Streets with no game
I was thinking about this last night on my way home, having a conversation with a guy I went to university with. He and I sometimes take the same bus home, and our conversation veered toward how empty some of the streets in the city seem. What prompted the conversation was an apparent increase in the number of vacant storefronts and the state of the local economy, which veered into a discussion about the wisdom of giving developers incentives to build ground-floor retail in their new commercial and condo buildings despite there being little market for the extra space, and finally to how the sorts of eclectic retailers that make a street interesting are priced out of the market because of the egregious rents being charged for these empty storefronts. Instead the spaces are filled with banks if they're filled at all; banks need somewhere to conduct their business and it's convenient as a customer to have a branch nearby but they tend to have monolithic designs that are not inviting whatsoever. Everything about the design of a bank tends to subconsciously say "keep out".
I didn't quote the entire article; it goes on to discuss the work of a pair of architects who 20 years ago argued "the generic city" is coming due to mass immigration and globalization. One of them, a Dutch architect by the name of Rem Koolhaas, said in a 2011 interview:
This can also have negative psychological effects on the people who live and work there (making them feel bored and miserable), as the author's research shows.
What do you think? Do you experience this?
Boring cityscapes increase sadness, addiction and disease-related stress. Is urban design a matter of public health?
In 2007, the Whole Foods supermarket chain built one of their largest stores on New York City’s storied Lower East Side, occupying an entire block of East Houston Street from the Bowery to Chrystie Street. For the well-off, the abundant availability of high-quality organic foods was a welcome addition, but for the majority of locals, many of whom had roots going back generations to New York’s immigrant beginnings, the scale of the new store, selling wares that few of them could easily afford, was a symbolic affront to the traditions of this part of the city.
When I conducted research at the site in 2011, my interest was more pedestrian: how did this megastructure – plopped into a neighbourhood populated with tiny bars and restaurants, bodegas, pocket parks, playgrounds and many different styles of housing – influence the psychological state of the urban pedestrian? What happens inside the minds of city-dwellers who turn out of tiny, historic restaurants with bellies full of delicious knish and encounter nothing but empty sidewalk beneath their feet, a long bank of frosted glass on one side, and a steady stream of honking taxicabs on the other?
To find the answer, I led small groups from site to site and had them answer questions that assessed their emotional state via a smartphone. At the same time, I had participants wear bracelets that measured their skin conductance – a simple but reliable window into their alertness, readiness to act, pay attention or respond to threat.
One of the sites in the study was midway along the long, blank façade of Whole Foods Market. A second site was a few steps away, in front of a small but lively strip 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 Whole Foods, my participants stood awkwardly, casting around for something of interest to latch on to and talk about. They assessed their emotional state as being on the wrong side of ‘happy’ and their state of arousal was close to bottoming out. The physiological instruments strapped to their arms showed a similar pattern. These people were bored and unhappy. When asked to describe the site, words such as bland, monotonous and passionless rose to the top of the charts.
In contrast, people standing at the other test site, less than a block away from Whole Foods, felt lively and engaged. Their own assessments of their states of arousal and affect were high and positive. The words that sprang to their minds were mixed, lively, busy, socialising and eating. Even though this site was so crowded with pedestrians that our participants struggled to find a quiet place to reflect on our questions, there was no doubt that this location was to their liking on many levels. In fact, even though we didn't have the equipment to measure such things effectively, we could read the telltale signs of happiness or misery on our participants’ bodies as they worked to complete the study. In front of the blank façade, people were quiet, stooped and passive. At the livelier site, they were animated and chatty, and we had some difficulty reining in their enthusiasm. Our experimental protocol, requiring that participants not talk to one another while recording their responses, quickly went by the wayside. Many expressed a desire to leave the tour and simply join in the fun of the place.
...
Why would anyone think it a good idea to build a large, featureless building at ground level? What motivates a developer to erect an endless stretch of suburban housing where each individual unit is identical and, in the language of information theory, low in entropy?
One obvious part of the equation, especially for suburban developments, is the economic one. It’s much less expensive to design only three or four different models of houses.
But what about our larger institutional buildings? Why build a closed, ground-level façade that will bore passersby? Perhaps the owners of such properties don’t see much to gain: it hardly seems in the best interests of a major bank to attract a crowd of happy lingerers to the fronts of their buildings, rather than serious customers who get in and get out again. A friendly façade might also be less in keeping with the image that the business wants to portray. We might want the bank looking after our assets to be a quiet, brooding, impenetrable fortress, rather than part of a whimsical and lively street market.
In 2007, the Whole Foods supermarket chain built one of their largest stores on New York City’s storied Lower East Side, occupying an entire block of East Houston Street from the Bowery to Chrystie Street. For the well-off, the abundant availability of high-quality organic foods was a welcome addition, but for the majority of locals, many of whom had roots going back generations to New York’s immigrant beginnings, the scale of the new store, selling wares that few of them could easily afford, was a symbolic affront to the traditions of this part of the city.
