Heart of the City (3 page)

One of the most consistent findings across decades of studies was that the closer any two people were—whether in dorms, offices, classrooms, or neighborhood streets—the more likely they were to become friends or at least think well of one another. As the authors of one environmental psychology treatise concluded, “the architecturally determined and accidental arrangements of persons can have dramatic effects on their relationships.” But why leave those effects to chance? A group of renegade psychologists, sociologists, and urban designers soon felt that by working together, they could build their way to a happier, healthier, and more productive society. “The rather obvious principle that people who don’t come in contact don’t become friends seems to offer the designer an intriguing new assignment,” the architect C. M. Deasy, who employed a sociologist in his practice, wrote in his 1974 book
Design for Human Affairs
. “[We] can draw on a considerable arsenal of design devices to increase the probability that chance encounters will occur, not only in the formal settings design usually deals with but in the myriad informal settings where so much of life occurs: parking lots, bus stops, elevator lobbies, laundry rooms, supermarkets and gas stations.”

Perhaps no figure associated with the field would leave a deeper imprint in the concrete than William Hollingsworth Whyte. Known as “Holly” to friends, Whyte was a Princeton-trained
urbanist who wrote the 1956 bestseller
The Organization Man
before turning toward problems of public space in his adopted city of Manhattan. A marine veteran who worked for a spell as an editor at
Fortune
, Whyte shunned the aloofness of his academic colleagues. He preferred plain talk to academic jargon and street-level observation to theory. In the 1960s, the New York City Planning Commission began trying a new style of zoning that gave developers financial incentives to include public space in designs for new buildings. The more square feet developers set aside for outdoor public plazas, the more stories they could build.

The assumption was that such plazas were an unqualified public good. Set aside open space in the crowded center of New York City, the theory went, and harried Manhattanites would flock there—to lunch, stroll, soak up the sun, or meet friends. But after looking at some of the plazas, Whyte had his doubts. All but a few were wastelands, forbidding deserts of concrete that people, at best, speed-walked through on their way somewhere else. Whyte was an admirer of Jane Jacobs, the author of the influential 1961 book
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
, a critique of her era’s urban renewal policies and an homage to the “sidewalk ballet” that unfolded each day outside her Greenwich Village apartment. “That the sight of people attracts still other people is something that city planners and city architectural designers seem to find incomprehensible,” Jacobs had written. “They operate on the premise that city people seek the sight of emptiness, obvious order and quiet. Nothing could be less true.” But as Whyte looked out over the vacant plazas, he saw none of the impromptu public life that Jacobs had argued was essential to great cities.

In 1970, Whyte set out to understand why some public spaces in New York worked as gathering places while others did not. Calling his study “The Street Life Project,” he mounted time-lapse cameras atop neighboring buildings and sent Hunter College students into the plazas with clipboards to carefully plot
the activity. Where were people sitting? How long did they stay? Did they come alone or in groups? Did sunlight matter? Did they prefer the backs or the fronts of the plazas?

Some of Whyte’s findings, however often neglected by builders, seem obvious. The best public spaces had sunlight, water, trees, food vendors, and, most critically, many different places to sit. But among his most surprising discoveries was that people beget people, just as Jacobs had theorized. Contrary to the notion that the best-used parks and plazas are hideaways from the urban rush, Whyte found that people often sought out the busiest areas of a public space to lunch, chat with colleagues, or snuggle. He called it “self-congestion.”

“What attracts people most, it would appear, is other people,” he wrote in
The Social Life of Small Urban Space
s. “People didn’t move out of the main pedestrian flow. They stayed in it or moved into it, and the great bulk of the conversations were smack in the center of the flow—the 100 percent location, to use the real-estate term.” People often chose the most visible spot—on the front steps of a plaza, for instance, or among closely spaced outdoor tables—even if it meant some jostling.

The most popular plazas didn’t cut themselves off from the streets, he found, but opened into them. And if you want strangers to talk, give them something to talk about: an unusual sculpture, a mime, a juggler, a musician, a street character. A spectacle, even a minor one, “triangulates,” Whyte wrote. It takes two strangers with ostensibly nothing in common and, through a shared, immediate experience, links them, even if just for a moment. New York City officials were so impressed with Whyte’s findings that they incorporated many of them into the zoning code.

I HAD set out to find the invisible forces at play in great public places, and felt now that I was getting warmer. I had discovered that for ages, builders had an abstract sense of the effects of the
built environment on people. By the middle of the twentieth century, scholars had begun quantifying those effects. And more recently, a few visionaries, like Whyte, were urging cities to apply the insights about people-friendly design to real public places.

But did any research go further? Had any settings been found to stoke, well, lust?

Arthur P. Aron was a graduate student in psychology at Berkeley in the late 1960s—and newly in love with a woman he’d one day marry—when he grew curious about the causes of intense attraction. Poets had long cloaked the phases of love in mystery. What drew two people together was ineffable, unknowable. That was its magic. True, it was the Summer of Love, and Berkeley its capital. But few grant-making institutions were funding scientific research on the psychology of love, viewing it as too frivolous for academic study. Leave it to the poets, they seemed to say.

But Aron persevered. He holed up at the University of California library and scoured the stacks for every single research study on love. There weren’t many. But before long, he wrote, “I had several clear ideas about what ought to generate love, or at least attraction, between people. All these ideas were based on the notion that there was more to falling in love than just the right combination of personalities (the main theory up until then).” What also mattered, Aron said, were “the circumstances under which people met.” From a smattering of clues in the available research, he theorized that people were more likely to be attracted to people they met during unusual or “boundary breaking” experiences—“those involving power, mystery, isolation, or strong emotions.”

