Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design (16 page)

6. How to Be Closer

This is the true nature of home—it is the place of peace: the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt and division …

—John Ruskin,
Sesame and Lilies

The challenge seems at first straightforward: If we are to escape the effects of dispersal, then dense places have got to meet our psychological needs better than sprawl. They have to be places that delight, nurture, and nourish us in return for choosing them. But this is not a simple brief, because we are not simple creatures. We are torn between competing needs. None are more contradictory than the push-pull between proximity and isolation. In some ways our needs are at war with each other.

We need the nourishing, helping warmth of other people, but we also need the healing touch of nature. We need to connect, but we also need to retreat. We benefit from the conveniences of proximity, but these conveniences can come with the price of overstimulation and crowding. We will not solve the conundrum of sustainable city living unless we understand these contradictory forces and resolve the tension between them. How much space, privacy, and distance from other people do we need? How much nature do we need? Are there designs that combine the benefits of dispersal with the dividends of proximity?

The evidence suggests that to get closer to one another, we need a little more distance from one another, and a little more nature—but not too much, and not the sort of nature we might think we need.

To explain, I will first talk about nature.

Then I will talk about the problem of neighbors.

Closer, Part I: The Nature Dividend

In 2011, I was invited by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum to join a team examining comfort in New York City. The museum commissioned Atelier Bow-Wow, a Japanese architectural firm, to design a temporary shelter in an empty lot in the East Village, then invited a team of collaborators from around the world to use it as a base for our experiments. The museum’s curators hoped that the BMW Guggenheim Lab would be an engine for creating new solutions for city life. They had money to spend and interns to assist. I planned on using their resources to collect data on the effect that city spaces had on people’s emotions and behavior. It was a fantastic opportunity: there are few better places to explore extreme urbanity than Manhattan.

The lab’s neighborhood, which straddled the boundary between the East Village and the Lower East Side, is a mashup of tenement-style walk-ups and newer mid-rise condo towers bisected by furious traffic arteries and crowded, cracked sidewalks. For a newcomer it is an exhilarating place, a distillation of all of New York City’s grit, noise, haste, surprise, and possibility. On my first walk there from my apartment on East Thirteenth Street—a fifteen-minute stroll—I passed every shop I could imagine needing that month. A hardware store, a bank, grocery stores large and small, tattoo shops, manicurists, dry cleaners, artisanal ice creameries, bars, and restaurants by the dozen. Every few blocks there were stairs leading down to the subway. This was a different universe from the empty collector boulevards I had driven on in San Joaquin County. You could live your life here, working, shopping, eating, socializing, and falling in love, all on foot. It was dense, convenient, connected, and endlessly stimulating.

I found the landscape thrilling at first. But I wanted to break down its elements, to understand how different sidewalks and buildings and open spaces in the dense city affected people. So I called in Colin Ellard, a psychologist at the University of Waterloo who had done groundbreaking work on the neuroscience of moving through cities. Colin equipped dozens of volunteers with devices to measure their emotional state as they moved through the neighborhood. He hacked a set of BlackBerry phones so that they would survey people for their levels of affect (happiness in the moment) and arousal (or excitement). We also strapped some volunteers with wrist cuffs that recorded the relative electrical conductance of their skin as they moved. Since skin conductance is directly related to perspiration, it provides an excellent objective measure of emotional arousal.

Why these measures? The affect test was an obvious choice: most people can agree that happiness is preferable to misery. The arousal test added nuance to the data: It can be good or bad to feel excited, depending on the situation. It feels great to be both calm and happy or excited and happy. But sustained arousal can be hard on your immune system, and a combination of high arousal and low affect—in other words, feeling both excited and miserable—is obviously worst of all. It’s the state most people call being stressed out.

Every few days, groups of fresh volunteers walked the neighborhood with our tour guides, offering up their psychophysiological data in return. We found that as the urban terrain varied, so did people’s emotions. People reported the biggest spike in happiness, and an easing of arousal, just moments after entering the gated M’Finda Kalunga seniors’ garden in Sara Roosevelt Park. That was even before the gardeners introduced them to the resident chicken.

This did not surprise us. The garden was almost junglelike in its variety of leafy plants, shrubs, and mature trees, and the last few decades have produced powerful evidence that simply being in, touching, or viewing nature makes people feel good. Hospital patients with views of nature need less pain medication and get better faster than those with views of, say, brick walls. Even simulating a view of nature can help. Heart surgery patients exposed to pictures of trees, water, and forests are less anxious and report less severe pain than those who have to gaze at abstract art all day. Dental patients get less stressed out on days when nature murals are hung on the waiting-room wall. Students do better on tests when nature is within visual range. The natural view is now being prescribed for some of the most stressful built environments. When architects installed a mural depicting a meadowy scene in the booking area of the Sonoma County Jail in Santa Rosa, California, the guards had an easier time remembering things.