When I conducted research at the site in 2011, my interest was more pedestrian: how did this megastructure – plopped into a neighbourhood populated with tiny bars and restaurants, bodegas, pocket parks, playgrounds and many different styles of housing – influence the psychological state of the urban pedestrian? What happens inside the minds of city-dwellers who turn out of tiny, historic restaurants with bellies full of delicious knish and encounter nothing but empty sidewalk beneath their feet, a long bank of frosted glass on one side, and a steady stream of honking taxicabs on the other?
To find the answer, I led small groups from site to site and had them answer questions that assessed their emotional state via a smartphone. At the same time, I had participants wear bracelets that measured their skin conductance – a simple but reliable window into their alertness, readiness to act, pay attention or respond to threat.
One of the sites in the study was midway along the long, blank façade of Whole Foods Market. A second site was a few steps away, in front of a small but lively strip 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 Whole Foods, my participants stood awkwardly, casting around for something of interest to latch on to and talk about. They assessed their emotional state as being on the wrong side of ‘happy’ and their state of arousal was close to bottoming out. The physiological instruments strapped to their arms showed a similar pattern. These people were bored and unhappy. When asked to describe the site, words such as bland, monotonous and passionless rose to the top of the charts.
In contrast, people standing at the other test site, less than a block away from Whole Foods, felt lively and engaged. Their own assessments of their states of arousal and affect were high and positive. The words that sprang to their minds were mixed, lively, busy, socialising and eating. Even though this site was so crowded with pedestrians that our participants struggled to find a quiet place to reflect on our questions, there was no doubt that this location was to their liking on many levels. In fact, even though we didn't have the equipment to measure such things effectively, we could read the telltale signs of happiness or misery on our participants’ bodies as they worked to complete the study. In front of the blank façade, people were quiet, stooped and passive. At the livelier site, they were animated and chatty, and we had some difficulty reining in their enthusiasm. Our experimental protocol, requiring that participants not talk to one another while recording their responses, quickly went by the wayside. Many expressed a desire to leave the tour and simply join in the fun of the place.
...
Why would anyone think it a good idea to build a large, featureless building at ground level? What motivates a developer to erect an endless stretch of suburban housing where each individual unit is identical and, in the language of information theory, low in entropy?
One obvious part of the equation, especially for suburban developments, is the economic one. It’s much less expensive to design only three or four different models of houses.
But what about our larger institutional buildings? Why build a closed, ground-level façade that will bore passersby? Perhaps the owners of such properties don’t see much to gain: it hardly seems in the best interests of a major bank to attract a crowd of happy lingerers to the fronts of their buildings, rather than serious customers who get in and get out again. A friendly façade might also be less in keeping with the image that the business wants to portray. We might want the bank looking after our assets to be a quiet, brooding, impenetrable fortress, rather than part of a whimsical and lively street market.
I was thinking about this last night on my way home, having a conversation with a guy I went to university with. He and I sometimes take the same bus home, and our conversation veered toward how empty some of the streets in the city seem. What prompted the conversation was an apparent increase in the number of vacant storefronts and the state of the local economy, which veered into a discussion about the wisdom of giving developers incentives to build ground-floor retail in their new commercial and condo buildings despite there being little market for the extra space, and finally to how the sorts of eclectic retailers that make a street interesting are priced out of the market because of the egregious rents being charged for these empty storefronts. Instead the spaces are filled with banks if they're filled at all; banks need somewhere to conduct their business and it's convenient as a customer to have a branch nearby but they tend to have monolithic designs that are not inviting whatsoever. Everything about the design of a bank tends to subconsciously say "keep out".
I didn't quote the entire article; it goes on to discuss the work of a pair of architects who 20 years ago argued "the generic city" is coming due to mass immigration and globalization. One of them, a Dutch architect by the name of Rem Koolhaas, said in a 2011 interview:
"In an age of mass immigration, a mass similarity of cities might just be inevitable. [Cities such as Dubai, where the majority of residents are immigrants,] function like airports in which the same shops are always in the same places. Everything is defined by function, and nothing by history. This can also be liberating."
This can also have negative psychological effects on the people who live and work there (making them feel bored and miserable), as the author's research shows.
What do you think? Do you experience this?
I live in Indianapolis, the epitome of "boring city" by most accounts... it was built as a planned city and mostly functions on conventions, warehouses and logistics anymore... which means that we have a lot of bland and featureless buildings and streets that are laid out in a grid system (which is why I think that other cities are dreadful to navigate by comparison... they are NOT laid out logically! more interesting though...)
we're also one of the top states for illicit use of prescription painkillers! 
