Part 2 of a multi-part series
How does this relate to architecture, urban planning, and landscape design? What does knowledge of pressure/volume pulses in the urban landscape do for the planner/designer? What can we learn from urban experiences in traffic flow and our emotional responses while driving? If we know how individuals generally react, how do we go about planning for this? Does it have to do with good urban design, compensation, or surrender to the sense that things are beyond our control?
Around my current residence, just Northwest of the central business district of downtown Salt Lake City, several issues slow down the pace of traffic, for me most noticeable in the evenings between 4:00 p.m. and 7 p.m. Traffic lights are paced in a way that seems always to go against the flow. I idle at each and every light. Even the usual well timed lights are paced in a way to impede continuous flow. One option for leaving the neighborhood I don’t usually use is Northwest, because the grocery stores to the East are closer and more familiar. There is no walkable grocery in this Northwest residential section between City Creek Canyon, which enters the city from the North and passes by the East side of the state capital, and I-15. The nearest grocery is 4-6 blocks West of the freeway.
Several aspects really impede flow. At dinnertime, just like in Park City, an international tourist destination town, everyone wants to go at the same time to the restaurants and grocery stores, and everybody shows up with the same hungry, impatient impulse. I enter this slow down with my own rising need to eat or shop for groceries, and get pinched by City Creek—which prevents flow East to the plurality of groceries 6 blocks in that direction—and all the downtown traffic emptying into the streets outbound through the various arteries north and west. Eastbound traffic is almost as bad, though if you drive far enough South, you will hit a moderately flowing Eastbound route.
Trax is but 2 blocks away, but this option means about an hour turnaround time to the most convenient supermarket and back. One might wonder why I am compelled to be on this schedule of having emotional or biological needs like hunger or the need to burn energy at about 5 p.m., when the immediate world around me is full of people in traffic, creating a potential for resonant stress through traffic, crowding and the like. My own impulses are naturally timed like most everyone else, and my schedule regularly coincides with the mass exodus from downtown.
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Monday, April 7, 2008
Traffic Flow, Personal Flow, and the Built Environment
Part 1 of a multi-part entry
Flow is a very unique phenomena in psychological wellbeing. When we are in flow, as with an athletic activity, complex task, or any time we are completely immersed and engaged by the moment, flow experts tell us that we have a different sense of time, our mind tends to be fully engaged, and our emotions support a peak experience.
In the buildup to the 2002 Winter Olympics, I held a night job that made quite a good deal of money, and when I wasn’t immersed in the work, I was doing a lot of reading and thinking, especially in psychology. Delivering food in Park City from over 30 restaurants around town allowed me to experience the streets from the late afternoon mass exodus of ski resorts, jamming all the main arteries, to late evening, when the streets returned to their quiet, empty state.
I used the opportunity to observe how stress affected the kitchens of those restaurants, and the staff of nearly 100 hotels, resorts and bed and breakfasts. How was stress affecting the 12-20 customers I delivered to per night, 7 nights a week? After having earned a BA in English with a minor in History from the University of Houston, and starting a 10 year hiatus living off the grid outside of Park City, subsidized by high paying seasonal jobs, I was spurred to be watchful for meta-patterns, useful information to stow away for later.
While many of my confederates were immersed in drama—of their personal lives, the road, interpersonal conflict and misaligned expectations between restaurant and driver, driver and customer, I was immersed in how the high volume, high pressure experience at certain times of day in a ski destination town impacted everybody I came into contact with. Road rage was defined in the mid-60’s by a major change in the thinking of stress psychology. The experience of misaligned expectation, where we are behaviorally programmed to travel fast, are attached to that rate of flow, and react to incidences that fuel a sense of frustration in traffic, turned out to have a very unique signature.
Theories and research on stress up to the 1960’s focused primarily on physical experiences, modern stress research growing up around studies of soldiers coming out of WWII. Much of the clinical research models revolved around studies that experimented with putting an organism under intense physical stress, and observing how it would try to adapt, burn out, give up, and eventually collapse.
Road rage studies tied an apparently primitive instinct of the brain and body—fight or flight, a survival mechanism evolved to protect the physical body—with the ego instead. Road rage was theorized as evidence of the shift of the body’s hormonal (and neurochemical) fight or flight response from defense against threat to bodily harm, to defense against threat of harm to the ego. Anyone familiar with ego defense psychology knows the old Benson and Hedges commercial stereotypes well this tendency to react under pressure: We’d “rather fight than switch”.
