You Are Here Read online

  Nold’s participants walk around an urban neighborhood wearing these devices, soaking up the sights and wandering at will. When they return to him, the equipment they have worn provides Nold with a comprehensive record of their travels, their times of movement and lingering, and, most interesting of all, their emotional state at each step along the way. Though Christian Nold’s bio-mapping initiative is designed more as a participatory performance piece than as a scientific endeavor, his results have much to say about human engagement with urban spaces. Overlaid on satellite photographs of streetscapes borrowed from Google Earth, the bio-maps show a cartographic sculpture of how the city feels. High arousal can be found at locations of stress (busy street crossings, for example) but also where the attention and interest of the walker has been engaged by a beautiful architectural facade, a busy market, or an interesting shop. Low arousal can be produced by large, empty spaces or oppressively boring facades. We all know that city travels produce these kinds of highs and lows in us, and perhaps even dictate our routes and stopping places, but quantifying these sometimes ephemeral states has been a difficult and rarely attempted task.5 The much more common methodology among environmental psychologists has been to study preference for vistas of buildings, streetscapes, and landscapes by asking participants to rank photographs of them. Though these studies have generated interesting findings about our perceptions of the environment, there is much less evidence that our movements through cities and landscapes are correlated with our rankings of photographs.

  Everybody who has lived in a city knows that each area has a distinctively different “feel” to it. Even when the purpose of our trip is specific, we may make choices that take us out of our way either to avoid areas that we find unpleasant or stressful (streets with too much traffic, quiet streets that we might find menacing) or to seek out areas of pleasure (busy pedestrian malls, attractive trails through urban parks). Even entire cities can seem to have their own personalities. I always see Toronto as a city of earnest virtue, like a little brother who tries just a touch too hard to act as if he were grown up. Vancouver is a shimmering, laissez-faire paradise by the sea with nothing to prove, its streets beckoning one to abandon serious worldly pursuits in favor of long runs through the park. New York’s majestic skyline, with breathtaking architectural landmarks visible from almost every street corner and wide avenues filled with honking taxis and bustling pedestrians, strikes me as the lanky and attractive distant relative, impossibly smooth and sophisticated, yet with a strong, warm, and welcoming heart. Where do such impressions come from? It seems unimaginable that their origins could be captured by asking questions about pictures, recording the conductive properties of skin, or by sticking our heads into a brain scanner.

  In his mammoth work London: The Biography, Peter Ackroyd struggles to capture a detailed impression of the grand old city by framing its history around its labyrinthine streets and alleyways. “Chapters of history resemble John Bunyan’s little wicket gates,” he says, promising to lead us “from the narrow path in search of those heights and depths of urban experience that know no history and are rarely susceptible to rational analysis.” He makes good on his promise by taking us through almost 800 pages of a history entwined around space and place.

  In a chapter on Fetter Lane, an avenue heading away from busy Fleet Street, Ackroyd documents the many uses of the space extending back to its fuzzy beginnings more than a thousand years ago. Though much of today’s lane would be unrecognizable to a nineteenth-century resident, some common threads persist. The lane has always been a border. It was where the Great Fire of 1666 stopped. It was a mixed lane of brothels, taverns, and itinerant businessmen. It was filled with residents who lived on the edge, a good number of them tumbling over it when their crimes amounted to enough to warrant summary execution on gallows hastily erected mid-street. Though present-day Fetter Lane is filled with offices and sandwich shops, it retains enough of the old marks, twists, and turns that the ancient spirit of the street and its influence on our feelings may still pulse faintly, resisting the steady pendulum beat of the wrecker’s ball.6

  Ackroyd is a modern acolyte of an older tradition of psychogeographers, mostly philosophical and literary figures who felt, and tried to describe, a connection between feeling, space, and history. Like Ackroyd, psychogeographers share a sense that those hard-to-identify impressions that we glean from cities, neighborhoods, or even individual streets have much to do with the manner in which the shape and appearance of space have influenced their uses. Collectively, this amalgam of activity and geometry continues to resonate in the present time, influencing our feelings and actions as we walk a city.

  The origins of the psychogeographic enterprise take us into the fascinating but bewildering territory of mid-twentieth-century French artistic and intellectual movements. One early proponent of the idea that city spaces evoke feelings as surely as mixtures of chemicals produce drug effects was Ivan Chtcheglov. In his “Formulary for a New Urbanism,” Chtcheglov wrote that cities were inhabited by ghosts created by combinations of “shifting angles” and “receding perspectives” that “allow us to glimpse original conceptions of space.” Central to Chtcheglov’s methodology was the derive, a kind of unstructured wandering where one was led from place to place like a robot being carried along the streets by simple rules related to the appearance of space. Though some of Chtcheglov’s pronouncements were interesting, his contribution to our understanding of how we experience space was badly impeded by a steadily worsening mental derangement. Ultimately, Chtcheglov was institutionalized in part for plotting to blow up the Eiffel Tower because the light from it shone into his bedroom and disturbed his sleep.

