don't really have much of a core for one thing) it's hard for me to look on at a metropolis where fantastic mass transport is available to all and to hear the reasons why some people balk at using it.  Here in Waterloo, we've been hoping to get a decent rapid transit system for quite some time (in order to, among other things, help to densify our core by making it easier for people to get into and out of it).

And this is where things get really interesting for a psychologist.  One of the prime movers of the congestion pricing initiative in NYC (other than Mayor Bloomberg, who is a huge booster of the idea) is an organization called "Partnership for New York City."  The PFNYC commissioned a survey to find out why people were driving into the mayhem of midtown when they had a clear choice to do otherwise.  The two main reasons given for climbing into one's car were 1. because it gave people the feeling that they could control their own schedules and 2. because it allowed them to avoid other people.  The New York Times has a nice article describing this, complete with a few case histories (I love the tale of the 62 year old custodian who likes to ride the velvet seat of his Jaguar into work and find it hard to blame him somehow)

I find this an amusing kind of schism.  We love to go into big cities because of the people that we find there.  The popular public places are the ones that are teeming with people for us to watch, and not those that for one reason or another sit idle and empty.  Yet when we're on our way to these steamy cauldrons of social contact, we'd much prefer to have an arm's length relationship (at least) with our fellow citizens, preferably from the inside of a steel carapace.

It's sad, but I kind of get it.  I might like to sit and eat my lunch on a lovely patio with lots of sidewalk action but when I'm on my way into the office, propped up with a big travel mug of strong coffee and still perhaps with one mental foot still dragging its way out of bed, I'd rather do my hatching alone.  On the other hand, multiply that kind of mental frame by the hundreds of thousands of cars that hit the road to commute into any big city on a weekday morning and, well, no wonder there's gridlock.

Migration as an act of faith

There's a great piece of science writing in today's Globe and Mail that has been prompted by David Wilcove's new book "No Way Home" dealing with the impact of human activity on animal migration.  In spite of the fact that a lot of my deep background is in animal behaviour, the impact of environmental change on migration patterns is a problem that has only slowly been creeping onto my radar.  Wilcove's book has been sitting on my night table for a few weeks now, waiting its turn.  It's now advanced in the queue.

What I've been writing about is really the influence of our psychology on how we structure our own spaces, and how we think about our connections with the broader spaces of the Earth.  Wilcove describes the many ways in which the resultant environmental carnage has changed what space, place and home mean to animals ranging from the Monarch butterfly to the sooty shearwater.  Our own inability to find and keep our homes seems also to be robbing our animal cousins of theirs.  It's great to see that this book is getting some attention.

Eyes on public squares

I had an interesting conversation recently with my friend and literary agent about the influence of the shapes of public spaces on our feelings and our behaviour.  She was administering my monthly dose of therapy, reminding me that there is more to life than simple shape and size, citing examples of public spaces and arguing that it isn't so much the shape of what's there, as what's there.  Some beautiful public squares in Venice came up.  So did Tianannmen Square in Beijing which, at least to Western eyes, is not a pretty thing. 

Anyone who's seen it knows that Tiananmen is a gigantic windswept piece of pavement.  Physically, it might inspire awe by virtue of its size, but it's hard to imagine being captivated by the details of its shape.  At the same time, it is a piece of real estate so soaked in history that it forms an important landmark in every sense of the word.  When I landed in Beijing for the first time in 2001, the friend who met me at the airport insisted that as soon as I had checked into my hotel, I needed to walk the two miles from my digs down Chang'An Dajie to the square so that I could see the same approach that had been made by students walking from the university in 1989, on their way to meet with tanks and murderous repression.  Even behind the veil of twelve hours of jetlag, I felt the electricity as I set foot on the big space, knowing what it had meant in recent years to the residents of the city, and how the images sent into space from here had galvanized the world.

I spend a lot of my time thinking about what works in public space.  I understand some of the tried and true planning principles that have to do with how to get people into and out of a space and how to keep them there for as long as possible.  I have at least a loose grip on some of the psychology that's involved in this, and I do think that size, shape, connections to the rest of the urban space are important determinants of how such locations work. 

