Colin Ellard - You Are Here

Emotional landscapes

This is a fascinating interview with landscape architect Michael van Valkenburgh (conducted in association with the BMW-Guggenheim Lab).  We've been spending a lot of time in our lab of late trying to figure out what works and what doesn't work in urban greenspace.  We're working at the level of neurons and psychophysics.  It's great to hear some important truths from a master practitioner.  I love what he has to say about the importance of hills.  There aren't many where I live.

Lonely in the city

I've always thought that if I could live anywhere in Canada, it would be in Vancouver.  In fact, I just got through telling one of my kids this very thing yesterday.  After I visited the city for the first time I remember telling someone that I was really surprised that any other city in Canada had been able to attract any residents at all. So a newspaper article purporting to take some of the shine off of West coast life is eye-catching.

But the article, from the Toronto Star, vaguely makes it sound as though urban loneliness is a Vancouver-centric problem.  It isn't and that's not at all what the study showed.  What it does point out though is that conventional measures of "livability" may not place enough weight on the importance of social cohesion. It also reinforces an old finding in environmental psychology that social isolation can be a problem in high-rises.  And that, apparently, if you move to Winnipeg, you will never have to cook your own dinner.

The year behind me

It's pretty typical that I'm writing my final post of 2011 in the early days of 2012 -- that's the kind of year it was - full speed frantic activity with lots of change on both professional and personal fronts and somehow, as always seems to be the case, the two realms were intertwined.

A big piece of my professional life in 2011 was my participation in the BMW-Guggenheim Laboratory in New York City.  The Laboratory opened in August and my now fuzzy recollection was that I was invited on board in about June.  So the second half of my year was really a frenzy of nail-biting, planning, coding, and flying back and forth between mission control and the test sites we used for the experiment.  I had intended to write a series of blog posts outlining what we did for the Laboratory, but I've ended up spending so much time analyzing data (and catching up on all the stuff that got put aside when I dropped everything to take advantage of this great opportunity) that I've barely had a moment to take a breath.

So what was it all about?  I still plan to give a decent accounting of myself here at some point soon, but the short version is that I had an opportunity to design and execute an experiment in urban environmental psychology using some pretty cool mobile gear for measuring people's minds and bodies as they sauntered from place to place in New York's Lower East Side.  It was really one of my first forays out of the world of the virtual into the world of the real.  It was tough!  Collision-detection in the real world is pretty graphic and some bruising may occur.  But I think we managed to put together some tantalizing early findings -- enough for us to begin planning the next round, which I'll also eventually discuss here.

On the personal front, one of the most interesting things to happen to me was that I found myself buying and moving into a new house.  I've spent such a lot of time ruminating about how the house purchase decision takes place and how the homes we live in influence our psychology, that it's been fascinating to self-observe during that process.  As with anything, when the distance between one's data points and one's own awareness is very small -- in this case essentially zero -- any kind of objectivity is impossible.  But this doesn't mean that the process of observing is meaningless.  Indeed I've learned a lot about domestic spaces through the process of adjusting to a new and very interesting living space.  In future months I'll write about some of those adventures as well.

There's much more I could tell, but the year ahead promises to be just as busy as the year just past, and I've got to get going.

More soon.

Feeling spaces

Architect James Polk wrote a wonderful column recently, encouraging his readers to tune in to the emotional impact of their lived spaces.  When you're walking through a neighbourhood or a building, how does it make you feel?  What do you like and what don't you like?  What makes you anxious?  There's much fascinating material to mine here, and the best way to do it is to lace up sneakers and take to the streets.  Over the coming months, I'm hoping to do quite a lot of this myself, both in my local haunts and farther afield as I take advantage of some nice travel opportunities.

But back to James....

He says 

You don’t need a Ph.D. for this little experiment. We all, as humans, have the innate ability to intuitively feel the world around us.This applies to the world we build as well as our natural surroundings.

Well, uh, yeah James I tend to agree, but the problem is that I have a PhD and I can't turn the damned thing off.  I want to do experiments.  In followup conversation (On FACEBOOK!  YES!  It was actually useful!) we talked a little bit about how one might go about designing some studies to try to understand in more detail how these kinds of emotional effects of the built world come about.  I can see the skeptical point of view that it's just too complicated to approach with simple one-factor experiments (more cowbell=more happiness) but the scientist in me won't sit still.  I think there are all kinds of great tools that could be used to probe these kinds of effects, and they could be very useful for designers.

