Colin Ellard - You Are Here

It starts at home

We greet the news of June’s uptick in new housing starts in the US like thirsty desert wanderers seeing the first shimmer of water on the horizon.  Could this be the long-awaited turning point in a year’s worth of economic bad news?  Have we finally found a midsummer’s moment of relief after the unremitting fiscal nightmares of the past months?  If only it could be so easy.  Hard as we might try to turn a blind eye to the continued avalanche of foreclosures and empty malls, and to point to the historical record showing that it’s always burgeoning housing construction that leads us out of recessions, to do so now is to forfeit what might turn out to be our last and best chance to cut into the diseased marrow of the ailing beast and apply the soothing salve of common sense.  We cannot be healed by turning back to the unsustainable lifestyles and practices that have brought us to this precipice.  We need to think differently about everything, and the fresh thoughts need to start close to home.  In fact, let’s think about our homes themselves.  When we cling to those encouraging signs of tiny green shoots in the housing numbers, let’s be quite explicit that what we’re really talking about here is not just a big pile of lumber, drywall, and human labor that converts to cash.  We’re talking about our homes.  We are talking about our most intimate personal possessions—the walls that we use to enclose our families, the canvas on which we paint the stories of our lives, our places of comfort, succor, refuge and happiness.  How sad that at some point along the line we’ve lost sight of the real importance of all of this and have been taught to treat our domestic spaces as nothing more than a form of hard currency.  In so many American cities we retreat to bloated suburban houses where we cut ourselves off from our neighbors, our workplaces, our public spaces and our services all in the crazed desire to encase ourselves in the protective armor of financial security.  We treat our homes less as domiciles and more as debentures.  We leave our children with no choices other than to sit and stare at screens while waiting for someone to drive them to the mall, and then we wonder to ourselves why they just don’t seem at all interested in the greater world.  In these, the most important spaces of our lives, we need to get beyond square foot equations in which we make brute declarations of our success in life by demonstrating how much of a one-acre lot we can fill with unnecessary and expensive interior spaces.  We need to make a mental migration to a place where we can think very carefully about where we are, what kinds of beings we are, and what we need to move forward into a happy and sustainable way of life.  Is that gigantic mine shaft foyer going to do it?  The two-storey great room?  The manicured lawn? As a psychologist interested in how people use spaces, I find it remarkable how little of the conversation I hear about home spaces has to do with anything other than size – how to get more space, how to make things look even bigger than they are, how to add on, how to move up the scale.  Much rarer are the conversations we really need to have about how our home spaces ought to work—how the organization of a home, a neighborhood, or a city might be re-thought to be something other than a conspicuous display of wealth and instead to be something that nurtures our spirits, helps us to forge community, and encourages our children to be the curious and autonomous explorers of spaces and places that some of us can remember being when we were children.  At this point in our history, we have a better understanding of how the design of spaces influences human behavior than at any previous point.  We can try to fix a sick animal by applying an ever larger number of loosely-fitting band-aids, or we can take the time to understand the disease and engage in the research, the soul-searching and the dialogue that might eventually effect a radical cure.  As with so many things, the important work begins at home.