What fascinates me, though, is how these kinds of stable properties of the things we see, our perceptions of the geography we walk through, interact with our feelings, our histories, and our motivations.  Most Westerners, I suspect, when hearing the words "Tiananmen Square" might first conjure the image of a young student standing in front of a row of tanks.  Before this, perhaps as the site of the mass rally celebrating Mao ZeDong's ascendancy to power in 1949.  And so for hundreds of years prior to these watershed events of the 20th century, this square was the symbolic centre of China for so many signal events in its history. 

It's easy to think of  many reasons for this -- the square sits in the centre of historic Beijing, the seats of political power lie nearby, its very size lends itself to massive gatherings of people.  Even for the purposes of the current government, the square possesses wide sightlines and easy surveillance from the banks of cameras said to be hidden in light towers (in 2001, my friend suggested I might try throwing a large handful of papers into the air to see a quick drama unfold.  I demurred.).  But does the history of a piece of space, and the location that it occupies in our mental maps of an area build up a kind of resonance with its physical properties? 

The power of places comes from the combination of their physics and their psychology.  It's obvious that the Chinese government, from long, painful and bloodsoaked lessons, understands this.  Hence their decision to ban live coverage of the Olympics from the Square.

Urban psychopathology

Unfortunately, this article in Saturday's Toronto Globe and Mail has disappeared behind a paywall, but it contains an excerpt from Richard Florida's new book which I'm sure is widely accessible.   The gist of Florida's argument may already be familiar to  many -- the connection between culture and economy, the importance of what he and others have called the "creative class" and some of the ingenious indices that he has tried to use to show these kinds of connections (the "gay index" and the "bohemian index" for example). 

People seem to love Florida's ideas, and I don't find it hard to understand why.  People who live in big cities I'm sure would love the argument that "coolification" is not only, well, cool, but also economically rewarding.  Also, improving cities using coolification methods would be a lot cheaper than improving schools or public transit, so I can certainly understand why city politicians might hope that his arguments had merit.

The excerpt printed in the Globe on the weekend made the argument that different parts of the country contained concentrations of people with varying degrees of particular personality traits -- neuroticism, conservatism, and so on.  This caught my attention.  The idea that different types of minds may collect in specific geographical areas led my thoughts on a jolly romp through psychopathology, psychogeography, and eventually of course to space (all roads really do lead to spaces of some kind, don't they?).  If this is true, then it would be interesting to know about the causes of such psychic stratification. Do we gravitate to certain places out of historical accident? Are there genetic factors at play? Or, most interesting to me, do different regions, because of the organization of the spaces in them, play a role in building our personalities?

Though it’s a sad example, we’ve known for a long time that there are regional differences in the incidence of schizophrenia. There are many more schizophrenics in cities than in the country, and a slew of interesting findings suggest that there are some causal factors at play. It isn’t that psychotics are attracted to what is found in cities but that cities seem, in some intangible way, to make schizophrenics. Whatever the shapes of streets and houses do to influence structures deep in our brains seems to take place early in life. Children who spend critical early years in cities and then move away are still prone to these increasing rates of schizophrenia. And even if the obvious causal factors like poverty and everything that goes along with it are factored out, city dwellers are still more at risk for psychosis than those who live in the countryside. Even comparisons of different neighbourhoods within cities show marked differences in the incidence of psychosis.

To the extent that we understand this at all, the evidence suggests that the key factor in the aetiology of this kind of schizophrenia may be what has been called “social isolation”, which can be measured in a variety of different ways, some of which connect directly with the shapes of the spaces in which we live.

Space shapes our social interactions. The locations of our homes, their connections and distances to other homes are the most basic bricks and mortar foundations  of our social lives. And in turn, our social interactions shape the basic elements of our minds. In extreme cases, such factors can contribute to a measurable degree to the outbreak of serious psychiatric illness, but short of those tragic extremes, it still seems reasonable to suppose that the shapes of our minds mirror the physical geographies that surround them.

