Colin Ellard - You Are Here

China risen

   On my first trip to  China in 2001, there was one small area of Beijing that drew me back into its clutches time and time again.  No matter where I began my day, it was a near certainty that around sunset I would find myself just below the south gate into Tiananmen Square wandering the tiny back alleys of Qianmen. Back then, I didn't know much at all about psychogeography or space syntax theory or isovists or any of the amazing ideas of planners and architects regarding the manner in which the organization of a space can have  such a profound impact on how one feels in it. All I knew was that once I was past Qianmen Gate and immersed shoulder to shoulder in the teeming masses, listening to screeching street hawkers trying to outdo the verbal advertising blasting out of shop fronts on loudspeakers, wandering tiny alleyways of hutong neighbourhoods with their incredible contrasts of light, colour, sound and aroma, I felt somehow as if I was at home but also in the heart of Asia.  It was here that I found a tiny restaurant where the staff seemed so fascinated by the chutzpah of a sole white face willing to sit and point at a menu of unknowns, to eat falteringly with slippery plastic chopsticks, and to drink seemingly endless large bottles of icy Chinese beer on those hot August nights that they would hover over me in clouds of three or four, offering giggling tutorials in Chinese table manners and what I at least interpreted as some admiring and sympathetic glances.  It was in this same neighbourhood where, tottering out of the restaurant on unsteady legs, I found a man standing with a small telescope pointed toward the full moon and a little sign that offered glimpses for a small handful of change.  And it was here that I was propositioned for the first and only time by a Chinese prostitute--in my naivete I wondered how it was that this woman was willing to risk the automatic death sentence for prostitution.   I loved the vibrant heart of this neighbourhood and always felt as though, if I were to live in Beijing, I would want to live here.

Now, seven years later, I read that the Qianmen streets I knew are no more.  The blazing shopping avenue that used to ring my ears and fascinate my eyes is to be replaced by some kind of faux-Chinese SoHo, replete with Starbucks, Adidas, Apple, and many of the other brand names of the West.  The hutongs in this area, like many others in Beijing, have been flattened to make way for the Olympic games, many of the residents driven to the outer suburbs.  It's all very sad that in the name of showing a "world class" face, China is destroying some of its jewels--lovely neighbourhoods filled with overflowing courtyard houses, street life, mixed use like those of us in the sterile and sprawling west can only imagine.  These parts of Beijing were for me the ones that really worked in a way that most of us living in North American cities  should only envy.

And what when the Games are done?  Will Qianmen slowly creep back towards the old ways?  Will there be enough ghostly resonance of old Beijing in the new concrete escarpments to bring  back any semblance of authentic life?   Or will the streets remain empty, like a sad facsimile of a North American power centre in the off-season, only with a few carved dragons on the building facades to remind us that we're in China and not in Tucson or Edmonton?   

The place of food

I've just come back from a few days in the wilderness with my son, Captain Oreo, to many news accounts of flood devastation in the US Midwest, especially Iowa.  Most of the mainstream news accounts seem to have been focusing on the devastation of homes in Cedar Rapids and the (fortunately very low) losses of human lives.  It's completely human that our attention would be gripped by the images of submerged houses and cityscapes.  As most of us live in urban settings, we can identify most strongly with families who have lost everything in the rising waters.  But the sleeper story, which is now slowly but surely rising to awareness, is the impact on US agriculture.  These floods have also laid to ruin millions of acres of planted fields.  We'll all feel the effects of this rain in the fall but by then it will be so much more difficult, because of the distorting lens of space and the quiet passage of months, for us to put together cause and effect. 

I just went out to my yard to check on our seedlings -- a small patch of spinach and kale in a postage stamp urban yard.  They're doing just fine so far.  I'll take the Captain out there tonight for a little survey.  It may not seem like much, but I'll do whatever I can do to help him understand that his dinner doesn't really come from the supermarket.

Water: the great leveller

It seems that stories of water are everywhere.  Thousands have just died in Burma, many of them essentially washed away in a deluge of floodwater.  Thousands more will now almost certainly die for lack of safe drinking water.

Those of us in the pampered developed world take our supply of water completely for granted.  We turn on our taps and generally expect what comes out to be drinkable.  We water our lawns and even flush our toilets with the same precious stuff.  We seldom think of what goes down our kitchen or bathroom drains, and the effect it has on water supply.  One treatment with a lindane based lice treatment (easily available in Canada) poisons 22,000,000 litres of drinking water, in spite of the fact that headlice don't really do all that much harm and can be treated in other, much safer ways.  Clever new nanotechnology designed to decrease foot odour (the bane of civilized life, one must think) will kill off aquatic ecosystems.

