Authors: Colin Ellard
The flames were fanned by reports that France’s controversial hard-line minister of the interior, Nicolas Sarkozy, had suggested that the way to solve the problem was to remove all of the “foreigners” from these troubled streets. Given the economic hardship typical of first-generation immigrants, the alleged police discrimination, and the systematic persecution of minority groups by certain sectors of France’s right-wing national government, it is easy to reconstruct a set of plausible causes for the widespread incendiary reaction to the deaths of the two boys. But one element that has received less attention is the built environment that was occupied by those who participated in the violence—that is, the ability of buildings or even neighborhoods to shape collective or individual human behavior.
At the time of the unrest, Clichy-sous-Bois was occupied by almost 30,000 people, among them some of the most impoverished in all of France. Not only was the area effectively isolated from the rest of Paris by an almost complete absence of public transport, but the streets were flanked by long, high, concrete buildings. Street intersections were rare, discouraging the flow of pedestrian traffic and minimizing any sense of privacy or ownership. The organization of the streets in the
banlieues
could not have been more different from those found in a traditional Muslim city like those in the countries
of origin of most of the residents. Muslim urban centers, with their houses that face away from public thoroughfares and their graceful courtyard designs, emphasize privacy, family hierarchies, and clear lines of separation between public and private spaces.
In compelling images, Nico Oved’s photographic exhibition “L’Habitat marginalisé” depicted the extent of the gloomy walls of concrete that surrounded the rioters and their families. Oved suggests that the shape and appearance of the streets themselves could have contributed to the conflagration in the streets.
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These suburbs were a hangover of a damaging movement in architectural and city design that had been set in motion by Le Corbusier, the influential French designer and architect of the mid-twentieth century.
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In a misguided effort to find ways to house large numbers of people in small areas of space, Le Corbusier approached the problem by conceiving of the dwelling as a kind of a machine. Applying principles that eschewed ornamentation and adhered to mathematical principles based on the size and shape of the human body, Le Corbusier hatched designs consisting of vast plains of skyscrapers like honeycombs, filled with spartan but efficient living quarters and suspended on pillars to allow uninterrupted pastures of green space on the ground. Between the skyscrapers ran gigantic freeways that could move people rapidly and effortlessly from one part of the city to another. In the 1920s, when his ideas were incubating, the automobile was at the very beginning of its ascendancy, and in it Le Corbusier saw the solution to one of the key problems in urban development—the movement of people. In order for a large city to have a high level of dynamic integration, for all of its citizenry to have access to as many of the city’s offerings as possible, there must be a way for large numbers of people to get from place to place in a hurry. The problem was, as urban visionary Jane Jacobs first pointed out, that to use the automobile to effect such movement,
Le Corbusier’s numbers simply didn’t add up.
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His vast green pastures lying beneath skyscrapers would need to have been endless gray plains of parking lots. Le Corbusier proposed in all seriousness to the administrative officials in Paris that they raze large neighborhoods of Paris to erect his sky-kissing vision of the future. Fortunately for today’s Parisians, Le Corbusier’s grand vision was not taken seriously by those with the power to make such sweeping changes, but the influence of his ideas can be seen in smaller enclaves within Paris as well as in many other parts of the world.
There are plenty of examples in our recent history of how neighborhoods fail when they are designed according to the ideals ascribed to Le Corbusier. Though his vision was not well realized in Paris, many of his principles were taken up in the design of large housing projects in North America. Indeed, because of the central place of the automobile in Le Corbusier’s designs, and because most major urban development in the New World has taken place after the invention of the car, it has sometimes been too tempting to include elements of this kind of modernist, mechanistic design in our cities. Europe’s large cities grew up over hundreds or even thousands of years, in a time when transportation of people and goods was either bipedal or, at best, by horse and cart, and so they have been more immune to the dramatic sculpting of urban space that the prospect of car travel makes feasible.
The reasons for the failure of modernist urban plans go far beyond an over-reliance on the automobile to solve problems of scale, though, and have much to do with the psychology of the urban dweller. Space in cities, much like the interior spaces of buildings, affects our behavior in two main ways. First, the organization and appearance of spaces can have a direct and measurable effect on
how we feel. Second, the organization of city spaces can influence how we move, where we go, and how large numbers of people distribute themselves in the plexus of streets and thoroughfares in the urban mosaic. What makes all the difference in a city, compared to the smaller spaces of buildings that we considered in the last chapter, is that the people whose behavior is being influenced by the shape of the city are mostly strangers to one another. It is one thing to understand how the design of a dwelling can support hierarchies or gender relationships among kin, but another thing entirely to see how city design influences interactions among thousands or even millions of people who may cross paths every day or only once in a lifetime.