In the land of the stereoblind, the one-eyed man is, well, stereoblind

I have to confess that I greet the news of a possible expansion of 3-d experiences in cinemas with a bit of chagrine.  The reason is -- deep personal confession here -- that like about 10% of the population, I'm stereoblind.  This isn't the same thing at all as not having vision in one eye.  Both eyes work, but they don't work well together.  Like Rembrandt, I can't fuse images from the two eyes together to get that pop-out of the third dimension.  I'll never "get" a Magic Eye picture.  I'll never really be able to enjoy these 3-d movies and in fact having to wear those glasses may even detract from my experiences. 

What's interesting about this, though, is that I  had no idea of my deficit until I had some vision testing at the age of 18 as part of an interview for a summer job at a glass factory (!!).  The company nurse, fearing that I wouldn't be able to detect huge slabs of sharp-edged window panes coming at me, wouldn't recommend me for a job.  When I tell people that I'm stereoblind, they often ask me why I don't bump into things or how I cope with a world that must look just like a picture.   But the truth is that we have lots of other sources of 3d information, especially different kinds of visual motion, so that I don't at all feel as though I'm trapped in Flatland (though I can have no idea of how the world might look different to me if I did have stereovision).

I have to tell you, though, that for a guy who works in a lab with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment designed to generate painstakingly realistic stereoscopic simulations of the world, there are days when I have to laugh a little at my own predicament.  Perhaps it even has something to do with my own penchant for getting lost.  But if so, the prevalence of stereoblindness must be much higher than we think because most of us spend some part of every day not really knowing where we are.

E-heckling

This morning I had cause to run up the aisles of the big lecture hall where I was teaching (admittedly to a smallish crowd of bleary-eyed souls who had braved the -22C temperatures and the first day of daylight savings to listen to me).  It's something I don't do enough.  In part I say that because it always makes me think of Phil Donahue, which itself brings back fond memories of high school days spent playing hookie, lying on the couch, watching the tube.  But a bigger reason is because, following the lead of a great tip given to me by my dean, I like to watch the reactions of students sitting behind laptops.  When it comes to minimizing windows, they have pretty wicked trigger fingers, sleep deprived or not.  It's something that professors have had to learn to live with (except for one lecturer of legend who climbs on a chair to unplug the wifi portal in his classroom before the beginning of each class).  I don't think it bothers us all that much.

This context made reading some of the accounts of the shenanigans at the SXSW conference all the more interesting for me tonight.  Mark Zuckerberg, wunderkind CEO of Facebook was scheduled to deliver a keynote, but the uber-technophile audience staged a kind of e-revolt, beginning with a mad bout of Twittering but then ending up the old-fashioned way with hoots and shouts.  They weren't happy with the questions that were being asked, and eventually took control of proceedings.  It seems clear that what in a conventional format might have amounted to nothing more than a dull murmur of discontent and perhaps a bit of an exodus to the coffee urn in the lobby was turned into something much more positive and productive by the priming presence of an extra layer or five of electronic communication in the room.

In another event, Meebo users expressed their boredom forcefully, electronically, and with all the maturity and wit of a gang of high school students.  The back channel chatter becomes the event, with multiple threads connecting the content of the presentation to the moods, expressions, and goofiness of the conference goers until the whole shebang becomes something like an act of swarm behaviour.  Not that this is a bad thing.  Swarm intelligence can generate some great stuff.  Look at termite mounds.  Look at great migrating flocks of Canada geese.

The potential for turning public speaking events like conference presentations, keynotes, and even humble little university lectures into something entirely different is something that interests me a lot.  It's as if we turn a physical location into the convergence zone of some kind of dynamic collaborative adventure.  I'm not even sure I understand the role of the speaker in such a setting.   The audience is the facilitator.  The "speaker" is just a kind of catalyst in an enzymatic reaction brought about by the occasion -- a space, a time, and a context mocked up by whomever happens to be in the audience and what they're thinking about on that particular day.

It would be really interesting to see more of this kind of interchange in a classroom setting.  At present, we can use things called "clickers" which can allow us to elicit simple push-button responses from an audience.  Imagine if they could give us much more than yes's and no's, abc's and 123's.  At times, the whole thing would dissolve into chaos.  But sometimes I bet things entirely new and unexpected could emerge.

