Colin Ellard - You Are Here

Calling expert wayfinders

I really enjoyed my stint on CBC's Ontario Today yesterday.  I have to confess I was a little taken aback when I realized that EVERYONE other than me was in Ottawa and I had this big comfy recording studio in Toronto to myself, but when the sound engineer explained that this meant I could pretty much do whatever I wanted -- kick back, put my feet up, dance around the room, I quickly recognized the possibilities (but then became so engrossed in the conversation that I soon forgot to take advantage of the solitude.  I don't think I even made any funny faces.  Opportunity lost....).

What I found most fun about the callers' stories was that we heard overwhelmingly from expert wayfinders.  With this kind of thing, one expects to hear from the tails of the distribution, so in a way this was not surprising.  I could also understand the reluctance of listeners from the other tail to chime in as readily.  Who wants to call in and say "I can't find my way out of paper bag", though one stalwart listener called in to tell me pretty much that and I'm grateful for him for carrying the mantle of the lost generation yesterday.

But on the drive home (yes, the eco-nut DROVE as this was the only way to both do a decent job of the interview AND attend my daughter's graduation ceremonies in the evening.  There really isn't a proper commuter train system in Southern Ontario -- the most heavily populated region in the country) I thought quite a lot about the comments of the callers.  It was certainly true that one common strand among the experts was that they felt that they paid close attention to their surroundings and maintained some level of awareness of their place at all times, but there were also listeners who told me that they never ever ever got lost and they didn't really know why that had this special ability.  They just always knew where North was, or home was, or the water was, or where SOMETHING was.  This fascinates me.

I'm thinking of starting a little research project on sense of direction in expert navigators.  I'm not quite ready to set things up in a formal way yet, but if you think you qualify as an expert, if you're one of those lucky people who never get lost whether in the woods, in the confusing labyrinth of Venice, or in the most byzantine corridors of a confusing government complex, I'd like to hear from you.

I've got a big box of books to give away and I'll let one or two fly away in exchange for a little Canadian wayfinding savvy.

Another radio interview coming up soon for the NPR network.  I suspect I'll be by myself for this one as well.  I'll be pulling faces this time.  And maybe I'll have my feet up on the table too.  If you listen in and hear a giant crash, that'll be me tipped over on the floor.  Details closer to the date.

City space in Cork

In many ways, the city of Cork seems not dramatically different to the city of Kitchener-Waterloo.  It's a bit more lightly populated and it happens to have a giant deep-water harbour, second only to Sydney Harbour in Australia.  But just as my mid-sized city residence has a mix of older traditional industries and newer knowledge industries, so does Cork.  There's a major brewery, some pharmaceutical plants, and the European headquarters of Apple, for example.  Given these kinds of very basic similarities, I couldn't help but be jealous of the layout of the city, so typical of an older European urban centre and so different from what I find at home.  It's easy to point to the very different ways in which mid-sized cities have grown on either side of the Atlantic Ocean, and to argue that the huge difference in the ages of cities has had an impact on the plan of the streets and the scales of buildings.  Yet I still find it difficult to imagine that the average North American municipal government would be able to ram through a proposal for a pedestrian centre like this one:

Or put up with this kind of ratio of sidewalk to road space:

Or tolerate the inevitable road congestion that results for those who choose to try to cram their vehicles into the city:

The best option, if you try to drive at all, is to pitch your car into one of the giant (and expensive) city parking lots and then hoof it from there.  Even better, if you're a resident, would be to get into the city via public transit, which seemed ample to me.

I know there are some big oversimplifications in all of this.  I could even guess that there are lots of Corkonians who utterly HATE their pedestrian dominated city and would like nothing more than a system in which they could drive a car into the city, find a parking spot right outside the shops and save a lot of time.  I had the perspective of a tourist who had nothing more urgent on his mind than soaking up the feel of the city, grabbing a pint at an interesting pub, making sure he didn't miss any of the must-see tourist attractions (of which, truthfully, there aren't many in Cork.  It's just a lovely, bustling, pretty city filled with pedestrians).  Nevertheless, I can't imagine what would make me object to any kind of redesign of our core, no matter how dramatic, that would give us a little more of what you see in the pictures and a little less of what we have now.  This spoken not as a privileged latte sipping condo-dweller with only a toy dog and a seasonal sports car to take care of, but as a member of a family of eight with 4.5 jobs between us, a big dog and a lot of complicated interests and ailments.