Flow is a very unique phenomena in psychological wellbeing. When we are in flow, as with an athletic activity, complex task, or any time we are completely immersed and engaged by the moment, flow experts tell us that we have a different sense of time, our mind tends to be fully engaged, and our emotions support a peak experience.
In the buildup to the 2002 Winter Olympics, I held a night job that made quite a good deal of money, and when I wasn’t immersed in the work, I was doing a lot of reading and thinking, especially in psychology. Delivering food in Park City from over 30 restaurants around town allowed me to experience the streets from the late afternoon mass exodus of ski resorts, jamming all the main arteries, to late evening, when the streets returned to their quiet, empty state.
I used the opportunity to observe how stress affected the kitchens of those restaurants, and the staff of nearly 100 hotels, resorts and bed and breakfasts. How was stress affecting the 12-20 customers I delivered to per night, 7 nights a week? After having earned a BA in English with a minor in History from the University of Houston, and starting a 10 year hiatus living off the grid outside of Park City, subsidized by high paying seasonal jobs, I was spurred to be watchful for meta-patterns, useful information to stow away for later.
While many of my confederates were immersed in drama—of their personal lives, the road, interpersonal conflict and misaligned expectations between restaurant and driver, driver and customer, I was immersed in how the high volume, high pressure experience at certain times of day in a ski destination town impacted everybody I came into contact with. Road rage was defined in the mid-60’s by a major change in the thinking of stress psychology. The experience of misaligned expectation, where we are behaviorally programmed to travel fast, are attached to that rate of flow, and react to incidences that fuel a sense of frustration in traffic, turned out to have a very unique signature.
Theories and research on stress up to the 1960’s focused primarily on physical experiences, modern stress research growing up around studies of soldiers coming out of WWII. Much of the clinical research models revolved around studies that experimented with putting an organism under intense physical stress, and observing how it would try to adapt, burn out, give up, and eventually collapse.
Road rage studies tied an apparently primitive instinct of the brain and body—fight or flight, a survival mechanism evolved to protect the physical body—with the ego instead. Road rage was theorized as evidence of the shift of the body’s hormonal (and neurochemical) fight or flight response from defense against threat to bodily harm, to defense against threat of harm to the ego. Anyone familiar with ego defense psychology knows the old Benson and Hedges commercial stereotypes well this tendency to react under pressure: We’d “rather fight than switch”.
Sunday, March 30, 2008
Can the Urban Environment Reinforce Certain Psychological States?
Part 2
Lowenstein and Schkade in an essay on the difficulty of perceiving “hot” emotions in “cold” states and vice versa, in anticipating future emotion, suggest that emotions live in state dependent memory. Perhaps a tool of the architect, urban planner and landscape architect can be to anticipate the kinds of emotions a given environment is likely to nurture. The emotional quality an environment evokes for its users is as important to recognize and anticipate as its visual and utilitarian impact.
Robert M. Pirsig, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, utilizes two very poignant icons to illustrate this experience we all tend to know and repress. The first is the highway traffic jam, with the isolated, miserable looking faces in each of the autos; the second is the constant drip-drip-drip of a faucet needing repair. We suppress these events from our consciousness, having more important things to do, more desirable experiences to consume. The water faucet example is reminiscent of old Chinese water torture sequences on television from the 50's and early 60's, where the subject eventually goes mad. Michael Douglas best represents the coming apart of a businessman stuck in traffic in the film Falling Down.
Evidence suggests such background stress lowers headroom and decreases tolerance. Caspi, Bolger and Eckenrode state: “micro-stressors, acting cumulatively, and in the relative absence of compensatory experiences, can be potent sources of stress”. The hinge here is “compensatory experiences”. In performance cognitive management, you might imagine doing intense creative work in the morning, something very synthesis based. The flow of ideas and associations may peak, but then the cognitive function fatigues, and needs to recycle. A relaxing and less cognitively busy environment can recuperate the cognitive function, refreshing the mind for the afternoon. This jibes well for me with the concept of calming the mind so that it can regenerate and prepare to perform in the next session.