One of the most interesting parts of all of this for me is that in a way it seems as though a new kind of cognition, a kind of freely floating unfocused attention would be needed to follow and understand proceedings like these. I wonder if we have it in us.

Losing our children

Though it's been on my list for some time, I haven't had a chance yet to read his book, but I spent some time listening to Michael Ungar's story on the media clips at his website this morning (my children are all away for March break, so it is possible for me to listen to things inside my house today -- a rare and welcome treat as I look out the window and see myself slowly but surely being snowed in).

Ungar's main argument is that we in middle class North America are "bubble wrapping" our children.  By this he means that we're trying to insulate them from risk and experience because we're afraid of losing them to any one of the perceived risks of living in modern society.

I've thought about this before, discussed it from time to time with other parents, and I've written about it in one section of my book.  A part of the problem is that we're overreacting to media accounts of the risks from which we're trying to shield our treasured kids.  The obvious argument would be that we do this because the media give pride of coverage to reports of pedophiles, drug pushers, and roving gangs of Nogoodniks.  There may be some truth to this.  In fact, the woolly and slightly paranoid socialist buried deeply inside me still sometimes wonders about the connection between our exposure to stories about threats to our kids and those who have vested interests in keeping bums in chairs facing screens selling products.  But Ungar makes a subtle point here that I really like.  To some extent, the media report what they report because of what we want to hear.  We'd be up in arms if there was a dangerous criminal ranging the streets, attacking our kids and this was not blaring from the headlines.  Where things go wrong is with our estimate of the risks.  We make two kinds of errors, it seems.  One is that we overestimate frequency (if one child falls from a tree and breaks his neck out of a million tree climbing escapades, we don't necessarily conclude that our child's risk of breaking their neck is one in a million).  The other is that we contract space.  If there's a killer on the loose in Austin, Texas, those of us in Whitehorse NWT start looking over our children's shoulders more closely.

These kinds of confusions of geography, brought about by the globalization of information, are yet another symptom of our loss of spatiality, no less threatening to our understanding of the world than a loss of literacy or numeracy, it seems to me.

There's another ironic twist to this, a nasty little positive feedback loop, where we respond to the perceived risks by doing exactly the wrong thing.  Rather than giving our kids wings, letting them do the exploration on foot that is so necessary to developing their own understanding of space, we quickly shoosh them into the back seats of our cars and we drive them wherever they want to go.

In a world brimming with threatening messages, it will be a hard fight, if not an impossible one, to convince parents to ease up on their surveillance of the little beings they cherish more than their own lives.  Though I know there are many who would disagree (and some of them have already yelled at me), it still seems to me to be a smaller sin to allow ourselves to use locative technology as a psychological "walking cast" for parents so that they can loosen their white knuckled grip on their kids, but not lose their own minds in the process.

Living the high life

There's been another small flutter of dissent following the publication of a comment by Tim Harford, the Washington Post's "undercover economist" citing some old evidence that, all other factors notwithstanding, crime rates are correlated with building height.  Glaeser and Sacerdote, the economists who authored the original study, suggested that the main reason for this might be that tall buildings put residents further away from the street and so make street surveillance more difficult.  In the tried and true language of Jane Jacobs, such architecture takes eyes off the street.  The dissenters argue, perhaps with some merit, that there might be other differences between neighbourhoods with heavy high rise densities and those without, even despite the fact that Glaeser and Sacerdote did their best to take these kinds of differences into account.

My thoughts about this take me in a slightly different direction.  We've been thinking quite a lot about height in our lab recently, mainly because the architectural theories we're trying to marry to our psychological work seem mostly to deal only with the two dimensions of a plan view.  But in terms of crime, safety, security, and psychological comfort, there are other types of considerations.  One of the more surprising statements in Christoper Alexander's early masterwork "A Pattern Language" is his argument that people who live in high places go, to use the psychological term, "nuts".

An interesting study in environmental psychology by Kaya and Erkip showed that in students living in a dormitory where all of the rooms were identical in size and shape, those who lived on the upper floors thought that their rooms were bigger and more private than those who lived on lower floors.  Presumably this has to do with things like exposure to strangers, impressions of privacy, and perhaps even the vistas seen from the windows.  Though this might seem at odds with Alexander's claim, it still seems to me that people living in units stacked one on top of another have to contend with some very interesting resonances set up by their movements and interactions.