There's something else about city plans like the one in Cork, perhaps hinted at by this picture:

I yak all the time about grid cities, deformed wheels, organicity in street layouts, blah blah blah, and though I have a sense of what I mean (and an even stronger sense of how little we know about the long-term psychological impacts of living among such different kinds of urban designs), there's nothing like being inside the issue to really understand it.  Thing is, there's something utterly magnetic about these wee little alleys and walkways that lead from one place to another -- in this case down to the edge of the River Lee which runs through (defines) the city.  When you live off the grid, so to speak, then wayfinding for an utter beginner to the city can be treacherous initially, but it's astonishing how quickly one learns one's way around by imbibing the character of these little nooks and crannies.  In a grid, every intersection is more or less the same other than the signage and whatever local landmarks might appear at the corners.  Off the grid, the size and shape of every intersection is unique, flavourful and unforgettable.  One's initial confusion seems to give way remarkably quickly to an easy comfort and familiarity.  

Sometime soon, perhaps on my next travel junket, I'm going to adopt a more scientific approach to measuring some of this both by monitoring some of my own reactions to what I see and by more careful measurements of the appearances of some of the gorgeous textures and surfaces that lead eye and foot to one interesting new vista after another.

Thoughts on return from Ireland

Rumours of my early demise were exaggerated.  I've just returned from a visit to Ireland -- mostly vacation but with some working threads as well.  I had meant to post some remarks and photographs enroute but, well, with a pub on every corner, remarkably few of them offering wifi, it was a little difficult.  I've got a busy week ahead -- some pre-interviews and at least one visit to the big city -- but I'll try to squeeze in some space-related comments and pictures here as the week goes by.  I'll just foreshadow now by saying that I return more perplexed than ever about the vast differences between the organization and rhythm of life in Europe and in North America and more curious than ever about the origins and meanings of some of these differences.

The release date of my book in the US is now very close (July 7) and though the prospect of trying to reach such a massive audience is a daunting one, there were some nice tidbits of news while I was away that should help a bit.  More details as things unfold.

For now I'm going to sneak out to the nice weather and a good book, though with the sun shining and the plants growing, the air is filled with the sound of gas-appliances hacking away at all visible vegetation in the constant effort to make it conform with the sharp corners and fine edges that we want in our built environment. I'm sure with a set of earplugs and a mask I should make out all right though.

Chimpanzee spatial memory

This really interesting article suggests that forest chimpanzees are capable of prodigious feats of spatial memory in which they remember the exact locations of thousands of trees, and factor into their searches for them how their fruit abundance varies from month to month. I'm impressed by the methods -- the authors needed to follow individual apes for days at a time in a forest in Cote d'Ivoire, notebook and GPS in hand, and they also had to map the locations of tens of thousands of trees.  To test the memory capabilities of the chimps,they compared their observations of real animals to a number of simulations of 'virtual apes' that were carried out using a variety of different kinds of assumptions -- the baseline assumption being that chimpanzees just walk straight until they bump into a tree and then bounce off of it and move in another more or less random direction.  The chimp movements were far from random -- they showed nicely directed search patterns zeroing in on rare trees with abundant fruit.  I once spent a year doing field work in the wilds of Australia, so I have deep respect and awe for anyone who can wander into a thick forest for a year and wander back out again with a nice set of data.  Things don't always go so well.  In my own case, I came out of the field with a set of legs scarred up by gigantic burrowing tics, a deep fear of the Taipan, one of the world's deadliest snakes, and a basic understanding of how not to be eaten by a crocodile--always go into the bush with someone who can't run as fast as you can--which explains why I was such a popular bush-date that year...  But I digress.

What these wild chimpanzees are able to do is obviously a far cry from the abilities of the average urban human being, who not only is unlikely to be able to go back into the forest to find the same tree he found yesterday, but is also somewhat likely to die of exposure before finding his way back to his starting point.  I describe such differences in a fair bit of detail in my book.  But one of the things that interests me a lot about these findings is their contrast with the handful of studies conducted on spatial memory in captive primates who often show a tendency to get lost, especially when they're unleashed on anything like a natural setting.  A question that I've been asked a lot lately is whether I think the human spatial clumsiness results from an unavoidable missing chip of some kind -- that we're just missing a tool that other animals possess -- or whether our spatial skills have just languished through lack of use.  The ape comparison here suggests the latter.  So what would a human being, completely comfortable and at home in natural situations, look like?  How well would they stand up in the kinds of foraging tasks that these forest chimpanzees were challenged with?  Also, given the argument in the BBC writeup of these findings, and the suggestion that the extraordinary spatial memory of the wild chimpanzee can be thought of as a kind of signpost to advanced primate cognition, what do we make of the fact that modern human beings of the urban kind are generally as spatially slow-witted as a caged tamarin?