Many artists and creative personalities have remarked that meditation offers such regeneration and centering. More of us might recognize the restorative potential of environments. Spend 20 minutes in an environment where you anticipate feelings of wellbeing, experience feelings of wellbeing, and leave remarking on how you enjoy the environment, and what do you get?
Imagine creating a diversity of urban environments that offer regenerative moments from mundane task sessions and heated decision-making events. I imagine myself at the City Library in downtown Salt Lake City, around the City/County Building and its great canopy of trees, Sugarhouse or Liberty Park where nature takes precedence over the built environment. Whether developing micro-environments or districts, having an idea of their impact on emotional wellbeing and cognitive refreshment—especially in a dense urban setting—seems valuable for sustainable living. What are your thoughts?
Lowenstein and Schkade in an essay on the difficulty of perceiving “hot” emotions in “cold” states and vice versa, in anticipating future emotion, suggest that emotions live in state dependent memory. Perhaps a tool of the architect, urban planner and landscape architect can be to anticipate the kinds of emotions a given environment is likely to nurture. The emotional quality an environment evokes for its users is as important to recognize and anticipate as its visual and utilitarian impact.
Robert M. Pirsig, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, utilizes two very poignant icons to illustrate this experience we all tend to know and repress. The first is the highway traffic jam, with the isolated, miserable looking faces in each of the autos; the second is the constant drip-drip-drip of a faucet needing repair. We suppress these events from our consciousness, having more important things to do, more desirable experiences to consume. The water faucet example is reminiscent of old Chinese water torture sequences on television from the 50's and early 60's, where the subject eventually goes mad. Michael Douglas best represents the coming apart of a businessman stuck in traffic in the film Falling Down.
Evidence suggests such background stress lowers headroom and decreases tolerance. Caspi, Bolger and Eckenrode state: “micro-stressors, acting cumulatively, and in the relative absence of compensatory experiences, can be potent sources of stress”. The hinge here is “compensatory experiences”. In performance cognitive management, you might imagine doing intense creative work in the morning, something very synthesis based. The flow of ideas and associations may peak, but then the cognitive function fatigues, and needs to recycle. A relaxing and less cognitively busy environment can recuperate the cognitive function, refreshing the mind for the afternoon. This jibes well for me with the concept of calming the mind so that it can regenerate and prepare to perform in the next session.
Many artists and creative personalities have remarked that meditation offers such regeneration and centering. More of us might recognize the restorative potential of environments. Spend 20 minutes in an environment where you anticipate feelings of wellbeing, experience feelings of wellbeing, and leave remarking on how you enjoy the environment, and what do you get?
Imagine creating a diversity of urban environments that offer regenerative moments from mundane task sessions and heated decision-making events. I imagine myself at the City Library in downtown Salt Lake City, around the City/County Building and its great canopy of trees, Sugarhouse or Liberty Park where nature takes precedence over the built environment. Whether developing micro-environments or districts, having an idea of their impact on emotional wellbeing and cognitive refreshment—especially in a dense urban setting—seems valuable for sustainable living. What are your thoughts?
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Can the Urban Environment Reinforce Certain Psychological States?
Part 1 of a 2 part series.
The idea for this blog came from a conversation with landscape architect Stephen Storheim of Design Workshop in Salt Lake City, Utah. He recently mentioned the desire to have an urban landscape he could move through at lunchtime, from the office to a restaurant and back, that didn’t require negotiating auto traffic. This parallels a line of thought I have considered since 2005 originally titled Performance Stress Management, but that might better be generalized to performance cognitive management.
“Stress” carries lots of baggage, though fatigue and cognitive shutdown are stress related events. A better way of conceiving this is perhaps managing states of work and restorative consciousness that provide optimum results for creating, analyzing, rudimentary task work, wise judgment, decision-making and the like. What kinds of environments—or micro-environments—best suit the focus and concentration, or the recuperation and counterbalancing of such mental states?
Peruse the rich visual images of an architecture or landscape architecture magazine. How do you imagine yourself in these environments, and how do they make you feel? Often these images are without the connective tissue of busy streets, cacophonous noise, or the bombardment of motion to the visual senses. Christopher Day, in Places of the Soul: Architecture and Environmental Design as a Healing Art, makes special note of the distinction between a photograph—de-contextualized, framed representation—from architecture, a living environment with long term impact on emotional and psychological wellbeing. This is a clue tuning us to how urban environments impact the individual.