Subversive GPS

I really liked this story of the Swedish couple who typed "Carpi" into their GPS when they meant to type "Capri".  Thanks to all those who tipped me off right away -- it's nice to have friends who know what you like.  The couple stopped at a tourist office in Carpi asking where the Blue Grotto was, not knowing that they were about 400 miles off course.  The stories I've read didn't give much detail as to what happened next, but one can imagine the astonished expressions, and then either some laughter or maybe some cursing.  What saddened me a little about the end of the story was the report that when the couple realized their mistake they got back in their car and headed south.  I would have liked to read about these adventurers saying "Carpi?  Who knew?  What's here? Let's go explore!"  I've never been to Carpi, which sadly is being characterized as a Northern Italian Industrial Town, but I'm sure there's much more to it than that.  Every place is brimming with secrets and delights.  I bet there's a nice cathedral and a fantastic place to have lunch.  I understand there's a large and attractive piazza there as well.  When I was on the radio last week (CBC's The Current) talking about the influence of GPS on our understanding of space, this is exactly the kind of thing we were discussing -- the risk that we can become slaves to the machine and so miss out on the pleasures of becoming lost.  So when the machine fails us (or in this case we fail to serve the machine as it demands) we can meet disaster.  But on vacation, getting lost is not a disaster!  It's the goal!  So I wonder -- is there a justification for a kind of subversive GPS system that messes with you a little?  I can imagine a machine that drawls in a voice a bit like HAL in Stanley Kubrick's movie "2001", "Dave, I don't think you really want to go this way.  Why not try it like this?  Let's just sneak down this little avenue and see what's at the end?  Trust me, Dave, I will lead you astray in the most delightful way."  Maybe not a huge market for a toy like this, but I'd line up for it.  But then, I've lined up for an hour for a cupcake. And also, why not imbue the GPS with personality?  Sure, you can customize the voice, but what about using a little AI to go beyond voice.  Imagine:  "would you care for the sprightly, playful unit or the strong and insistent model?"  If you and your partner are going to have a techno-menage-a-trois in your car, you ought to be able to conduct interviews.

Topophobia

I'm staring into the abyss of Google maps tonight trying to plan carefully for a complicated multi-leg car journey I'm going to have to take tomorrow.  I'm zooming in and out of the map, trying to imagine how some of the different critical choices I will need to make will look from the ground.  It's something we struggle with -- the conversion from an overhead or plan view to an on-the-ground street view.  But I'm struggling with a greater problem as well, and its one that has come up a few times in recent interviews -- our primal fear of disorientation.  There's no doubt at all that there are times when this fear is completely justified.  If you're hiking the Appalachian Trail and you find yourself off the beaten path, your concern for your well-being is justified.  Similarly, if you've just landed at O'Hare Airport for the first time and you have to make your way from Gate C16 to Gate M5 in 15 minutes to make a flight, you'd better have a good pair of running shoes and a keen eye for signs.  But there are some parts of our lives where we don't have those kinds of severe constraints.  Tomorrow I have to find myself at a particular latitude and longitude at one particular point in the day (else there's going to be one p.o.'d radio producer who won't speak to me again).  After that, what I plan to do is to seek out some refreshing green vistas so that I can grab myself a few hours of restoration.  This isn't quite as easy as it sounds in a built-up area like Southern Ontario, but I'm not looking for the Adirondacks here -- a few acres of woods and, if I'm lucky, some water will do nicely.  So what I could do is just point myself west after my radio gig and follow my nose and my instincts.  Instead what I'm doing is scrutinizing aerial maps for likely looking clumps of vegetation and water. Maybe I'm an outlier, but I think that as we have more and more aids to navigation, more and more of us are finding it a little difficult to let go of that primal fear of being lost.  Maybe that's what's going on here.  For thousands of years our DNA has grown up with these protective mechanisms that equate disorientation with death, so it seems unavoidable that we have this little frisson of fear when we realize we don't know exactly where we are.  And technology feeds that need.  I argue all the time for the adoption of a more playful relationship with space.  I want people to just let themselves be led by those deep hidden impulses whenever they can be, because I think that's the way we can all begin to understand not only how spaces affect how we think and feel, but what kinds of spaces we actually want in our built world.  What feels good?  What works?  Yet her I am sitting up a bit past my bedtime plotting routes and worrying about where I'll be and when I'll be there.  I think what I'd like to have is a GPS with a sense of humour.  "Oh, did I say left back there?" she'd chuckle with a wry little silicon smirk on her smooth face.  "Oops.  Sorry.  I'll try to get it right next time.  I just get so distracted with all these satellites chattering at me, ya know? Why don't we just roll down the window and breath together."  I need a subversive machine to derail my obsessive need to be here right now.  I'm sure it'll all be just fine.  And if none of you ever hear from me again, just imagine me wandering off into a lovely green vista somewhere west of Toronto.  It'll all work out.