One final little sidenote.  The authors of the study found some interesting gender differences which did NOT support the standard story that Men are from Mars and Women don't know WHERE they're from -- just as I've been saying in talks and interviews -- there are gender differences but they're much more subtle and interesting than this standard tale.  In the chimpanzee study, females were generally more efficient and spatially savvy searchers.  

I'll be watching for updates from this really interesting group, though what they're doing is tough.  The going will be slow.

The big here and the long now

In an epic bout of WILFING brought on by an excessive early morning round of woofing that roused me from bed at an uncivil Sunday morning hour, I've landed here, thinking about Brian Eno.  I couldn't possibly reconstruct the path now, but funny how these things happen, that I end up with an essay written by one of my favourite musicians (no, he's not a musician. I know.  A philosopher of sound?) about topics close to my heart.

I love the story of the multimillion dollar Manhattan apartment set in a desolate and gloomy industrial street, as if the context doesn't matter.  I'm also much intrigued by the suggestion that this kind of blithe oblivion to context might be North-Amero-centric as it relates to my increasing fears that I don't know nearly enough about how cities or even brains work outside of my own continent.  It reminds me once again of a recent conversation I had with an architect interested in environmental psychology who said that he thought the hypothesis that we can acccount for many environmental preferences by imagining a connection with ancient Savannah forebears was a fevered figment of the American imagination.  But the most intriguing part of the essay is Eno's claim that as we misunderstand space by focusing on the near-at-hand, the immediately visible, the isovist (which is one of my main book messages as well), we're also narrowing our temporal focus to mere moments.  It's a terrible cliche to rabbit on about how life is speeding up blah blah blah, but much more interesting to think about some kind of integral connection between our inability to understand the structure of large scale space and our blind spot for any temporal effects that extend beyond a few minutes into our future.  

Desire lines

I wrote last year about the participatory design process that culminated in the construction of this great backyard play structure.  The idea was to find a way to connect our yard with the neighbour's yard but also to take things into the 3rd dimension and to build our fantastic shade tree into the picture.  I think it all went very well, and the structure is well-used by kids of all ages.  The older ones like to congregate in the cockpit after dark and we can see the play of flashlights from our family room.  The younger ones play on the stairs, the platforms and the ground underneath pretty much all day long when the weather is good.  Even the adults seem to enjoy the structure.  I've used the perch once or twice as a backyard office where I can sit and talk on the phone away from the hubbub of the house (you can see my fancy office chair in the picture).  I'm looking forward to sitting up there in hot summer nights as well.  

This spring, our street is a quagmire of construction as all of our services are replaced, so we're all learning new patterns of movement through the neighbourhood.  It's prompted me to spend a lot of time on my bicycle, as then I don't have to figure out how to get the car in and out of the street.  It's also given all of the grownups new reasons to move from one backyard to another to access our back gates which lead out to some additional parking areas and walkways.  I get a real kick out of watching neighbours climb up and down these stairs with books and briefcases on their way to and from work.  The daily commute should always be this much fun.

Bonn public space

Just a quick and dirty grab from Google Earth showing the public space in Bonn where I enjoyed my beer.  I was in Marktplatz (easy to recognize because of the sea of blue dots -- these are embedded photographs taken mostly by tourists -- you can see how popular this particular spot is) I was sitting somewhere near where you see the shadow cast by the high facades.  Also notice that the central core of old Bonn is completely car free.  And we'll look at this as North Americans and say "ok, but we can never be like Bonn."  But working out all of the reasons why this may be true is a very interesting exercise that to me goes far beyond snow.  Imagine a mid-sized city -- Bonn's population is about 300K -- not much different to Kitchener-Waterloo, Ottawa, Hamilton, etc. -- where there was the political will to just close the core to cars.  Just close it for, say, May to October.  See what happens.

Plato, architectural renderings, public spaces and biology

I spent some time in Waterloo's new public square yesterday.  It's about a 1 mile walk from my office, so an easy jaunt for me to get into the city for lunch, and much of that walk takes me along a nice trail through some woods and past a nice urban park filled with kids and moms on picnics and university students sitting by the riverbank thinking deep thoughts.  We've all been talking about this new space for years now.  It was initially mired in controversy because it replaces a few parking spots, and there were lots of people who thought that parking right in the middle of the busiest part of the the busiest pedestrian street in Waterloo was a good use of space.  I'd driven past the space a few times and listened to its design being brutally panned by my 13 year old daughter.  I'd tried to explain to her the reasoning behind some of the features of the design, as I understood them, but my words were a little hollow as, truth be told, it's not a tremendously attractive space for the drive-by observer.  Her complaint that this was a big hunk of flat concrete when it could have been so much more had some truth to it, frankly.  And her criticism of the sculpture -- a slightly off-kilter bell, had the ring of truth to it (ha, yeah, funny).