At the intersection of consumer expectations and the urban environment we are often told to face reality. We are often told to accept less than ideal aural, visual and emotionally impactful environments, environments that impact mental states and our wellbeing. Is this necessarily so? Granted, at the speed we tend to build and live, we often find in hindsight things we can’t just make go away. Overhead power lines outside the window of a local $199k condo, which otherwise looks very inviting, could have enormous consequences on one’s mental state. Given the significance of windows, views and view sheds, looking out onto power lines could be very dissatisfying.
Yet, one might ignore the negative feelings and thoughts likely to recur and reinforce each time one looked out the window, or thought about the view, because they enjoyed other aspects of the condo and are paying $199k. Imagine leaving such a condo having triggered that subconscious sense of dissatisfaction on your way out the door to work. In a city that has the potential for sunny, blue sky days, how does smog and yellow haze impact your perceptions and background thoughts on the way into the office?
The idea for this blog came from a conversation with landscape architect Stephen Storheim of Design Workshop in Salt Lake City, Utah. He recently mentioned the desire to have an urban landscape he could move through at lunchtime, from the office to a restaurant and back, that didn’t require negotiating auto traffic. This parallels a line of thought I have considered since 2005 originally titled Performance Stress Management, but that might better be generalized to performance cognitive management.
“Stress” carries lots of baggage, though fatigue and cognitive shutdown are stress related events. A better way of conceiving this is perhaps managing states of work and restorative consciousness that provide optimum results for creating, analyzing, rudimentary task work, wise judgment, decision-making and the like. What kinds of environments—or micro-environments—best suit the focus and concentration, or the recuperation and counterbalancing of such mental states?
Peruse the rich visual images of an architecture or landscape architecture magazine. How do you imagine yourself in these environments, and how do they make you feel? Often these images are without the connective tissue of busy streets, cacophonous noise, or the bombardment of motion to the visual senses. Christopher Day, in Places of the Soul: Architecture and Environmental Design as a Healing Art, makes special note of the distinction between a photograph—de-contextualized, framed representation—from architecture, a living environment with long term impact on emotional and psychological wellbeing. This is a clue tuning us to how urban environments impact the individual.
At the intersection of consumer expectations and the urban environment we are often told to face reality. We are often told to accept less than ideal aural, visual and emotionally impactful environments, environments that impact mental states and our wellbeing. Is this necessarily so? Granted, at the speed we tend to build and live, we often find in hindsight things we can’t just make go away. Overhead power lines outside the window of a local $199k condo, which otherwise looks very inviting, could have enormous consequences on one’s mental state. Given the significance of windows, views and view sheds, looking out onto power lines could be very dissatisfying.
Yet, one might ignore the negative feelings and thoughts likely to recur and reinforce each time one looked out the window, or thought about the view, because they enjoyed other aspects of the condo and are paying $199k. Imagine leaving such a condo having triggered that subconscious sense of dissatisfaction on your way out the door to work. In a city that has the potential for sunny, blue sky days, how does smog and yellow haze impact your perceptions and background thoughts on the way into the office?
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
What is stress and calm in the Urban Environment?
Stress and calm in any environment—home, car, work, play, city, suburb, country—is on one hand based on individual perceptions and immediate experience. We can’t just write off stress as a perceptual: “I think I’m stressing; I think I’ll relax”. Once discomfort, looking, listening, and thinking accrue, stress hormones and neurochemistry take over. Once triggering occurs, even an environmental shift can take 20 minutes or more to dissipate the effects.
On the other hand, some situations commonly induce a degree of stress or calm for many of us. Bumper to bumper traffic, a sudden computer crash, and crowding are likely examples. We might pass the time relaxing, or utilize a resilient side of our personality, but many of us will eventually react with thoughts and feelings that lead to stress. Conversely, natural settings—beaches with waves, sunsets on patios and porches, satisfying parks like Sugarhouse and Liberty in Salt Lake City—can put us at ease, stress tolerant to issues that may later arise.