For his dissertation, Aron conducted an experiment in which he asked fifty-two male undergraduates to take part in a role-playing game with the same attractive woman. Though the woman had been coached by Aron, the men were told the woman was just another subject. In one scenario, Aron asked the male subject to pretend he was a captured soldier being tortured by the woman,
who dripped a painful “acid” (actually water) on him from an eye-dropper until he confessed military secrets. Aron encouraged the male subjects to really get into their roles, acting as if they feared for their lives as the imaginary acid burned through their skin. In the control scenario, the subjects were asked to play the same roles but without the torture or high emotion. Afterward, the male subjects were asked to complete a Thematic Apperception Test (TAT). A fixture of psychological studies, a TAT depicts an ambiguous scene and asks subjects to describe what is happening. The men who had been through the high-emotion role play were far more apt than those in the control group to describe the scene as sexual. On a separate questionnaire, they were also more apt than those in the control to say they wanted to kiss the woman. Interestingly, there was no difference between the high-emotion and low-emotion groups in the number of men who wanted the woman as either a work partner or friend. It was, for Aron, a eureka moment. An emotionally stimulating situation didn’t necessarily make you want to be friends or colleagues with attractive strangers. But it could make you hot for them.

Aron wanted to see if he could repeat the experiment outside the lab. The result—a 1974 study titled “Some Evidence for Heightened Sexual Attraction Under Conditions of High Anxiety”—would become one of the most talked-about papers in social psychology. In it, Aron and a colleague, Donald G. Dutton, of the University of British Columbia, enlisted an attractive female student to stop men as they crossed one of two footbridges over Vancouver’s Capilano Canyon. The first bridge, a long and narrow span made of wobbly wooden boards suspended from wire cables, was some 230 feet above rocky rapids and had low handrails and a tendency to sway underfoot. The second bridge—the control—was wide and solid, had high handrails, and was just ten feet above a small stream.

The woman stopped unaccompanied men who looked between eighteen and thirty-five years old and said she was doing a project
for a psychology class on the effects of scenery on creativity. She showed the men a TAT drawing of a young woman covering her face with one hand and reaching out with the other. Then she asked them to write a short story about the scene. When they were done, she said she could say more about the experiment if they called her later. She wrote her name and phone number on a scrap of paper. (On the shaky bridge, she gave her name as Gloria, on the control bridge, Donna, so the researchers would know where the interviews had taken place if the men called.)

The findings were striking. The men on the shaky bridge had 75 percent more sexual imagery in their stories than those on the stable one. Moreover, half the men stopped on the shaky bridge called the woman, whereas just 12 percent of those on the solid one did. To rule out the possibility that the bridge crossers were self-selecting—perhaps the rickety span tended to attract thrill seekers with more testosterone—the researchers swapped the female student for a male one but otherwise left the experiment unchanged. Without a potential love object (and assuming, as the researchers seemed to do, that most of the men stopped were heterosexual), men on the shaky bridge were no more likely to write racy stories or call the interviewer later. (In most of these early experiments, men were cast as the pursuers and women as objects, but later studies, with the roles reversed, confirmed many of the findings.)

Researchers soon turned up more evidence for the aphrodisiacal effects of “arousal,” which psychologists define as any state of heightened physiological activity, from a racing pulse to a rush of adrenaline. The stimulus, it turned out, didn’t have to be anything as drastic as make-believe torture, a walk across a rickety bridge, or the anticipation—as in yet another experiment—of an electric shock. Physiological arousal could just as well come from listening to a Steve Martin comedy tape, being surprised by a loud noise, or even just running in place for a few minutes. In a 1989 study, researchers watching couples leave a theater observed
more touching after a suspenseful movie than after a dull one. A headline in
Psychology Today
in the 1970s distilled the emerging findings: “Adrenaline Makes the Heart Grow Fonder.”

When I tracked down Arthur Aron at Stony Brook University, where he now teaches, he said that one theory sees the arousal-attraction link as a cousin of the fight-or-flight response. When we’re worked up—excited, upset, euphoric, jealous—we are more at the mercy of our most basic drives, not least the urge to reproduce. “You’re not thinking as clearly,” Aron told me, “and you focus on those biological responses to a situation that from an evolutionary standpoint are most prominent, and mating is one of them.”

Advances in brain science would later identify another key chemical as dopamine, a pleasure-inducing neurotransmitter associated with reward-seeking, gambling, and drug addiction. It is closely related to adrenaline, and its levels in the body tend to rise and fall with those of testosterone, in both men and women. “Anything that’s novel, scary, interesting, or new drives up dopamine in the brain, and that brain system is associated with feelings of romantic love,” Helen Fisher, a renowned biological anthropologist at Rutgers University who has used brain scans to study the neural circuitry of love, told me when I called her on a recent spring day. “If a person you find attractive walks by at just such a moment, then, boom, you have love.”

But is this good for evolution? I asked. Should you really be choosing a mate when you’re, well, high? Fisher told me that the evolutionary value of the arousal-attraction link was the subject of debate. But she sees benefits. “The dopamine system may have originally developed to give you the energy and focus and motivation you need to cope with a new situation. Romantic love may have piggybacked on that, so that when you’re suddenly in a situation of real danger, you fall in love with somebody, and then you have someone to get you through the situation.” She pointed to a recent article about the brisk business among wedding planners in Iraq. “In wartime,” Fisher said, “people really fall in love.”