  Guy Debord, a clearer thinker than Chtcheglov, offered the first decent definition of psychogeography as “the study of the precise laws of and specific effects of the geographic environment … on the emotions and behaviour of individuals.” Debord saw psychogeography as an essential element of a larger political initiative steeped in Marxist doctrine and intended to remake much more than the aesthetics of Parisian street corners. Debord’s psychogeographic movement drifted into obscurity, in part because, as Merlin Coverley points out in his witty summary of the movement, the principal players spent far more of their time involved in definitional infighting than in actually carrying out the derives that would be required to collect any data. Later in his life, Debord appears to have lost faith in the psychogeographic derives to reveal any underlying principles relating space and feeling, preferring to believe that each person’s relationship with urban space was intimate, personal, and beyond the reach of the conventional tools of science.7

  IMAGES OF CITIES

  Kevin Lynch, a leading twentieth-century American urban planner and a student of Frank Lloyd Wright, took a considerably more scientific approach to the general question of how cities are represented mentally. Lynch’s concerns were more closely focused on the intelligibility of a city for the purpose of finding one’s way around than they were on how cities make us feel, yet he saw close connections between the two. Lynch is best known for his groundbreaking work The Image of the City, the culmination of five years of survey, observation, and questioning of the residents of three major American cities, Boston, Jersey City, and Los Angeles.8 Lynch defined the imageability of a form as that which made the form memorable. Highly imageable forms, by virtue of their “shape, color, or arrangement,” were able to generate powerful mental images of these forms. Extensive questioning of interviewees led Lynch to propose that cities contained five main elements: paths, nodes, regions, boundaries, and landmarks. Paths are linear routes that people normally use to travel from place to place. Nodes are places of gathering, the places where things happen. Regions are sections of a city (SoHo, Beacon Hill, the Annex, Chinatown) that can be mentally represented as a single chunk of space. Boundaries are linear elements that are not used as paths, such as the edges of lakes or rivers, freeways, or railroad tracks. Finally, landmarks, as we have seen before,
can be local elements that symbolize the meaning, use, or feeling of a part of a city or they can be large structures (such as the Sydney Opera House or Manhattan’s Empire State Building) that are visible from many places and can act as navigational aids.

  The main way in which cities varied, Lynch argued, was the extent to which each of these five elements were imageable, and he argued that the tools of urban planning could and should be used to influence this imageability. Chief among the evidence for image-ability of city elements was the frequency with which they showed up on sketch maps of cities that Lynch asked people on the street to draw for him. Though many features in each of Lynch’s three studied cities did seem to have high imageability, these sketch maps showed little sign of metric accuracy. The maps were topologically accurate, but distances were distorted, often in such a way as to suggest that the mental representations of the more imageable elements were expanded considerably.

  Lynch’s work takes us away from descriptions of how city space works that are concerned only with attraction, preference, and feeling and toward a consideration of how we cope with problems of space and wayfinding in cities. Although he emphasized that the strong impressions made by highly imageable city spaces are likely to be pleasant ones and well worth pursuing on entirely aesthetic grounds, another major part of his argument was that highly image-able cities are friendlier for the wayfinder. A navigator confronted with a morass of indistinguishable streets with little visual appeal or interest not only is likely to feel unhappy to be there but is also much more likely to become lost than a navigator in well-structured, highly integrated space filled with prominent visual features.

  An entirely different approach to understanding urban behavior from the intensely introspective walks of the derive or the analysis of sketch maps generated by residents is to adopt the simple observational methods used by many other behavioral scientists, including those whose work was described in earlier chapters on animal behavior. If we want to understand what people do and how they feel in cities, perhaps there’s nothing better than to take up a position, as unobtrusively as possible, and to just watch them. This approach was pioneered in the United States by William Whyte.

  After graduating from Princeton in 1939 and serving in the U.S. Marines during World War II, Whyte landed a good job at Fortune magazine and quickly rose through the ranks to an editorial position that gave him a chance to record in print his astute observations on the sociological upheavals occurring in postwar North America. From these writings eventually emerged the enormously successful book The Organization Man, whose recognition allowed Whyte to leave Fortune and devote himself full time to the study of urban behavior. In 1970, Whyte formed the Street Life Project, a small group devoted to using firsthand observational methods, including unobtrusive time-lapse photography and simple turnstile counts showing where, when, and how people spent time in cities.9

  One of Whyte’s first observations was deceptively simple. New York City contained a number of pedestrian plazas. Some of them were built at great expense, yet were always empty. Others were always teeming with business. Why? Whyte’s group tackled the question with characteristic straightforwardness. They mounted high cameras to record movements of people, and they waded into the crowds to ask questions. Why had people come? Where had they come from? Why had they chosen this particular place? Like Jane Jacobs, his finest and most successful student, Whyte learned that life attracts life. In spite of what many builders had believed, people do not look for out-of-the-way, secluded spots in cities. More than anything else, we are fascinated by each other. We want to be as close to the fray as possible. Plazas that are close to major navigational routes are much more likely to be used than those that aren’t. In a cycle of positive feedback, a small nucleus of people draws in a further influx of bodies as if by magnetic attraction. In no time at all, one plaza is filled while another, perhaps offering all the same amenities (except for the people), remains unused.

