On Video: Ellard and Sternberg explain psychogeography of NYC Lower East Side

By Charles | January 26, 2012

For those of you who have been asking exactly what we were up to with our sensors and Blackberries in NYC this fall, here are some answers. Colin Ellard delivers results of our psychogeography experiment:

Then the brilliant Esther Sternberg (Healing Places) drops in to give us the big picture about how places can heal us or make us sick:

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Evolution, brain science and urban activism: vignettes from the BGLab

By Charles | November 15, 2011

The lessons from our three months of experimentation and learning at the BGLab in NYC are still percolating. I’ve been too consumed with book revisions and presentations (including the keynote at this year’s ASLA convention–a fairly messy writeup of which is here) to collect my thoughts. Although our workshops and experiments have not hit Youtube yet, I see a few gems on Youtube. Here are a few:

Love Night: We created an evening that tested new insights in brain science that suggest that we are hard-wired for altruism and trust—even among strangers. Neuroeconomist Paul Zak, psychologist Emanuele Castano, and Kio Stark helped take us there, along with heat-sensitive garments and furniture from the Fashioinable Technology Lab at Parsons The New School for Design. It was all very huggy:

BGLab and Occupy Wall Street: an unlikely meeting

The brilliant Nicholas Humphrey on urban design as placebo:

And David Sloan Wilson explains how he used evolution to make his town happier:

Juliet Schor explores the hopeful economics of sharing:

And then there’s the bizarre and incomparable Reggie Watts, making fun of all of us:

The person who has come closest to making sense of the BGLab is our blogger Christine McLaren, who has also done extensive research for my book, Happy City. Christine will be hopping a container ship, following the lab to Berlin in the coming months. As usual, her wonderful blog will find ways to relate every structure and experience to the science of making better cities. Check it out.

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Experimenting with the emotional city in NYC

By Charles | September 20, 2011

The city is a behavioral system. It alters how we feel, how we see each other, and how we act. This would be a terrible thought if it were not for a second truth, which is that the city is malleable. We can change it whenever we wish.

These are the ideas at the heart of the Happy City project. Between Sept 28 and Oct 16, I will test them at the BMW Guggenheim Lab in New York City. If you give a damn about the future of cities, if you are curious about the city’s ability to design sweet moments into or out of your life, or if you simply like to hug strangers, I invite you to join me as we poke at both the city and the human brain.  I could use your help.

If you can’t make it to my opening presentation, here’s what we’re up to the first week:

We have already started by examining the emotional life of public space. The Canadian psychologist, Colin Ellard, has designed an experiment that uses various gadgets to measure the effect of locations in the Lower East Side on participants’ brains and bodies.  We’re learning about how these places influence visitors’ levels of arousal, affect and cognitive function. You can sign up for the tour here.

For most New Yorkers, the most common experience of public life occurs in transit. On any weekday, 8.5 million people depend on the MTA’s busses, boats and subways. How does the commute influence your sense of status, comfort and wellbeing? There is no better guide to that question than Carlos Felipe Pardo, a psychologist who has examined the emotional effects of transit around the world. Join Carlos’s transit psychology tour. Then brainstorm new ideas for commuting comfort with panelists including the author of the bestselling Traffic, Tom Vanderbilt.

Despite this focus on designed experiences, our comfort can be shaped by unseen systems that define how we see and treat other people. If we can redesign our spaces and mobility systems, can we redesign the cultural and cognitive software that shapes our social behavior? We’ll explore these ideas in a couple of slightly mind-bending programs. First, Kio Stark will send volunteers on missions to interact with total strangers on city streets. I am hoping this will prime us for Love Night, where an all-star team including neuroeconomist Paul Zak, psychologist Emanuele Castano, Stark, artist Ryan Brennan, the folks at Project for Public Spaces and Sabine Seymour’s fashionable technology students at Parsons will use the entire BGLab as an environment for building feelings of trust and altruism.