Children in space

My last few interviews have taken a very interesting turn in that I've had some chances to take discussion beyond the (admittedly quite fascinating) discussion of sense of direction. I'll confess there have been times when I've almost rued the extent to which people seem to have such a strong intrinsic interest in the question of how we find our way from A to B because there is just so much more to talk about that connects to the human relationship with space.  Some of the conversations that have sprung up both here and in other venues (comments on the syndication of my blog feed to my Facebook presence, for example) about my last post on space and the city have stimulated many new thoughts about how we are dealing with the mounting problems of sustainability, energy balances, and the urbanopolis, all of which I think connect back to how we view space and place and how its many different forms can affect our minds.  But that's follow up for another day.  Today I want to talk about something very near and dear to so many of us: our children. One listener on the Pat Morrison show today asked me how she could help her 3 year old son find his way home.  I loved that the question was asked in so many different ways that I could have yammered about it for hours had Pat not wisely intervened with the hook, and only had a chance to begin an answer.  The most important part of the answer which remained unstated on this program but which I've discussed in many other venues now and also in the pages of my book has to do with story.  If we human beings have one phenomenal talent it is the invention of narratives.  So I tell people who are trying to lost-proof their children to tap into this innate ability.  When you're out walking with your kids, get them to practice connecting places with events by making up stories that interest them.  They have to invent the stories themselves or the method doesn't work very well, but if you give your children the latitude to put themselves and the things that they care about into the picture, they will be able to find their way through these storied routes even years after the fact.  It's quite an astonishingly powerful method.

But what I think I loved even more about this question was that it spoke to the desire on the part of this parent to give her young son some platial autonomy.  Let him wander the world, experience the disorientation of the lost and equip him with the rudiments of the tools that he will need to find his way.  Not only is this a practical gain, but it is one way to ensure that our children will feel connected to the places they inhabit.  In a world where spaces are warped and twisted by every means of modern technology from passive travel in the back seats of cars to the screens that transfix young minds, this encouragement of raw contact with natural place is no small thing.  I don't even think that it is overstating the case to say that this effort to connect our children with the raw feel of places and how they fit together is one thing that we can do to help them overcome one of the most astonishing deficits of the human species.  Converging thought among environmentalists suggests that we desecrate our planet in part because of a failure to put together cause and effect.  We don't see how our local actions have global effects.  Can this be in part because we don't feel the spatial connections of things in our bones?  The great evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould said "We will not save what we do not love."  But how do we grow to love our place?  Perhaps it begins with that integral feeling of connection that comes when we truly know our way.

Building cities with our minds

Cities are colliding with such potent forces for change that the future of our urban landscape has never been harder to predict. First, there are unprecedented opportunities for infrastructure development in the form of stimulus spending money.  At the same time, a glance at the headlines in almost any major newspaper reflects a populace that is in the mood to hash out what it means to be a city and, more importantly, what we want it to mean in the immediate and long-term future.  A part of what is revving up the drive for a massive re-think of these issues must surely be a background awareness that our future can be nothing like our past.  The economic collapse of the past year and global fallout that will ring out for decades, a growing awareness of the precarious future of an existence based on fossil fuels, and sharp concerns about the sustainability of so many aspects of our current lifestyle have left many of us wondering whether we can even have a future.  Those of us with enough optimism to believe that we can find a way to muddle through are engaged in a furious struggle to figure out how best to pull it off.  Some of us hope, likely in vain, that some key piece of technology will fall into place that can provide cheap, clean and abundant energy sources that will allow us to carry on with the status quo.  Others are beginning to conclude that we need to look inwards to understand the big picture.  The shapes and forms of cities should reflect our psychology as much as our technology.  We may not be able to fundamentally change who we are, but understanding how our wants and needs can drive urban form may be the most important first step in finding a sustainable path to the future. 

