Places of the Heart: The Psychogeography of Everyday Life
What an amazing book. As a User Experience professional with a fascination with Urban Design, I couldn’t have picked a better book to launch me into the world of City Planning.
This review will mostly be quotes from the book itself, mainly because this book is just so damn good at creating impactful statements off of data and surveys. For the full list of my favorite quotes (all 8 pages), I’ve created this Google Doc. I’m hoping that this book—specifically my favorite quotes—can all be an important piece of my upcoming Cleveland Thesis Project. This is a longterm project to aid the city of Cleveland in its design, sustainability and economic retention. As you’ll see, this book has done a fantastic job of analyzing potential and optimizing current processes, all while connecting it to the psychology of individuals based off of human behavior.
“Regardless of what can be known about the thinking that lay behind the careful construction of Göbekli Tepe, six thousand years before the invention of the written word, one thing is clear — what happened there may represent the very beginning of what has now become a defining characteristic, perhaps the defining characteristic of humanity: we build to change perceptions, and to influence thoughts and feelings; by these means, we attempt to organize human activity, exert power, and in many cases, to make money. We see examples of this everywhere, scattered through the length and breadth of human history.”
The quote above really opened my eyes to exactly why any of this stuff matters. I was always drawn to the way that a city’s impact could change your perception—how one city would feel and be experienced in such a different way than the others. Growing up, it’s hard to understand the intentionality of it all; but now as an adult aware of what makes a city, it’s so vivid and yet so subconscious still.
“The question of how any individual animal comes to select a particular habitat is one of the most basic and important ones in biology, and many thousands of research studies have been devoted to it. The ability to select a set of surroundings propitious for foraging, shelter from predators, and the availability of mates is one of the most important determinants of biological success — measured as survival to reproductive age and the production of offspring.
Many studies have shown that not only do animals have a remarkable ability to seek out the best available locations for the necessities of life, but that they are able to anticipate how a setting will serve their future needs. For example, the black-throated warbler, a small songbird that nests in spruce forests of eastern North America, establishes territories preferentially among the red spruce trees of arboreal forests early in the summer months, even though these trees offer less food than the neighboring white spruce trees.
Later, though, when nests are built and hungry fledglings need sustenance, it is the red spruce forest that offers the easier pickings. Somehow, the warbler has been guided to settle in locations that will suit its future parenting needs better than its present ones.
It is no accident that many studies of habitat selection focus on nesting birds. Construction of a nest requires considerable effort; it is important that the nest site remain stable and safe for the duration of the breeding season, and that it offer the right mix of resources at a time in the future when those resources will be most crucial for the survival of offspring.”
This is incredibly fascinating because it initiates the question: how did humans achieve a similar result? Settling near a river might make sense for transportation, but why this river? What resources or circumstances were unique to that environment to provide the inspiration to settle there?
Later on, the book talks about how birds and other mammals prefer to “see but not be seen” and that humans do this too. Go to a pub or coffee shop and yourself and others will usually be inclined for the same: sitting off in a corner or booth. It makes complete sense, but to understand the history and evolution behind it really puts the pieces of the puzzle together.
“Our first experience of the Eiffel Tower or the Empire State Building is only partly colored by the raw appearance of these buildings and more by the complex of associations that we bring with us to the experience, and how that history connects with our present experiences.”
This quote was impactful to me because it not only made me think of my association to different locations and the particular buildings that meant something to me, but also the potential that could be unlocked for the future designs and creations. What hasn’t been built yet that will one day be the most important artifact to society or even just one person? Humans interest in symbolization and connection to objects makes this an overlooked but impactful observation.
What I found really interesting as well were the studies that the author, Colin Ellard, often conducts. In the book he described that he measured how the Participants react to different locations in a physiological and emotional level while exploring a city:
“For one of the sites in the study, I used a location about midway along the long, blank façade of the Whole Foods Market. For a second comparison location, I took visitors to a site a few steps away, slightly further east on East Houston Street, in front of a small but lively sea of restaurants and stores with lots of open doors and windows, a happy hubbub of eating and drinking and a pleasantly meandering mob of pedestrians. Some of the results were predictable. When planted in front of the Whole Foods store, my participants stood awkwardly, casting around for something of interest to latch onto and to talk about. They assessed their emotional state as being on the wrong side of ‘happy’ and their state of arousal was as close to bottoming out as I saw at any of the sites on the walk. The physiological instruments strapped to their arms showed a similar pattern. These people were bored and unhappy. When asked to describe the site using words and phrases, utterances such as bland, monotonous, passionless rose to the top of the charts.”
In the way that humans evolved, it makes sense for us to always keep learning, visually understanding and to find a need to be interested in something. It was previously a point of survival—to be able to provide for yourself through understanding new situations—and now can make all the difference between an intellectually stimulated citizen, emotionally impacted by their community, and a citizen who feels no emotional pull towards being a part of their city at all.
“For the individual urban dweller, what are the psychological implications of getting things wrong? If city streets are designed with endless closed façades like those seen in supermarkets and bank headquarters, people might feel a little less happy and they might walk faster and pause less, but what is really at stake here? The real risks of bad design may lie less in unhappy streets filled with cars full of people who have no motivation to walk and pedestrians who won’t be able to enjoy a coffee at a nice café, and more in the amassing of a population of urban citizens with epidemic levels of boredom.”
And I think that is really the point of it all—what impact does your city have on you? Is there a tie there that, because the city has given so much to you, that you feel an interest to give back? And another question is whether or not people are even aware of these things, or if it’s subconsciously a part of how they react to their surroundings.
In the creation and change of a city, it’s so vitally important to be aware of how the city can sway the opinions of those living in it. Ellard’s book did a fantastic job of properly explaining this; vividly unpacking the nuances of how a place is put together. How a city makes you feel in an everyday interaction might not be something you can verbally or psychologically understand, but it can very vividly change how you interact with it.
