Heart of the City (2 page)

My mom, sitting across the kitchen table from him, couldn’t resist a jab. “In that park, especially, there were a bunch of oddballs. You probably felt like you could fit right in.”

“So what about you, Mom?” I asked. “Did the park do anything for you?”

She assured me that for her, it was all business. She was there, she said, as a photographer. “I went because I liked to take pictures of the characters.”

My father, seeing his opening, cracked a smile. “Were you also open to
meeting
a character?”

In the coming months, I couldn’t stop thinking about our conversation. I felt it contained some important truth, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. I always knew I had America to thank, at least in part, for my parents’ meeting. But had I overlooked the role of Washington Square Park? Could a vibrant public space, in some subtle but essential way, play matchmaker?

WHEN I turned to books on the history of cities, I saw that their builders understood from the start the power of the built environment over how people think, feel, and act. The walls that Gilgamesh built around civilization’s first city, Uruk, in what is now southern Iraq, in 2700 BCE, were both physical and symbolic. They were markers of the city limits. But they were also a kind of rope line between the lowly farmers outside and the craftsmen, religious leaders, and other elites inside. They were a potent signal to both subjects and enemies of the stability and power of the new city-state.

“Esthetically,” Lewis Mumford wrote in his landmark history of cities, the earliest urban wall “made a clean break between city and countryside; while socially it emphasized the difference between the insider and the outsider, between the open field, subject to the depredations of wild animals, nomadic robbers, invading armies, and the fully enclosed city, where one could work and sleep with a sense of utter security, even in times of military peril.”

In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the narrator is downright swaggering on the subject of walls. “Behold its outer wall, whose cornice is like copper / Peer at the inner wall, which none can equal! ... / Go up and walk on the walls of Uruk, / Inspect the base terrace, examine the brickwork: / Is not the core of kiln-fired brick? / Did not the Seven Sages lay its foundations?”

The Sumerians, for their part, erected ziggurats—terraced temple compounds—so their priests would feel closer to their gods. The Greeks built agoras, open gathering places at the center of cities, so citizens of every class (except, to be fair, women and slaves) could trade, mingle, and debate the issues of the day. New Englanders planted greens at the center of town to instill in residents a sense of communal obligation.

Not long after Nazi warplanes bombed the British House of Commons in 1941, leaders began proposing new designs for its replacement. Winston Churchill was adamant in his opposition, grasping at a gut level the psychology of the original. He wanted the chamber to remain oblong—rather than semicircular—so that members of Parliament would continue to have to “cross the floor” to vote against their own party. A switch of allegiance should be conspicuous, he felt, so that it gives pause. He also wanted fewer seats than there were members, so that the chamber would seem bustling, even with members absent. Cramped was good.

“If the House is big enough to contain all its Members, nine-tenths of its debates will be conducted in the depressing
atmosphere of an almost empty or half-empty Chamber,” Churchill warned Parliament during a debate on rebuilding in 1943. The conversational style of parliamentary debate, he said, “requires a fairly small space” that projects “a sense of crowd and urgency. There should be a sense of the importance of much that is said and a sense that great matters are being decided.”

Whether they actually were, it seemed, was beside the point, so long as the design made it appear so. Churchill knew the stakes. “We shape our buildings,” he told Parliament, “and afterwards our buildings shape us.”

SURE, I thought. But is there any hard evidence? Any architectural theorist could say that a wall antagonizes, or that a tower exalts, or that a green unites. But could any of this be measured? Where were the social scientists? I was particularly interested in landmarks and public spaces, like Washington Square Park, where people find themselves in close proximity to strangers. Were some such places more likely to induce friendly glances than others? Could some actually encourage people to take the first steps toward falling in love?

After muddling through card catalogs and online databases at a few research libraries, I discovered writings in a field I had never before heard of: environmental psychology. The discipline came of age with the social movements of the late 1960s. Architects and psychologists began discussing how the design of everything from rooms and buildings to streets and cities might be contributing to social ills like poverty, crime, mental illness, overcrowding, and isolation. But soon the conversation shifted to a more universal question: how do the physical places in which we live, work, and play shape us?

One of the field’s founders was a maverick psychologist named Roger Garlock Barker. A small-town Iowa boy who earned a PhD from Stanford, Barker landed early teaching jobs at places like
Harvard before growing irritated by what he saw as a major flaw in psychological research: psychologists of his era were great at running experiments in labs, but they rarely studied human behavior in the real world. This was in sharp contrast to natural sciences like chemistry and, say, entomology. “Although we have daily records of the oxygen content of river water, of the ground temperatures of cornfields, of the activity of volcanoes, of the behavior of nesting robins, of the rate of sodium iodide absorption by crabs,” Barker wrote in the introduction to his seminal 1968 book
Ecological Psychology
, “there have been few scientific records of how human mothers care for their young, how teachers behave in the classroom (and how the children respond), what families actually do and say during mealtime, or how children live their lives from the time they wake in the morning until they go to sleep at night.”