It’s surprising how much of the critical debate about the future of the city concerns physical space and how we use and understand it.  What so attracts us to super-sized homes in the open spaces of the suburbs that we are willing to tolerate long commutes to workplaces and isolation from public spaces, entertainment, and even most retail services?  Do we make such choices because we really are happier living outside of the central core of a city, or because we feel as though we ought to be?  Can it really be true that living in the wide, winding streets of suburbia among rows of almost indistinguishable houses can make us feel as though we are in touch with nature or our neighbours?  And what of those who make equally vehement arguments for the imperatives of urban densification, as if the desire to live in a four-bedroom ranch style in the ‘burbs is a crime against humanity?  Are people who live cheek-by-jowl in small condominiums and apartments really happier because they have ready access to a cornucopia of city amenities, all within walking distance, or are they driven to such lifestyles only by feelings of civic responsibility?  What kinds of homes bring comfort, and how is it measured?  How does the rapid transit debate—now being engaged by a large number of mid-sized cities because of the obvious candidacy of such big-money projects for stimulus spending—factor into such thinking?  In cities with weak urban cores, LRT systems can be used like a surgeon’s scalpel to transform an urban landscape rapidly and dramatically.  This is a potent tool to hang from the city planner’s belt, but only if he knows what to do with it.  If we build fantastically expensive transit systems, how do we know they’ll be well-used?  There’s a fascinating psychological paradox here.  Jane Jacobs’ mentor, William Whyte, taught us what makes a great public space: people want to be with people.  Yet the most cited reason for avoidance of public transit in favour of car travel is the desire to be alone!  What is it that we want?

As a psychologist interested in how the shape of the mind helps to form our cities, I’m heartened to see such debates beginning to take shape.  We know a great deal about how to make a city, but much less about how to make a city that is pleasant, livable, and comfortable for the majority of its residents.  If we take the time now to understand who we are and what we really want, perhaps we can defy the doomsayers and actually get it right.

Gender differences in spatial navigation

I've noticed that there have been some commentaries (and I've received a few emails recently) connected with some of my statements about gender differences in spatial navigation.  It can be incredibly hard to convey what I think is a subtle and nuanced story in a brief sound bite for media, and the fact that there's room for some misconstrual of my meaning is really nobody's fault.  It's how all of this works.  But here on my blog I have the leisure of laying things out a little and trying to convey the bigger picture as I see it.

I should probably begin by saying that the work I do in my laboratory never focuses on gender differences in the navigation tasks that we use.  Yet my students and I know the literature well enough to know that when we look for differences, we are likely to find some.  We have many discussions at our lab meetings about this.  Sometimes we decide to downplay the differences as much as possible because they are not the focus of our study.  At other times though, we (and often that 'we' is just 'me') argue that these differences are an important component of the variability in human behaviour that we want to describe, and so we should muster the bravery to wade in and to try to understand what's going on.  When we do compare the genders, the differences that we identify are often nothing like those that might be predicted on a simple-minded dichotomy of gender a=good and gender b=not so good.  In fact, the differences often come out in complicated higher-order interactions between our variables (and I'll admit freely that we most often find these interactions very difficult or impossible to explain and, because they are not the prime focus of our research, we don't often pursue them in any kind of determined way).  So that's me and how gender influences my own work in spatial navigation.  What about the rest of the field?

Here's the canonical view of the field as I understand it.  In simulations of real world tasks using either laboratory situations, or virtual reality, or sometimes even in field studies of human beings doing real world tasks, a difference that often seems to arise is that women appear to rely more on a strategy based on keen observation of landmarks and men appear to rely more on a strategy based on an understanding of Euclidean geometry.  This distinction has been observed repeatedly and it also has an interesting analog in non-humans.  Even laboratory rats show some signs of a similar difference in spatial strategies between the sexes.  As with all aspects of human behavior, there are some modifiers that we need to attach to this basic finding.  The main one is that there is a tremendous amount of variability in performance on these behavioral tasks and that there is a great deal of overlap between the genders in the distribution of that variability.  What this means is that it isn't too hard to find men who do better with landmarks than geometry, nor is it hard to find women who do better with geometry than with landmarks -- I hear from such individuals all the time and I see them in some of my studies.  However, the averages suggest a difference between the genders, and a pretty good sized one at that.