  Whyte’s observation, and many others like it, suggests that, just as we saw in the interior spaces of our houses, offices, and institutional buildings, the shape of space has a formative influence on where we go and how we gather. Route and enclosure move us from place to place with the same sureness with which a well-designed decanter pours oil onto a plate.

  In his book Architecture and the Urban Experience, Raymond Curran uses exactly this analogy to explain how space moves us. Curran argues that all exterior spaces can be divided into receptacles, or “cluster spaces,” in which we gather and avenues, or “linear spaces,” that bring us to these gathering places. We are led along paths by our eyes, so artful presentation of contours, surface patterns, and colors can draw our attention with all the careful deliberation of a magician using sleight of hand. Spaces filled with horizontal contours sweep our eyes along, pulling our body behind them. High building facades and towers interrupt this sweeping gaze, causing us to slow and linger.10

  Curran’s illustrations make a convincing argument that in the design of cities, the spaces that lie between buildings are every bit as important as the buildings themselves. Danish architect Jan Gehl made similar arguments in his classic book Life between Buildings and then went on to show the city of Copenhagen how to put such principles into effect in spectacular fashion.11 In the 1950s, like many other cities all across the world, Copenhagen found its dense core becoming choked with cars and empty of public spaces. Beginning with the placement of sidewalk cafés in the 1960s, Copenhagen’s city fathers began a protracted campaign to resurrect public space in the city. With Gehl’s help, this campaign reached its height with the opening of a major car-free pedestrian zone, the Strøget, which attracts throngs of visitors and residents and has become the crowning jewel of the city. The tactics used by Gehl to invite people back into city cores on foot have been so effective that now other cities, most recently New York, are trying to emulate them. At some point a new verb, “to copenhagenize,” has entered the lexicon to describe the measures recommended by Gehl. In addition to an outright ban on automobiles on certain key thoroughfares, these measures include dedicated bicycle lanes, public squares, and restrictions on heights of buildings to enhance both the appearance and the climate of central pedestrian zones.

  Copenhagen has become a model city for those who are trying to find ways to break down our car-centric way of life and to bring people back into the city core not just for commerce but for pleasure. Much of this evolution has been due to the steady influence of Gehl’s approach, which combines insights into human psychology and sociology with sound architectural and urban-planning principles.

  UNDERSTANDING THE GRAMMAR OF CITY SPACES

  The kinds of on-the-street observations made by Jacobs, Whyte, Curran, Gehl, and many others have brought about workable principles that can effect positive changes in the shapes and arrangements of urban places. If such principles could be embedded in a more thoroughgoing theoretical analysis of lived space, one that made connections to the psychology of spatial cognition, then what has worked so successfully in some of the world’s great places could perhaps be applied more systematically to our ailing cities. Bill Hillier, an architect and planner at the Bartlett School of Planning in London, has pioneered exactly such an approach to the understanding of city space.12 Hillier has uncovered some powerful mathematical principles that can help to predict how our movements through space are partially determined by its shape. As surely as a thin-stemmed pitcher can be used to mete out minute quantities of rare truffle oil, a large piece of real estate can be carved up in such a way as to pull us through space in any desired manner.

  Hillier begins by characterizing urban spaces as little more than strings of beads, where the beads are two-dimensional polygons of space, and strings are the paths from one district to another. From such patterns of nodes and paths, Hillier derives a grammar of space that he refers to as space syntax. The measures Hillier describes give us a way of describing relationships between small parts of a space—a single
piece of road, for instance—and the entire context in which it is found. Whereas Whyte or Jacobs could stand on the street and describe with convincing and witty prose the nature of the street life that hums in lower Manhattan, Hillier’s space syntax methods can give us a precise set of numbers describing the relationship between, say, Washington Square Park and the surrounding Greenwich Village streetscape. These numbers can be used to make solid predictions about where and how many people will be found in the park.

  One of the most useful of such numbers is what Hillier calls the coefficient of integration. Each of the lines on a map of a built space can be given such a coefficient, and it represents, roughly speaking, the average number of turns that must be made to get from any one place on the map to any other. The easiest way to think about this is to imagine a neighborhood that you are familiar with, beginning with the street on which you live. Now, mentally travel from your street to the nearest convenience store, and count the number of turns that you would have to make along the way. If you repeat this exercise, but for a very large number of different destinations, then you can calculate the average number of turns required to get from your starting point to anywhere else in a region (or a whole city if you like). The higher this average number, the less integrated your starting point and the lower the coefficient of integration.