It would be interesting to see a study in which we know not only about the physical living arrangements of the victims, but of the perpetrators as well. 

A virtual walk in the park

I've just been invited to speak at a local conference on "Health and the Built Environment."  This excites me but also scares me to death both because it will be my first chance to speak to the very broad implications of my work in psychology as I've only recently begun to understand them, but also because this is a conference combining academics, NGOs and politicians.  The intent of this conference, as I understand it, is not just for us to float lofty ideas at one another like great shining baubles in air but also to get some things started that will make a difference.

Happily, in addition to my usual rant about the psychological origins of our current state, I'm going to have some nice data to describe.  One of my students, Deltcho Valtchanov, has been working on a project in which he makes people feel all stressed and anxious (we're allowed to do that in psychology labs) and then gives them an opportunity to calm themselves down by wandering through a stunningly beautiful virtual environment filled with trees, ferns, meadows, waterfalls, and lovely little ponds.  We've been amazed at the intensity with which some of our participants have been able to immerse themselves in this environment (quite literally sometimes - they often ask permission to plunge into the healing waters for a swim, and sometimes seem confused about what might happen to them if they do so -- did they bring a change of clothes?).  We've also been very pleased by the extent to which it is possible to duplicate the benefits of a real walk in real woods with our simulations.  This is a tremendous advance for us.  It gives us a tool to begin to understand the sources of the healing benefits of nature so that perhaps we can focus and amplify them.  In cities, there isn't much greenspace to play around with.  It'd be a marvellous thing to know how to get it right.

The decline of suburbia

This article by Christopher Leinberger in the Atlantic is getting a fair bit of attention in the blogosphere.  In it, Leinberger identifies some interesting and in some ways encouraging trends in housing preferences.  With the rising foreclosure rates that are running in lockstep with the subprime mortgage market fallout in the US, some suburbs are becoming empty, dangerous and unpopular places, rather much as predicted (perhaps even with a bit of barely concealed glee) by Howard Kunstler among others. 

Opinions are mixed on Leinberger's claim that the suburbs cannot be retooled and saved in an age where fewer of us are willing to undertake (or can afford) long commutes to work for the benefit of a big yard full of grass and a great room the size of an airport hangar.  I'm more optimistic that if more mixed use can be built into a 'burb, especially considering the changing connection between home and workplace identified by James Bow, and especially if we can find ways to do useful things in these big tracts of space like, for example growing food, they may survive, but in vastly different form.

What interested me the most about the article was the assertion that our preferences are changing.  More of us want to live in walkable communities with worthwhile destinations than ever before.   That's a funny way to put it.  Who doesn't want to live in such a community?  More accurate would be to say that more of us are willing to forego what the suburbs do offer (large if usually inelegant houses on big lots with much privacy, the illusion that one is living the life of the country squire) in exchange for smaller dwellings, elbow to cheek contact with lots of other people, and amenities, destinations and attractions.

So what has changed?  Though fuel costs have risen, I don't think that accounts for the shift.  Fashion?  Remarketing of the image of success?  It would be great to think that those kinds of forces are responsible for what I see as a healthy development in preference.  I wonder if any part of it comes from some deeply subsconscious rising sense of anxiety about the future.  There's so much uncertainty about what will happen to us if we don't find a way to rise to the challenges of dwindling energy, a ravaged environment that perhaps we are responding with a kind of "circle the wagons" response in housing preference.

In my lab, we're just starting some studies of housing preference using virtual reality.  The idea is to present potential homeowners with simulations of different types of houses -- a typical North American suburban spread, a nice Frank Lloyd Wright house, and a beautiful Sarah Susanka "not so big" house.  We predict that people will feel more comfortable and less stressed in the Wright and Susanka houses, an effect that we expect to be able to measure.  But there's an interesting question here:  will people actually prefer the house that makes them feel the best?  The icon of success for a long time has been the power square footage upscale executive home in the suburbs.  Can not possessing the icon make us miserable even though what get substituted might be better for our bodies and minds?