To cap the week off, Justin Luke at Audio Visual Arts has put together a mash-up of acoustic ecologists and sound artists to consider the science and wonder of the urban soundscape.

This, of course, is just the beginning. As we roll into the second week, we’ll take these ideas and imagine ways to retrofit NYC for comfort and joy. Stay tuned…

 

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Experiment launches today: join us in NYC

By Charles | August 4, 2011

After months of effort by a cast of dozens, The BMW Guggenheim Lab has  opened in NYC. Now that we’ve christened the space with a first-class shindig (observed critically here) the lab team will spend the next three months conducting experiments, playing games, exploring unseen systems, fighting and confronting ideas of comfort in the city. (Urban Omnibus features in-depth interviews with the team members, describing what we’re up to.)

The lab is the brainchild of curators David Van Der Leer and Maria Nicanor, who saw it as a kind of pop-up intervention whose radical openness would be reflected not just in its programs, but in the structure it inhabits: a carbon fibre frame, designed by Atelier Bow Wow, floating above a previously-abandoned lot on Houston Street in the East Village. Upstairs is a theatre-like toolbox. The ground level is a reconfigurable theatre/workshop/lecture/game/community gathering space. There are no walls, other than the graffiti-covered bricks of neighbouring buildings. There is no way to shut out the noise, dust and buzz of the city, which is exactly the point:

The structure, which The New York Times calls a departure from the Guggenheim’s starchitect trajectory, is a big hit. But we hope that its contents will produce a greater legacy: a whorl of new ideas and innovations to help cities face the big challenges of this century.

I host the space between Sept 28 and Oct 16, and I will be using the lab as a base to investigate the psychology of public space, commuting, and sprawl. I’ve developed an experiment with psychologist Colin Ellard in which participants will help us map the effects that the urban landscape has on our brains, bodies and behaviour. Other programs will include neuroeconomist Paul Zak, stranger-provocateur Kio Stark, suburban retrofitter June Williamson, resilient city documentarian Greg Greene, the agitators at Streetfilms, and others who are challenging what it means to build and live together well in cities.

It’s  free to participate in all the lab’s programs. Check out the calendar here. Join us.

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The altruism dividend: a lesson from my brother

By Charles | June 5, 2011

What’s the biggest lesson I’ve learned in my research looking at cities and happiness? It’s that the our relationships with other people matter more than money, status or beauty. In fact, my friend Elizabeth Dunn showed in her work that money has the most power to buy happiness when you give it away.

Funny thing is, while I have been poking through academic archives and psychology labs, my brother has been spending the last few years living out the science. He opened a surf camp in Nicaragua, but quickly found that the community around his hotel was in dire need. Hundreds of people, displaced by a hurricane, survived by picking garbage at a local dump. So my bro and his Nicaraguan business partner, Jerry, asked surf camp guests to lend a hand. Yup: they asked vacationers to put down their margaritas and surf boards, and spend their afternoons building a medical clinic and an education centre at the dump. Here’s a taste:

Nicaragua Volunteer Vacations from Amy Hanson on Vimeo.

As it turned out, just about everyone found their sun and surf experience most satisfying when they took time to help. The folks who live in the area, who are getting dental care, medicine, and business training, are happy about it, too. Stories like this are happening all around us, of course. Their message is inspiring: Altruism makes us happier. In Happy City, I explain how humans are actually hard-wired for cooperation and altruistic behaviour. I’d love to hear your stories of how cooperative behaviour among strangers has fueled good feelings.

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A radical collaboration: the BMW Guggenheim Lab

By Charles | May 7, 2011

Earlier this spring, curators at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum put five strangers from different countries and different disciplines in a room in New York, and asked us to think about what it means to be comfortable in cities. I’ll share more about this collaboration between a dizzying collection of architects, thinkers, curators, builders and innovators in the coming months, but here are the basics on the BMW Guggenheim Lab. If you’re in New York this summer between August and October, come check us out. And now, the video:

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