Urban planners, architects and landscape architects benefit from tuning into their own dynamics of stress and calm, a tool allowing insight as to what may or may not work. Diversity courses and experiences inform on cultural, ethnic, and geographical differences. Schmidt et al. suggests a predominantly white culture is more likely to be concerned with psychological aspects of stress in reacting to crowding—predictability, control, and behavioral freedom—while Blacks and Hispanics from Riverside and San Bernardino, Cal. were more attentive to physical aspects of an environment when reacting with stressful behaviors and perceptions. Sensitivity to diverse cultures and “congenial environments” probably seems basic to the urban planning and creation field, but gaining specific insight, whether through peer reviewed research or commissioned participatory action research is critical. We have entered an era where smart urban planning must be concerned with congenial density.
In Communicating Nature, Julia Corbett discusses the impact of early experiences with natural environments in conceptualizing and relating to nature as adults. Numerous studies have focused on Nature Deficit Disorder, as well as nature’s impact on the average individual in terms of natural calming properties. Flower beds and occasional saplings that garnish the downtown exteriors as conceived through the 80’s didn’t cut it. Recognition of the positive impacts of nature in built environments seems to parallel the fashionable arrival of atriums. Beautiful as opposed to token and neglected atriums substantially affect utility and experience.
A 2006 Urban Land article discussed recent California police station innovations, emphasizing plazas, green building, windows, an inviting design, and especially a departure from previous generations of police stations designed and located specifically to intimidate. Though background stress is difficult to assess and quantify, the majority of suburbanites knew instinctively when they fled to the suburbs in the ‘60’s, and downtown areas of major cities were hunkering down in the face of race riots and civil unrest, that some sources of background stress would be unmanageable. Race riots and civil unrest are themselves upshots of unmanageable stressors of inequity and substandard living.
Consider the 1939 Sears Art Deco department store in my hometown Houston, Texas. In the mid 60’s, Sears armed itself with an ‘intimidating’ exoskeleton, masking its beautiful urban design with boxiness and windowlessness. What are your thoughts?
On the other hand, some situations commonly induce a degree of stress or calm for many of us. Bumper to bumper traffic, a sudden computer crash, and crowding are likely examples. We might pass the time relaxing, or utilize a resilient side of our personality, but many of us will eventually react with thoughts and feelings that lead to stress. Conversely, natural settings—beaches with waves, sunsets on patios and porches, satisfying parks like Sugarhouse and Liberty in Salt Lake City—can put us at ease, stress tolerant to issues that may later arise.
Urban planners, architects and landscape architects benefit from tuning into their own dynamics of stress and calm, a tool allowing insight as to what may or may not work. Diversity courses and experiences inform on cultural, ethnic, and geographical differences. Schmidt et al. suggests a predominantly white culture is more likely to be concerned with psychological aspects of stress in reacting to crowding—predictability, control, and behavioral freedom—while Blacks and Hispanics from Riverside and San Bernardino, Cal. were more attentive to physical aspects of an environment when reacting with stressful behaviors and perceptions. Sensitivity to diverse cultures and “congenial environments” probably seems basic to the urban planning and creation field, but gaining specific insight, whether through peer reviewed research or commissioned participatory action research is critical. We have entered an era where smart urban planning must be concerned with congenial density.
In Communicating Nature, Julia Corbett discusses the impact of early experiences with natural environments in conceptualizing and relating to nature as adults. Numerous studies have focused on Nature Deficit Disorder, as well as nature’s impact on the average individual in terms of natural calming properties. Flower beds and occasional saplings that garnish the downtown exteriors as conceived through the 80’s didn’t cut it. Recognition of the positive impacts of nature in built environments seems to parallel the fashionable arrival of atriums. Beautiful as opposed to token and neglected atriums substantially affect utility and experience.
A 2006 Urban Land article discussed recent California police station innovations, emphasizing plazas, green building, windows, an inviting design, and especially a departure from previous generations of police stations designed and located specifically to intimidate. Though background stress is difficult to assess and quantify, the majority of suburbanites knew instinctively when they fled to the suburbs in the ‘60’s, and downtown areas of major cities were hunkering down in the face of race riots and civil unrest, that some sources of background stress would be unmanageable. Race riots and civil unrest are themselves upshots of unmanageable stressors of inequity and substandard living.
Consider the 1939 Sears Art Deco department store in my hometown Houston, Texas. In the mid 60’s, Sears armed itself with an ‘intimidating’ exoskeleton, masking its beautiful urban design with boxiness and windowlessness. What are your thoughts?
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