I spent a few minutes on the weekend sitting down with one of my neighbours, a retired land surveyor for the city, talking water.  The water to my house, it turns out, is at the very end of a long supply line which originates at five large  wells located about 5 km from here.  In 2004, the wells were temporarily closed because of the discovery of high levels of 1,4 dioxane -- an industrial solvent that causes eye and lung irritation, nervous system and kidney damage, and cancer.  What's especially interesting is that my water supply is on what is called a "stump" meaning that the pipes that come to my house are just beyond the last fire hydrant in the supply line before the pipe ends.  This means that when the pipes are flushed to clean them out, my "stump" is left out of the equation. 

What astonishes me the most about all of this is that I knew nothing of it until this weekend, when I learned of the city's plan to replace our water mains next summer (though I imagine that we will still be on a "stump" we will at least then have lead-free pipes), I knew nothing at all of where my household water came from and assumed that it was completely safe.

Many of us are becoming more careful about food - reading labels, considering the geographic origins of our food, reducing the oil cost of nutrition whenever we can.  But water, because it looks more or less the same everywhere and because the taste differences from place to place are (hopefully) only subtle, is easier to consider a placeless commodity. 

But it's not.

How does water get to your home?

Placing diet

I don't get to do much travelling for pure fun anymore.  Most of the time, when I step onto an airplane, at least a part of the agenda is to attend a conference.   Not that conferences aren't fun (well, some aren't), but they are most often not held in venues that I'd choose to visit if there were no constraints on destination.  I've just come back from Barbados, where I took my family for no other reason than that we felt like going somewhere and we'd never been to the Caribbean. 

In a world run amok with climate turmoil, food shortages, political and economic chaos, I have to tell you I awoke each morning with a strange feeling of premonition, as if we were all breaking some kind of rule.  And in a way, we were.  My family is very far from the dour, fun-spoiling, sour-pussed uber-socially conscious lot that you might imagine from some of the things that I say here.  We know how to have fun and we have our guilty pleasures, but we do think and talk every day about the mighty problems confronting the world and how best to at least avoid making them worse.  We've seen enough of the world to know exactly how privileged we are.  So for us, flying off to a beach with no agenda other than to grab a few days of badly needed rest seemed to just not sit quite right.

When we're away from home, one of the things that we enjoy the most is the chance to experience local food.  Unfortunately, in the heavily tourist-laden part of the country where we were staying, the only way we could eat was to choose from any one of the twenty or so restaurants that were within walking distance or to shop at the local supermarket, where we noticed an almost total absence of local foods.  I think that the ground crops were from Barbados, but even the fruit came from overseas.  The apotheosis of the whole culinary experience for me was when I found myself one morning munching on a bowl of granola that had been made with local fruit which had been dried, shipped to Belgium for packaging and then returned to a Holetown supermarket.  It seemed hard to believe that in this tropical paradise where all evidence suggested that almost anything could grow easily, we were filling our bellies with products that came mostly from Europe even when the raw materials might easily be available on site.  The little packets of sugar we put in our coffee came from New Jersey.  Sugar.  In Barbados.

We spent the week away insulating ourselves almost entirely from any kind of media.  We did this on purpose as we have all been through a frantically busy winter and felt a need to restore ourselves.  So when I finally plugged back into the Internet and caught up on the news, I was interested to see that while I'd been muddling about the cost and place of food from my rented house in Holetown, much of the rest of the world seemed to have been preoccupied with the same thing, but on a vast and urgent scale.

Something has been desperately wrong with how the world has been doing food for the past forty or fifty years, and now it seems the industrial chickens are coming home to roost.  After an extended period of revelling in the Death of Distance, the rising costs of energy are now beginning to have the effect of reminding us of the meaning of space and place.  Suddenly, it's a big deal that our rice comes (or doesn't come) from Asia.   Suddenly, we have this rush of understanding that we don't really know squat about diet, nutrition or health.  We've allowed a part of our lives that should be sacred and intimate -- the part where we actually take the products of the biosphere in our hands and place them inside our body -- to be industrialized, filled with science and jargon and rendered into something abstract and modern.

I think that this could be an interesting summer.  As food prices spiral, we'll perhaps see more initiatives like this one.  I'm curious to see how many new urban vegetable patches appear as we all begin to think more often of our connection to the planet through food.  In a way, such acts seem trivially inadequate in the face of the massive starvation taking place across the planet, but such small gestures, multiplied by a few billion of us might be enough to trigger a new green revolution.  I, for one, will plant a few seeds this year.

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.

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.