But you've got to be in a place at street level to understand it (which is one of my main points today), so I wanted to go there.  I bought some lunch at a small takeout place that's located somewhere behind the square -- top left in the plan view you're looking at -- and I decided to just eat it there at some little tables they had set up rather than cart it over to the square.  The view I had from my little seat was of a fairly busy street -- Willis Way (though in fairness extra busy these days because it serves as a detour around some downtown road construction) -- and also of a gigantic parking lot which is one of the main lots in the downtown area.  Fair enough -- if you want people who don't live in your core to use your core, you've got to give them somewhere to park.  I just wish some of it could be underground or at least compacted a little more by being multi-level.

After lunch I ventured out to the square which looks much like the plan view rendering, except in one important respect.  I've talked about this here before, and I had further long email discussions of this very thing with my friend Richard, and also with an architect friend of mine recently.  I think those tiny dots in the rendering are meant to be the positions of people.  Thing is, unless there's a ballroom dancing lesson, or a concert, or some kind of organized event, people don't often mill about in the middle of large, flat, concrete spaces.  They're much more likely to use the edges.  This is not only good sense (the interesting features and services are more likely to be located around the edges), but downright biological (we have an affinity to locations affording prospect and refuge -- the sheltering corners and cubbies from which we can observe the grand vistas of the square).  So what matters here is that the rendering betrays a failure to take into account how the space might actually be used and understood by people.

My architect friend told me that one of the great difficulties he finds in training young architects is to encourage them to understand how the world works at the ground level rather than at plan view.  We never actually see the square as it is drawn here.  And what we see from the ground looks very different to us, and works in an entirely different way.  He likened it to a contrast between a Platonic view of the world in which objects and structures are boiled down to their ideal, abstracted forms, and an Aristotelean view in which we're grounded in the vital particularity of the experience.  And I think that observation is right on the money.  I think it also speaks to a greater problem that permeates every realm of our thinking about our built environment:  it's the distinction between how spaces will actually work given our biology and our psychology, and how we would like to think that they might work based on an idealized view of who we are and what we ought to want.

At a much more prosaic level, I have to say that the square suffers from bad edges.  When I think of the happiest day I ever spent in a public square, I remember a particular late afternoon on a visit to Bonn.  I stumbled accidentally into a large, pedestrian space that was ringed by many cafes and restaurants, all of which had a few tables that spilled out into a part of the square.  I sat at one of them and quenched my hot afternoon thirst with a delicious, fresh wheat beer.  The combination of a little shaded spot at the edge of a grand vista, the drink and food, and the sight of a busy and interesting square made me never want to leave.  And in fact I think I ended up sitting there for about six hours by myself, enjoying the sights, an evening concert, dinner, and yes, a little more beer.

Could our little mid-sized city square be like this?  I don't know.  Maybe it's a pipe-dream to think so.  But as things are right now, it definitely could not be, because it can't be properly surrounded by the right kinds of offerings.  Three sides of the square are surrounded by roads, so it's impossible for the businesses that surround the square to have tables spilling into the space -- which I think is very important.  The businesses that do surround the square are not of the right type.  The marquee building is a drug store with a large sign that dominates the space.  At the moment, there's not even any interesting street food on offer.  You've got to have public food to have public space.

But I still think it's better than a parking lot.

Educating spaces

Reading this article makes me want to send my children to school in Germany.  This is exactly the kind of forward-thinking and revolutionary initiative that we should be pouring our infrastructure dollars into.  I've been saying for a while now to whomever will listen (run now while you still have the chance) that politicians should try to avoid the impulse to use stimulus spending to merely control anxiety levels by propping up failing industries or investing more of our money and energy in yesterday's world.  Here, Germany is putting 8.3 billion Euros into a radical re-design of educational spaces.  Current schools in Germany sound much like Canadian schools -- monotonous little beehives of classrooms with rows of desks and chairs facing front.  When we vary from this scheme, our experiments tend to be on the small and safe side -- a cluster of classrooms sharing a computer lab or an outdoor classroom consisting of a few benches and perennials.  These are fine initiatives, but why not go back to the fundamentals, think about all we've learned about how children learn and then build a structure to support those processes?  Let's treat our current state of disarray and confusion as an opportunity to re-think rather than an occasion to shrink from in fear.

