I’ll be interviewing the Straphanger himself tonight at the Vancouver Public Library. Grescoe will show us images from his strange journey, and we will argue about the future of getting around in cities. If you are a dedicated car driver, you may want to come down and harass him.

Deets:
Taras Grescoe at the VPL Main Branch
Alice McKay Room
May 7, 7pm
Free

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.

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…

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.

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.

Well, don’t blame yourself. Alan Penn, a professor of architectural computing at University College London, explains that 60% of the stuff the typical IKEA shopper carries away was not on his shopping list. In this lecture, below, Penn explains how IKEA pulls off this feat. The store employs the same floor layouts perfected by famed mall designer, Victor Gruen, half a century ago. By disorienting you, they gradually wear down your ability to discern what’s worth buying.

Logorama from Marc Altshuler — Human Music on Vimeo.

The strange part of this story is just how right the hyper-branded world feels. It feels…like home.

A decade ago, Bogota was on a high. The iconoclastic mayor, Antanas Mockus, was still sending clowns into the streets to tease citizens towards good behaviour. His predecessor, Enrique Peñalosa, had just finished a massive transformation of city streets in the name of equity and happiness. The city spent on parks, schools, and space for pedestrians, cyclists and busses, instead of freeways.

But when I visited Bogota back in 2007, the smile was already beginning to fade from the city’s face. A future mayor was proposing a costly subway line, which would effectively keep poor people underground. The Transmilenio bus system, which helped poor people cross the city as fast as the wealthy, was becoming crowded again. The public space campaign had ground to a halt.

Now, writes the Economist, the city has fallen into a deep funk:

“The bright-red articulated buses of Bogotá’s TransMilenio, with their dedicated lanes and station-style stops, were once the symbol of a city that had been transformed from chaos and corruption in the 1980s into a model of enlightened management admired and imitated across Latin America. Today the chaos and corruption seem to be back.”

The Bogota story matters, because it contains a distillation of the history of every city.  They all have eras of wondrous change and optimism. They all experience times of fallow, and if they are unlucky, chaos and deep depression that shows on the sidewalks, in crime stats, and on people’s faces.  No city is a finished product. They are all being reborn, all the time.

There’s a civic election coming up. Enrique Penalosa, who once rebuilt the city in the name of happiness, is taking a fourth run at the Mayor’s seat. This time he’s got the support of fellow Green Party member, former Mayor Antanas Mockus. This may be Bogota’s chance to rise, yet again.

But in a country where unemployment is contributing to insecurity, building technology can have a direct impact on safety. It takes a couple of marines with a back-hoe to install a HESCO wall. But for the same cost, you could employ a dozen or more Afghans for a month, building a traditional rammed-earth wall. Not  only would the project create goodwill, but a thick rammed-earth wall would be almost perfect for softening the impact of bomb blasts. It has been found to work kind of like a huge, brown pillow. In Dwell, I describe how Westerners and Afghans are learning that ancient ways of building can make everyone’s life more secure.

The story made me think about city forms and resilience. If we really cared about wellbeing, we would consider how urban forms and systems get people working. A bus or tram system requiring a human driver may do more for local resilience than an fancy automated rail system, because it creates local jobs. Meanwhile, in the highway-oriented North American suburb, the car-only mobility system sucks money out of the local economy by funnelling gas money away from the local economy and into the pockets of distant oil producers.

How might we retrofit our cities in an era of unemployment?