All this reinforces the concept that Edward O. Wilson dubbed biophilia, which holds that humans are hardwired to find particular scenes of nature calming and restorative. One theory to explain nature’s benefit considers the ways in which we notice the world around us. This theory, developed by biologists Stephen and Rachel Kaplan, posits that we pay attention in two completely different ways: voluntarily and involuntarily. Voluntary attention, the kind we engage when we are consciously solving problems or negotiating city streets, requires plenty of focus and energy, and can tire us out. Indeed, after spending time on a crowded city street, most of us find it harder to focus and harder to hold things in memory. The problem is that much of the built world is so crammed with stimuli, it forces us to constantly decide what to pay attention to—the oncoming bus, the opening door, the flashing stoplight—and what to ignore—say, a billboard advertising liposuction. Conversely, involuntary attention, the kind we give to nature, is effortless, like a daydream or a song washing through your brain. You might not even realize you are paying attention and yet you may be restored and transformed by the act.

The Social Life of Trees

I am not exaggerating when I use that word
transformed
.

In the mid-1990s environmental psychologists Frances Ming Kuo and William Sullivan took a stroll around the Ida B. Wells project, a low-rise social housing complex in Chicago. They were struck by what seemed to be a vivid contrast between the complex’s many courtyards. Some were bare tundras of concrete. Others had been planted with grass and trees. The barren courtyards were always empty of people, but the green courtyards, even though they were fairly unkempt and ragged, always seemed to be buzzing with activity, from women sitting around shelling peas to children playing in the corners. “They seemed to be alive, like living rooms,” Kuo recalled. “We thought,
geez
, this might be kind of important.”

Kuo and Sullivan enlisted residents of nearby projects to watch and record the comings and goings of people at Ida B. Wells. Sure enough, no matter the time of day, those green courtyards hosted some kind of social life, while the barren courtyards were consistently dead. But Kuo also found a stark psychological difference between tenants with green views and those who could see only concrete. “People with the bare views told us they were psychologically fatigued, and more likely to be rude, to fly off the handle, more likely to slap someone in anger. They just had a harder time coping,” Kuo said. They even yelled at their children more.

When the researchers began examining police records, they found a mountain of hard data that linked lack of greenness of courtyards to local crime rates. Buildings that looked out on trees and grass experienced about half the violent crime level of buildings that looked out on barren courtyards. The less green the environment, the higher the rate of assault, battery, robbery, and murder. This is especially remarkable given the fact that criminologists have pointed out that bushes and trees provide convenient cover for illicit activity.

Nature deprivation, concluded Kuo, was not merely unhealthy, it was dangerous, partly because it left people feeling more raw and aggressive, and partly because most residents simply abandoned barren spaces, removing the watchful eyes that help keep them safe.

Kuo’s discoveries helped establish a clear link between exposure to nature, well-being, and behavior—and a powerful social upshot. People who lived next to green spaces knew more of their neighbors. They reported that their neighbors were more supportive and friendly. They had more people over for get-togethers. They had stronger feelings of belonging.

Nice and Green

Access to green space transformed the emotional and social lives of residents of social housing in Chicago. People who lived around the leafier courtyard on the left were happier, friendlier, and less prone to violence than those who lived around the barren courtyard on the right, even though both areas were poorly maintained.
(W. C. Sullivan)

This was partly a result of the social time people spent in their green courtyards. But there may have been a deeper alchemy at work, one identified more recently by psychologists at the University of Rochester when they had volunteers sit through slide shows depicting scenes of varying biophilic content. After their virtual immersion, volunteers who had viewed nature scenes had strongly different attitudes toward other people than people who viewed images of urban skylines. The nature viewers were much more likely to say they valued deep relationships with other people than the city viewers, who came out more focused on extrinsic goals, such as getting rich. The real test came when the volunteers were handed $5 and invited to either share it with other students or keep it. Amazingly, the more nature students had been exposed to, the more generous they were. These results are now being mirrored outside the laboratory. A study of Los Angeles revealed that people who live in areas with more parks are more helpful and trusting than people who don’t, regardless of their income or race. Nature is not merely good for us. It brings out the good
in
us.

The Savanna Trap

At first these findings do not seem to bode well at all for the dense city, especially considering the tricky navigation provided by our own landscape preferences.

In 1993 the Russian artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid hired a professional polling firm to determine what people living in various countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas liked to look at. Using the poll results as a reference, they laid brushes to canvas to create images that were statistically most likely to please the populace of each country. The intent was obviously ironic (the painting
America’s Most Wanted
features a perambulating George Washington), but the images revealed a pattern. They all depict similar scenes: open fields with a few trees and shrubs in the near distance, perhaps some wildlife, and, beyond that, bodies of still, clear water. The statistically average Kenyan, Portuguese, Chinese, and American had strikingly common tastes.

The artists thus demonstrated what hundreds of studies into human landscape preference over the last few decades have shown. Most people really like savanna-like views, typically characterized by moderate to high openness; low, grassy ground vegetation; and trees that are either scattered or gathered in small groups. Our preferences are collectively precise: when given a choice, people say they would rather look at trees with short trunks, layered branching systems, and broad canopies.

These happen, of course, to be the sorts of trees and landscapes that nurtured our hunter-gatherer ancestors for thousands of years, including during the era that saw the human brain expand faster than any brain had in the course of animal history. Evolutionary theorists argue that we are genetically inclined to like such landscapes because liking them helped our Paleolithic ancestors survive. Jay Appleton, the English geographer, argued that most of us still unconsciously evaluate terrain for threats and opportunities, leading us to feel better or worse according to the resource quality of our location. We like open views, but we also like to feel safe—values that Appleton called “prospect” and “refuge.”