Nobody understood the importance of this difference better than Jane Jacobs, the urban visionary, activist, and writer who spent much of her life fighting modernist forces poised to reshape New York City and used her later years to exert similar powerful influences on Toronto, her adopted home. In her trailblazing book
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
—still current more than forty years after its initial publication—Jacobs offers a scathing indictment of the influence of modernist principles on urban design, but the more enduring contribution of this book is the collection of worldly wise prescriptions for designing livable, safe, and vibrant neighborhoods. Central to Jacobs’s thesis was the oft-repeated mantra that “life attracts life.” What cities need to stay alive is a multitude of public places filled with people. In part, this means that these public places, city sidewalks especially, must present opportunities for work, pleasure, and recreation, but it also means that the spatial organization of the city must accommodate such uses. Sidewalks must be wide enough that they can support pedestrian traffic as well as lingering. Blocks must be short enough to encourage pedestrians to make short hops from block to
block. Collectively, these principles bring traffic, “eyes on the street” in Jacobs’s words, but they do much more. By bringing together strangers with partially overlapping goals, they encourage a sense of shared ownership of public spaces. Because all see the value of the space, all defend its physical integrity and a code of behavior that maintains it. Because of this organic network of trust and understanding, the streets become almost as safe as the interior of the family home.
The importance of this sense of shared space was nowhere better illustrated than by some of its most striking failures. The infamous public housing projects in the United States, designed along modernist lines to provide low-cost subsidized housing to the needy, demonstrated how dire life could become in an area where poor arrangements of space served to break down social networks. Oscar Newman, architect and president of the Institute for Community Design Analysis until his death in 2004, described life in one of the worst of these developments, the Pruitt-Igoe project in St. Louis. Designed very much as a Le Corbusian plan, with skyscrapers suspended over verdant fields and trees, the development never reached more than 60 percent occupancy. The corridors and stairwells became deadly cesspools of human waste and garbage, and the flowing greenspace beneath the skyscrapers became “a sewer of glass and garbage.”
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About 10 years after its construction, the Pruitt-Igoe project was torn down.
In a lifetime spent trying to resurrect such projects and older neighborhoods on the slide toward slumhood, Newman identified what he perceived to be the key ingredient in the deficiency of such designs: the failure of residents to take ownership of public space. Newman’s renovations included measures designed to place portions of public space into the hands of a few owners rather than many, believing that when a space is owned by all then it
is perceived to be owned by none and therefore all rules are suspended. Like Jacobs, Newman understood the power of the eye. Spaces will remain secure only when there are many to watch over them. Jacobs believed the key to putting eyes on the street was to give those eyes reasons to want to be there. Newman, instead, tried to leverage the power of a sense of ownership by arranging space to encourage residents to feel a sense of pride, possession, and nurturance over the physical terrain just outside their thresholds. In both cases, though, these visionaries understood at a gut level what psychologists are now revealing about the importance of views and vistas as the foundation of the human understanding of the geometry of space. More important, they understood some of the ways in which our tendency to understand space as a set of connected views, rather than as a strictly geometric grid, could be used to encourage gathering, affiliation, and safety.
Those of us who live in cities (that is, almost all of us) might always have some background awareness of issues of safety and defense. Every street-smart person in a big city, even very livable ones like New York, Melbourne, or Toronto, knows that limits to one’s freedom are imposed by standards of good sense. We don’t linger in a deserted downtown alley at four in the morning unless we’re hoping for trouble. But although we must think of our own safety in cities from time to time, the happy truth is that for most of us, most of our decisions about where and how we spend time are not governed by a concern for bodily safety. Simple preference also plays a large role in our movements and decisions.
Christian Nold, an artist by training, designs beautiful multimedia demonstrations of place preference in urban settings that he calls bio-maps. Nold sets up exhibits in urban centers in which
volunteers are recruited to walk the streets of a city while wearing a small pack containing a suite of electronic hardware. The two main components of the pack are a global positioning device that can continually record the location of the wearer and a small machine that records a property of one’s skin referred to as the galvanic skin response, or GSR. GSR is recorded by passing very low-intensity current between two of one’s fingers and measuring how easily the current flows (though this sounds as though it might sting, the currents are so small that they are undetectable). A long tradition of experiments in psychology has shown that GSR readings correlate with arousal; this is exactly the same principle that is involved in using polygraphs as “lie detectors.” In a way, we wear our hearts on our sleeves, or at least on our fingers, and GSR measurements reveal our feelings to the world.
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.
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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.