I find this difference fascinating.  I don't understand entirely what it means.  Most accounts try to put together some kind of arm-waving argument that the differences are related to differences in lifestyle of our ancient forebears.  Put simply, males were more likely to explore larger ranges while females were more likely to stay closer to home territory but to know that territory and both what it had to offer and the risks it engendered in fine detail.  Males had an eye for distance and females for detail.  I can see the logic of the argument but it's one of those things that is very hard to bring from the realm of amusing speculation to hard science.  

The implications for modern human wayfinding are very interesting as well.  I think one of the main implications of such strategic differences, whether they're gender based or not, is that the two strategies that I've described -- landmark-based or Euclidean, are more or less likely to work well in different kinds of situations.  In a grid city like Manhattan, Toronto, Calgary, or countless others, a strategy based on Euclidean geometry might work well, but so might a landmark based strategy.  In a city with a more tortuous and winding street pattern with lots of irregular intersections, a Euclidean strategy will not work as well because it will be more prone to error, but landmark navigation could work very well indeed.  Think of trying to find your way in Venice by keeping track of where North was.  You might be able to do it, but I think it would take a tremendous focus of attention to pull it off.

For those who might like to delve deeper, here are some references.

Running in place

I know I haven't posted here for a while now but I have to tell you the pace has been hectic over these past few days.  My book is now released and on sale in the United States and the publicity has been fun so far (except for coping with some unfortunate time shifts -- being on the radio at 6 AM -- if my mother were around to know I'd been involved in such a scheme she'd laugh and laugh).  I spent a few hours with a really fun group of NPR people last week wandering the suburbs and parks of Washington DC.  And this week I fielded some extraordinary questions and stories about getting lost on Neil Conan's Talk of the Nation.  I noticed an interesting difference between the callers in the US and callers on a similar show I'd done in Canada.  Canadian callers, almost without exception, told me about their very good sense of direction.  American callers were almost the opposite -- eager to share stories of difficult wayfinding times.  I think the most likely explanation for the difference has to do with the way that the call-in challenge question was worded, but I also wondered whether we Canadians might have something of a rugged outdoorsy reputation that we feel we have to defend.  I think my favourite story on TOTN, or at least the one I remember most vividly, came from a man who reported having been lost in Japan and having had a difficult time eliciting directions from anyone except for those who were intoxicated.  He thought the reason might have something to do with people not wanting to embarrass him by sharing publicly with him the fact that he was lost.  The story has made me reflect more deeply on cultural differences in our understanding and uses of space.  These differences affect everything from how we organize our domestic spaces to how we navigate through a city or design a park.  I need to write about some of this soon.  In fact, as much as I'm now acquiring a taste for talking about my writing, I'm beginning to miss writing.  This is a good sign.  I had a discussion some time ago with someone in publishing where we talked about the strange rhythm of life for a full-time writer.  We bury ourselves away for two or three years while we work on a manuscript, and then the book is released to (if you're lucky and you have good people helping you) a lot of attention and requests for interviews.  Suddenly you have to manage this mad transition from the seclusion of the writing place to the exposure of the market place.  Even for someone like me who has a day job that involves lots of contact with people, this has been jarring and disorienting at times.  But also very addictive.  Much like Amazon rankings.

Speaking of the day job, many fascinating new opportunities are brewing, including one that was set in motion yesterday which involves a bewitching combination of real down-to-earth applications to thinking about how we build things to ethereal ruminations on what built space is and how it affects our feelings and movements.  Eventually, I'll have more to say about it.  But right now, after waking up in the middle of the night to go on radio (would it have been easier to have just stayed up all night?), I need to pull my thoughts together and go earn my daily bread.