Bill Gates, technology, society and the enigma of content

I'm excited that Bill Gates is visiting Waterloo again on what promises to be his farewell tour in his Microsoft persona.  Details are sparse, but the topic of his presentation is said to be "technology and society."  I haven't always been a fan of everything that Microsoft has done (those who know me well might guffaw at my gift for understatement) but I'm pleased to see Gates turn more of his attention to broader issues in technology.  Though I think the odds are slim that I'll find a way into the small hall for a talk geared to students (and wisely so -- these are the bright kids who hold the future in their hands), the possibilities, given the topic, excite me.

I've been a part of many discussions recently which have all come to the more or less the same conclusion.  We've become a society that is expert at designing and deploying technology--gigantic screens, virtual reality, dirt cheap information processing, light speed communication of huge amounts of image and sound data.  We know how to do it in a big way, but we're still trying to figure out what to do with it.  We have the toys.  Now we need the content.

Plenty of money has been made by those with the know-how to use computer technology, but I see a future where our main concern will not be to find a way to grow economies and make lots of bucks.  We'll be busy trying to find a way to turn what our super-intelligence has wrought into a viable future for the species and the planet.  This will entail some hard thinking about exactly what we are as a species, what forms our minds take, and how we can tap into our biologies with new technologies to make the world a place again.

I've written here before about how technology might be used to help our minds connect fragmented spaces, to help us see how we're connected to the wider effects of our actions, and I'm hoping that what Gates will have to say will light some similar sparks in a room full of very smart 20-something students.

What we need out of technology is a new set of tools for rethinking ourselves as an integral part of a planet we need to protect, rather than as some kind of boxed-off Wunderkind outlier set apart from the rest of the cosmos.  I think the kind of information technology that Gates has helped to build can do exactly that.  The way is now being led by creative new media artists like David Rokeby and Scott Snibbe, but what could lie ahead is an environment populated by permanent interactive architecture that responds to our actions, thoughts, and moods by reminding us of where we fit in the bigger picture.

I may not be able to get my body into the room for Gates' talk, but thanks again to technology, I'll be sure to get my head into his space.

Argentina's Guarani disconnect

I'm not quite sure what to make of this story yet.  I spend a lot of time arguing that the best way to build a better planet is to bring everything we have to the table--technology, urban planning, architecture, education and entertainment--in an all-out effort to help us make village style connections across a globe-sized space.  My reasoning is that we have minds that are predisposed to separate our own little spheres of life from the rest of the planet, even though we live now, more than ever before, with gigantic geographic footprints that are quickly rendering the very idea of place as an archaic and almost meaningless notion.

And then along comes an activist village chief, Silvino Moreyra, desperate to turn around the lives of a group of indigenous Argentinians whose life histories tell a story that is all too familiar to a Canadian -- a spiral of depression, substance abuse, suicide.  Moreyra declares a 60 day quarantine, effectively cutting off the Guarani from the rest of the world.  The quarantine is so popular that the Guarani vote to extend it for another 60 days.  All signs suggest that they will want to make the isolation permanent.  At present, the barricade between the Guarani village and the rest of the world is a bit artificial -- Argentinian social services deliver food to sustain the community.  But if Moreyra has his way, this will be a temporary measure.  His aim is isolation, independence, and self-sustainability. 

Other villages are paying attention and considering similar measures.  What I like about it is that, in a case such as this one, the villagers are being encouraged to pay attention to each other, to their own precious piece of real estate and to how their own plot of the planet can be coaxed to give them life.  But what bothers me is that the wider world continues around them.  The air heats up, the fresh water dwindles, biodiversity collapses.  Erecting walls might serve as an effective stopgap solution in a case like this, but it's hard to see it as a promising general approach.  I hope things go well for the Guarani, but I think the rest of us will have to think of something different.

Carty followup

A small but significant followup to my comments about Arthur Carty last week.  Today, the Globe and Mail reports that Carty's decision to retire was a response to his being told that the position of science advisor was being phased out.  This casts the series of events in a different and even more worrisome light. 

It's ironic that this tangible evidence of the federal government's disdain for unbiased advice about science happens during the same week as the hearings regarding the dismissal of Linda Keen, president of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, for ordering our Chalk River facility closed because it posed a risk of nuclear accident 1000 times higher than acceptable standards. 

I don't want to turn this into a political blog (and I promise that I won't), but as a scientist, a concerned citizen, and the father of several children whom I'd like to see have a chance to live decent lives in a world that's changing too fast to even measure, I can't help but worry about these kinds of actions. 

I live and work in an environment where there seems to be near unanimous agreement that the general public needs to have more access to good science. People need (and I believe want) to be helped to the tools necessary to evaluate the scientific evidence that relates to the massive changes that lie just beyond the crest of the next hill. That's what drove me to put so much of my time into writing for a wider audience, even when this means I can actually do less research myself.   It unsettles me that I'm currently represented on the world stage by a government that seems to take much the opposite view.