The most surprising thing for me was to learn that the training of architects includes little instruction on how buildings make us feel.  Is that because we know what works but we don't know how to explain it?  

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.

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.

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.

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.  

London tube maps

I often use images of the London tube map to explain what I mean by topological maps.  I have to confess I hadn't known much about the history of these maps, so was really glad to find this little treasure today, which shows the revolutionary influence of Harry Beck, who in 1933 proposed that much of the geographic information in the map -- information that he reasoned was not really necessary for people making transit decisions -- should be removed from the map, leaving something that looks more like a circuit diagram and is a familiar form for transit users the world over.  This type of map, as I discuss here, is a mirror of our mental spaces.

The marketplace of place

There's a sad little platial drama playing out in my town -- Kitchener, Ontario.  We've had a farmer's market in the centre of town for well over a hundred years.  In fact, Kitchener boasts one of the oldest continuing farmer's markets in the country. The market has resided in various locations through the city, but in my years of living here, it has been in only two places.  First, in Kitchener Market Square -- a moribund downtown shopping centre that was built in 1973, mostly vacated by merchants over the years as commercial development migrated to the exurbs where operating costs were much lower because taxpayers were footing the bill for much of their infrastructure.  More recently, beginning in 2004, the market moved to a new space right on Kitchener's main street (King Street) in a gigantic multi-level building that ended up costing a small fortune.  The concept was that the traditional Saturday market would be supplemented by a retail and restaurant space that would operate every day, draw a good lunch crowd and possibly some daily food shoppers for gourmet items.  When I read of this plan, it seemed to me like a no-brainer.  The organic and locavore movement was just beginning to pick up some steam, the market was easily accessible and central, and to me the idea of being able to go grab a quick lunch and then maybe pick up some good coffee beans or some cheese to take home seemed like exactly the thing a growing city should offer.  Yet in the five years of its existence, I've visited the Kitchener Market exactly twice at times other than Saturday morning.  And my experience is not an isolated one.  The market is just not doing well.  Why?

Compared to our much larger market situated squarely in Mennonite country in St. Jacobs, the little urban market attracts a decent but much less impressive Saturday crowd.  When I go, I actually like this because it's not as hard to move from aisle to aisle, find the things I need, and even to stake out a little spot to stand and eat something delicious on offer from one of the few restaurant stalls that operates on the main market floor.  I have no idea whether the main market space is doing better or worse than in its old location, but I do know that the upper floor, housing the permanent restaurants and stores, is foundering.  It seems like such a good idea until you arrive at the site.  First, the opening to the market building is a large, empty piazza.  It's just not an inviting space that reels me in and makes me want to linger.  But more importantly, for all of the efforts that were made to make the upper space cheery, inviting, and in keeping with a market atmosphere, it just seems to make the space act like one that I want to rush out of rather than cling to.  The large, vaulted skylit ceiling and the wrap-around windows seem to take away any semblance of coziness or refuge.  The exposed surfaces, almost all consisting of concrete and metal, don't help.  The food is actually quite good and there is good variety, but having purchased a delicious order of jerk chicken or some rib-sticking Croatian fare, when I get to my table, I just want to gulp it down and flee.  It's very much the same feeling as having lunch at a food court in a shopping mall.  These are not spaces that are designed to encourage us to linger and relax so much as to bolt down some sustenance and to go back into the shopping fray.

Now there's a new manager for the market, who says that she's going to try to figure out how to make the upper retail and restaurant space more compelling.  She says she is going to "warm it up and make it very comfortable to be there."  Encouraging that she seems to have put her finger on the problem exactly.  But how to fix?  Can shuffling the purpose of the space, filling it with cooking demonstrations, community group meetings, and a mini-market accomplish this, or does the configuration of the space itself need some more radical surgery?  It's a fascinating problem and one I hope finds a solution.  I'm a firm believer in urban markets and local foods, and I know I'm far from alone.  I want to want to go there, but right now I don't.