Peter Hubner is proposing something here that should not be revolutionary.  Let's go take a close look at the constituents of an educational building - the students and their families - to think about what works and furthermore let's hang their ideas on a commonly understood framework -- the village.  Then maybe we'll end up with a school that looks more like what it actually is -- a garden for growing healthy young citizens -- than what it is not -- a penal colony.  The only thing I'd want to add to the story given here is to remember that in addition to asking people about their visions for a school, there should be ways to assess how they are currently using their educational spaces and what is working and what is not.  Just as with writing a good story, it's not what your characters say...it's what they do.

All fecund in my eco-nuttiness

My first op-edwas published yesterday.  I'm not doing such a great job of avoiding glancing at the comments, though I ought to have predicted that if I become aroused about the comments people make on others' work, then my reactions to comments on my own work would be, um, a bit more stress-inducing.  I have to say that it felt good to put the view out there that a very small change to an urban plan that would make life a bit more pleasant for bikers and walkers, ought to be a pretty simple decision.  There were one or two things I might have said a little differently if I had the exercise to do over again, and I would have maybe left out my discussion of inter-city travel (though still quite surprised to read that there are people who, even after looking at the VIA schedule, think that a train system that is less efficient than it was in the 1930s is acceptable).  But rather than defend myself here (I'm completely ok with being 'out there' and taking some abuse if there's a chance I can help make people keep thinking about these issues), I'll just note a couple of things.  First, as with all such discussions whether initiated by me or not, I notice that they reach the boil quickly.  Those who live outside the core in the suburbs are very reactive to defend their lifestyle on a wide variety of bases -- some imaginary and some with quite a lot of validity.  Those who live in the city and who want to adopt a healthier set of transportation alternatives including walking, biking, and public transport argue that such things are easily possible with a bit of planning and also perhaps they do sometimes claim some moral high ground.  Much of the discussion revolves around questions of social responsibility balancing personal freedom.  We don't want to be told how to live by anyone but (hopefully) we all want to find a way of life that is sustainable for all in the face of the epic changes that we see taking place now or in the near term.  How do we do it?  And what's the role of the state?  These are questions that take me far outside my realm of professional experience, yet they are connected to it.  The question of how we live is inseparable from the issue of where we live, and that's something that we all have to think about quite a lot.

And now for my deep confession.  I'll whisper this.  Lean in.  Sometimes I drive.  You see, I have a very complicated lifestyle, a bit like the ones described by some of the readers of that op-ed.  I have a large, interesting, blended family.  There are 3 full-time workers in my house, a couple of children in the public schools, and a couple more in daycare.  I also have a dog.  I have what I used to think of as a moonlight job (the book-writing gig) which I now see as the monster that ate my life (no regrets though).  So there are days when I help get the kids ready for the day, help get the dog ready to face a few hours of solitude (ok, I envy him a bit sometimes), pull together whatever I need to drag myself through another day at the office, and there's nothing I want more than to slide behind the wheel of the old spawnhauler with a big travel mug of Java in my hand, burn a few grams of carbon, and take the fossil-fuel magic carpet to the parking lot conveniently located just across the way from my building at the university.  Ok, and then sometimes I even take the elevator up to my office.  Otherwise I spill coffee.  

Not this morning, though.  Having actually been referred to as an eco-nut yesterday (yeah, I know..cool),this morning I hauled out the bike trailer and I lugged two pretty solidly built five-year olds up the road to the daycare centre.  This was interesting because we had to get through a major construction site on my street to do this, so there was a bit of a wait while the workers, who were incredibly obliging and supportive, cleared a path for us.  I had a full load of gear on my back as well.  And some lunches.  And then I had a flat tire, which I managed to buff up to the point of rideworthiness so that I could deliver my children, who were utterly thrilled to be transported through the streets in their open air chariot.  Did I mention it was pouring?

But here's the best part.  I arrived at my office soaking wet, slightly flushed, breathing deeply, fully awake and alert and, in spite of the 10 pounds I've gained in the last 2 months eating potato chips so as to avoid compulsive Amazon rank checking, feeling rather healthy.  And pleased with myself.  

If I'm going to be called an eco-nut, I'm going to live the part.  I'll let you know how that goes.

Tomorrow night, June 2, I'm going to be appearing at the Waterloo Entertainment Complex with Thomas Homer-Dixon.  I'll try not to show up all soaking and sweaty.