Abstract
Although urban planners and architects have understood that there is a relationship between the design of a setting and our thoughts and emotions, it is only recently that we have had the tools to properly dissect this relationship. New methods for measuring brain states in field settings in immersive virtual reality have generated a host of novel findings, but a theme that connects many of these findings together is the idea that human beings have a deep affinity for vitality at every level from the interior of a home to an urban streetscape. Not only this, but recent evidence suggests that we respond to the vitality of scenes almost immediately, even after exposures as brief as 50 milliseconds, possibly using ambient visual processing mechanisms that rely on our peripheral visual field. Further, when we sense and respond to vitality, positive affect increases, which in turn promotes affiliation and buffers us against urban loneliness. I will present findings from experiments both in the laboratory and in the field that show the power of vitality to effect behavioural change, and I will argue that harnessing this power is one of the keys to building a psychologically sustainable city.
Highlights
In his book The Phenomenon of Life (2003), the first volume of a monumental four-volume opus, architectural theorist Christopher Alexander sets out to reach the foundation of the phenomenon of life in the built environment
In an entirely different realm of discourse, noted urban planner Jane Jacobs, delivering a speech in Hamburg in 1981 at a conference on urban renewal (Zipp & Storring, 2016), argued against what she called “big planning,” which is the kind of urban planning that is conducted from the top-down, where entire neighborhoods might be orchestrated by a few strokes of a mighty pen in the hands of a megaplanning department
I intend to draw the connections between these two sets of grand ideas – the deep-rooted determinism of Alexander’s list of life-giving properties of built spaces and Jacobs’ “vital little plans”— using ideas that have emerged from efforts to relate the building sciences to biology and neuroscience
Summary
In his book The Phenomenon of Life (2003), the first volume of a monumental four-volume opus, architectural theorist Christopher Alexander sets out to reach the foundation of the phenomenon of life in the built environment. This tantalizing finding is just one piece of evidence for the importance of vital features of the human aesthetic response, which might be relevant to our emotional relationship with the built environment.
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