Apologies to the burgeoning Poetics of Space reading group -- I haven't exactly been asleep at the switch so much as buried in commitments over the past few days, including some interesting travel and conferences that I'll want to get out of my system before we return to Bachelard.
Last week, I spent time at the British Columbia Planning Association meeting at Sunpeaks Resort near Kamloops. At some point I want to talk about Sunpeaks and the impression that this very peculiar place made on me, but first the meeting. I gave a talk about the psychology of the built environment that seemed to be well-received. One's never quite sure how to talk to a group that it outside one's own specialty and squarely within another one, but I got the sense, especially from some of the conversations that I had with people afterwards, that there is an appetite for looking at new ways of doing evidence-based design at all scales from the small to the very large. Planners, of course, deal mostly with the very large scale. One of the most exciting projects that is slowly ramping up in my lab is one in which we're going to try to take the physiological measure of a city, or a part of a city, by strapping a set of sensors onto a few urban pedestrians. At this point, I'm keeping my expectations as low as possible, and hoping for not much more than some pretty visualizations of physio-flaneurism, but there's a little corner of my mind that hopes that this will turn into something very interesting and exciting. One of the things that occurred to me at this meeting was that current sensing technologies give us some opportunities for some very close scrutiny of street-level behaviour, allowing us to follow through on the hallowed principles of people like William Whyte and Jane Jacobs but with micro-levels of detail, right down to measurements of stress levels, heart beats and gaze patterns. From the chatter that I heard, planners have an appetite for moving from survey view conceptual thinking about aesthetics to a much grittier and fine-grained analysis of what is actually happening on the ground. If I'm reading this right, then psychologists have a very important contribution to make to help with this paradigm shift. And at a time when changing energy equations and climate change are generating increasing pressure on us to change our spatial footprints, it will be important to understand the psychological impact of the new patterns of urban living that may be thrust upon us.
Halfway back across the country (um, more than halfway I think) in Ottawa, I attended the Canadian Science Writer's Association Conference. One of the events there was a panel discussion about climate change, and one of the main arguments of the panel was that climate change is no longer much of a scientific issue so much as a human rights issue. It's becoming increasingly difficult for even the most strident deniers to convince anyone that we're not on the brink of major tipping points in the world's climate. Taking the steps necessary to begin the slow process of reversing these trends, or at least doing what we can to adapt to these changes, will require us to claw deeply into our current way of life. Where do we start? How do we do it? What's fair? Where does a politician draw the dividing line between the defense of individual freedom as opposed to our collective survival? What happens when our choices about what car to drive (or indeed whether to drive a car at all) become moral issues? Many would say that we're already at that point, or perhaps past it. I think the two notions -- that there may be better ways to build cities that are both more ecologically and more psychologically sustainable, and that how we choose to live within an energy budget (or not) is a moral one-- are connected. Or, to put all of this in a simplistic nutshell: most of us agree we need to make radical changes in how we live if we are to survive. It may be that the contribution of psychology to the debate would be to explore how such changes might be made without driving us all completely crazy.