The city in mind: how urban psychology could radically transform city living
Cities are the most complex and important of all human inventions. Without them, much of the world we know could not exist. Why then, when over 50% of the planet lives in a city and rising, do we know so little about their emotional impacts? It is astonishing that psychology, the discipline that deals most closely with these issues, is almost absent from urban policy. Over two years, Chris Murray and Charles Landry researched the potential for psychology to help us reinvent city living. The results are published in Psychology & the City: The Hidden Dimension which can be ordered HERE.
As the Danish urbanist, Jan Gehl said ‘it is ironic that we know more about the habitat of mountain gorillas than we do about the habitat of people’. We have programmes for Smart Cities, Green Cities, Healthy Cities. Cities of culture, hi tech, low carbon, the past and the future. But where are people in all of this?
Each urban programme inches our knowledge forward, yet cities are too often seen as machines, or inanimate clumps of buildings and technology. This view misses the essential nature of what has become our primary human habitat, and we should look again.
As well as interacting with cities through work, housing, transport, we also have a constant lived emotional experience in them, which the evidence clearly shows impacts massively and directly on our development and wellbeing. Mental health figures in cities are generally worse than rural areas, and worsen the bigger a city gets. This in no sense makes cities bad – they are the solution not the problem – and is largely connected to concentrations of urban poverty. It is however an issue that we have to confront in our place making. There is plenty of evidence from psychology to help us do exactly that, but we seem oddly to ignore it.
Our success as a species is closely linked to the success of our cities…
Given the success of our species is now closely linked to that of our cities, it is critical to understand more about how we influence and are influenced by them, helping those who make and manage cities to take decisions that increase the best and reduce the worst of those effects.
‘Place identity’ and ‘place attachment’ theory from environmental psychology demonstrate how and where we live can have profound emotional and physical impacts, also influencing our sense of self, belonging, purpose and meaning in life (or lack of it). Put alongside this that fact that over the span of human evolution, very few people have lived in a city – it is not where our mental apparatus evolved – and we can begin to understand the urgent need for an urban psychology.
The ‘peace psychologists’ Herbert Kelman and John Burton showed how basic psychological needs had to be met before progress on negotiations in disputed territories could be made; its not all about land and power. They include: feeling secure; belonging; self-esteem and respect; a right to cultural identity; an ability to participate; and a sense of fairness — sometimes, a simple apology. To successfully deal with differences of views, culture, religion, a city must also provide these things.
What is clear from even a cursory review is that there is a virtually untapped, rich seam of ideas and practice in psychology that could, with relatively little effort, be brought to bear on cities providing new perspectives and workable solutions.
It is possible to transfer a number of psychological tools from place to person, and in our book, we begin to build a toolkit for ‘psychologically resilient cities’. We also wondered what would happen if a city could take a personality test, so we built one and trialled it with ten cities internationally. The results have created an entirely different way in to a discussion about place.
Why is psychology not more front and centre of urban thinking? Is it because different schools of psychology disagree on quite basic issues? That should not present a problem, but instead a palate of ideas to work from. The Danish Physicist Niels Bohr noted: “The opposite of a fact is a falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth.”
Or is it because those of us involved in developing cities do not want to reveal our emotional side, think it vague or without economic return? Perhaps. But it is more likely that psychology simply has not been brought to bear in a coherent and consistent way across a long enough period. As cities become larger, more complex and resources scarce, now feels like a good time to do that.
As well as fulfilling basic psychological needs, we might ask a more radical question of our cities. Is it possible to conceive of place-making and management as grounded in a broader understanding of human psychology, which will enable us to flourish psychologically, develop more fully, and achieve more of our potential?
Making places of purpose and potential
Patricia Greenfield used software to analyse two million books published over 100 years in the US, showing how the use of language has shifted from the communal to the individual. Interestingly, the rise in this shift correlates exactly to the rise in urban living in that nation.
A sense of entitled individualism has grown with consumer culture, which although it has benefits, can be a barrier to successful city living, focusing on the singular ‘I’ and ‘me’ not the collective ‘us’ and ‘we’ that is a defining feature of what makes us human. James Hillman the American psychologist and urbanist suggested that a collective engagement and care for the urban environment – an informed and conscious citizenship – is what will enable people to find meaning and thrive.
“How we imagine our cities, how we envision their goals and values and enhance their beauty defines the self of each person in that city, for the city is the solid exhibition of the communal soul. This means that you find yourself by entering the crowd …. to improve yourself you improve your city.”
Ultimately, the most successful cities will be those that have the best answer to these questions and can build psychological resilience, to adapt, deal with adversity and complexity, to bounce back and continue to function competently, and to provide the conditions in which its inhabitants can achieve those outcomes too. We hope our publication will spark a debate, by setting out some big ideas and challenges, as well as pragmatic steps that will help this to happen.