Barker, whose rounded shoulders and oversized eyeglass frames made him the picture of the bookish Midwesterner, set out on just such a task. No sooner had the University of Kansas recruited him in 1947, to chair the psychology department, than he told the dean that he didn’t intend to live in the college town of Lawrence, the lone real city amid vast tracts of farmland. Instead, he was interested—for scholarly reasons—in settling in one of the rural outposts. Such towns were ringed by farm fields and largely immune to outside influences. They were naturally occurring laboratories. “My idea,” he once told an interviewer, “was to settle in one of these towns and study the children as biologists study the animals of nature preserves.”

In retrospect, his words might have been better chosen. But the impetus was sound: to study an organism in its native habitat. He and his wife, Louise, who collaborated on his research, settled in Oskaloosa, a place of some 715 souls more than twenty miles north of campus. They set up their “Midwest Psychological Field Station” there and spent the next twenty-five years studying the behavior of Oskaloosans—particularly children—in their own environments. (In his research Barker gave Oskaloosa the fictional name “Midwest.”)
An early book,
One Boy’s Day
, published in 1951, was a minute-by-minute stenographic record of an ordinary day in the life of a boy named Raymond Birch. Barker called it a “scientific document ... of what a seven-year-old boy did and of what his home and school and neighborhood and town did to him from the time he awoke one morning until he went to sleep that night.” Soon Barker was recording the behavior of scores of Oskaloosans in drugstores, Sunday school, 4H club meetings, and football games.

“It was during these studies that we shed the blinders of individual psychology, and it became clear that how a child behaves is not only determined by what he or she wants to do but by where he or she is,” Barker told an interviewer in the late 1980s, a few years before his death. “For example, Raymond could not ride his bicycle, as he clearly wanted to, in the courthouse where his mother worked (the stairs and the ‘rules’ were absolute barriers). We also observed that there was more similarity in the behavior of Raymond and Roy in arithmetic class than between Raymond in arithmetic and Raymond in recess. How could we account for this? Obviously, recess ‘did something’ to Raymond. We had the idea that we should station observers in various places in the town and make a record of Raymond in each place so as to understand him. But then we began to see that the ‘places’ were dynamic entities into which children (and adults) were incorporated. I don’t know why it took us so long to see that the drugstore was not only a building with equipment but also a particular pattern of behavior. We later called these places behavior settings.”

Barker’s notion of “behavior settings” gave birth to the field of environmental—or ecological—psychology. If you want to know how someone is acting, Barker said, don’t tell me who they are—tell me where they are. “All inhabitants of the genotype Drugstore behave drugstore, and all inhabitants of a Tavern behave tavern,” he declared in
Ecological Psychology
.

As early as the 1950s, some behavioral researchers were going further. A setting could not only predict with some certainty what
people were doing. It could also, in some cases, tell you how they were feeling. For their classic study in
The Journal of Psychology
, professors Abraham Maslow and Norbett Mintz divided a few dozen Brandeis University undergraduates among three rooms and told them (falsely) that they were part of a study of facial types. The “beautiful” room had large windows, a soft armchair, and a mahogany desk, and was decorated with a large Navajo rug, paintings, and other art objects. The “ugly” room had two half-windows, battleship-gray walls, an overhead bulb with a grimy lampshade, and furnishings like mops and pails that evoked a janitorial closet. The “average” room fell somewhere in between.

Interviewers, also unaware of the study’s purpose, entered the rooms with a series of close-up photographs of faces and asked the subjects to rate the faces on scales of “energy” and “well-being.” On average the subjects in the beautiful room rated the faces as having nearly 20 percent more energy and well-being than did their counterparts in the ugly room. Over the course of the three-week study, the rooms’ aesthetics even took a toll on the interviewers, who had not been briefed on the actual purpose of the study. Maslow and Mintz noticed that the interviewers assigned to the beautiful room reported liking their work and feeling happy, energetic, and comfortable. The interviewers in the ugly room, meanwhile, suffered from fatigue, boredom, headaches, and irritability. “The dungeon is all yours,” one interviewer said, glumly, to another at the end of her ugly-room shift.

Over the years, scholars would take the insights of Barker, Maslow, and Mintz in new directions. Places were not just “behavior settings,” these new thinkers said, but “stage sets” on which people acted out life’s dramas or “containers” that framed our conduct. Soon, theorists would try to apply some of the emerging principles to design. If physical settings shaped behavior, they reasoned, shouldn’t changes in design trigger changes in behavior?

Books with names like
People and Buildings
,
Design for Human Affairs
, and
The Human Context: Environmental Determinants of
Behavior
appeared in the 1970s suggesting socially minded design tweaks for everything from urinals to entire cities. The more carpets in a psychiatric ward, for example, the less anxious the patients. The more natural scenery that postoperative patients see from their recovery room windows, the less pain medication they request. The more car traffic on a street, the less neighbors socialize. The wider the aisles in a department store, the longer female customers linger. The fewer the buildings on a school campus, the more interaction between teachers and students. The closer together the chairs in a waiting room, the warmer strangers feel toward one another.