All these new measures encouraging pedestrian life, of course, will work only if they are supported by mixed use. People will walk only if there are places to walk to. Though current bylaws might preclude such mixed uses in many areas, the day will come when the rising cost of automobile travel will make mixed use in suburbs, incorporating businesses, market gardens, community halls, and other public spaces, seem like a much more attractive proposition. When the suburbs contain favorable destinations, they can be connected to one another through interesting, challenging, but intelligible networks of pathways.
ENGAGING ALL THE SENSES
An entirely different approach to discouraging our tendency to chop up space into a sequence of discrete views is to enlist the participation of our other senses. Japanese gardens are arranged in such a way as to take command of all the senses rather than just recruiting our gaze. Though there may be many beautiful sights in such a garden, what possesses us is the way in which our visual experiences cohere with sounds (of running or falling water, for instance) and with the sensations produced by our own movements as we follow meandering paths through the garden. Our eyes follow our feet, our ears, and even our hands as we are compelled to imagine the tactile properties of the smooth stones whose careful placement in the scene enhances its overall polysensory effect. It might be unreasonable to propose that entire city blocks could be designed to replicate the sensory absorption produced by a small Japanese garden, but some of the same principles could be used.
Architects who are designing concert halls are naturally intensely interested in the aural environment of the interior of the hall, but other kinds of buildings and even streetscapes possess distinctive auditory properties. Consider the difference between entering a cozy, carpeted space in an intimate den and walking through the cavernous lobby of a large bank building. Even with your eyes closed, you would notice a stark difference in the auditory properties of the spaces and the manner in which the spaces either absorbed or reflected the sounds that you produced as you moved through them.
There are some interesting parallels between the ways that our own movements shape the aural environment that surrounds us and the mechanisms that are used by strongly path-integrating animals like ants. In both cases, space is being marked out by our own actions in a way that isn’t true for vision. For one thing, many of the sounds that reach us, especially as we move about in buildings, are reflections of self-produced sounds such as footsteps. As Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter describe it in their book on aural architecture, Spaces Speak, Are You Listening? a critical difference between the sights and sounds of architecture is that we don’t usually make our own light, but we do make our own sounds.14
In natural settings, we experience a closer link between the senses than is true for most built settings. As we walk through a forest, the sounds of our own footsteps meld with other sounds such as those produced by birds and insects, the sounds of wind in trees and other plants, and the sounds of moving water. In nature, there are fewer surprising transient sounds equivalent to the urban honking of a horn or the assault of jackhammer on pavement. Instead, an integral natural logic to the sensory landscape encourages us to distribute our attention more widely over space so that we become much more sensitive to subtle events.
I spent a portion of the writing time for this book living in a very small fishing village on the east coast of Canada, and I fell into the habit of taking long daily walks along deserted stretches of road, trail, or beach. Like so many others before me, I discovered that these walks exerted a powerful positive influence on my patterns of thought both while en route and for many hours afterward. In the beginning, I thought that much of this therapeutic effect had a simple physiological cause—the movement simply helped to pump more freshly oxygenated blood to my brain. But I came to realize that an important component of these walks was the manner in which sensory experiences coming to my eyes, ears, skin, and nose were perfectly in accord with the rhythms of nature. The lapping waves, the crunch of stones or dry leaves underfoot, and the smell of salt and pine combined to produce an ineffable sense of place that became so strong that, like an Aborigine wandering the outback, I began to associate particular ideas with locations. From time to time, I would even revisit locations now resonant with my thoughts in order to clarify a concept or hash out a difficult ambiguity. The key element of these personal songlines, I came to realize, was that the perfect fit between what I could see, hear, feel, and smell made me recognize more profoundly than perhaps at any other time in my life that not only was I in a real place but my presence, movements, and the content of my mind helped to define that place. My thoughts and sensations strapped me to the earth as securely as a scurrying ant carries a homing beacon for its nest.
My own experience was an extremely lucky and unusual one. Few of us have the chance to sequester ourselves away from the busy chaos of life for several hours every day to be alone with our thoughts and with nature. But is there anything that can be learned from such experiences, and adapted to the pace of modern urban life, to encourage us to reconnect with the multisensory dimensions of real space and time? Inside buildings, it is certainly possible to do a great deal to sculpt the aural environment, by varying the texture and shape of walls, changing the ceiling height, and perhaps even adding water features. Though it has not been attempted as far as I am aware, it should also be possible to generate aural experiences that are specifically geared to the movements of pedestrians. This might be a particularly effective strategy to use in long passageways, such as the subterranean connections between office buildings in urban centers.
Given a city’s large open spaces, public access, and complex mix of uses, deliberate attempts to construct soundscapes there are bound to be much more complicated than such efforts inside buildings. Some very creative approaches to this challenge have been adopted by cutting-edge artists interested in urban soundscapes. Andrea Polli’s NYSoundmap was an installation at the 2006 Conflux Festival, a meeting devoted to psychogeography held every year in Brooklyn.15 The installation included a clickable webmap that could be used to navigate the aural environment of the streets of Brooklyn. In addition, Polli provided instructions to those interested in heightening their attention to urban sounds while they were walking. At the same meeting, Sawako Kato, a sound sculptor who straddles venues in Tokyo and New York, unveiled a work entitled 2.4Ghz Scape, in which sound-processing technology was used to convert ambient signals from Wi-Fi sources into a soundscape that accompanied a walker through any location where such signals could be detected. As Wi-Fi can now be found in almost any urban center (I must still say “almost” as, when I recently asked a server at a Florida bar whether Wi-Fi was available, she consulted the bartender, who looked for the appropriate bottle on the shelves behind him), the possibilities for taking advantage of these signals to produce soundscapes that might accompany a walker wearing a portable listening device are at least interesting.
In a variant of this idea, Mark Sheppard, a professor of architecture at SUNY Buffalo, has developed the Tactical Sound Garden. Users are able to plant or prune individualized sound signatures in particular locations in the city that are defined by complicated combinations of public Wi-Fi signals. Freely available software can then be installed on a cell phone or pocket computer so that a user, wandering through the city, is able to listen to the garden as they walk the space. Interestingly, Sheppard uses an explicit community gardening metaphor to describe the project, likening the shared manipulation of sounds to the nurturing of a garden.
Though devices such as these might be adopted only by the technological cognoscenti at first, it would be entirely possible to adapt a wide variety of devices ranging from smart phones, Black-Berrys, or even MP3 players to provide place-specific aural content to accompany urban pedestrians. Electronic sound gardens are a far cry from the sensory experience of a country walk, but it would not be impossible for such technological devices to become an acceptable way of generating multi
sensory urban experiences that could help fix us to a place. Further, if these sound gardens could be specifically geared to reflect an important feature of our natural environment, they might play some role in helping us to feel our connections to even larger spaces.
Andrea Polli’s project Airlight Taipei may be a step in this direction. This installation provides a repeating audible signal that reports the measurements of air pollutants by a local monitoring station. One could imagine more complex auditory signatures to signal relationships between local activities and their effects in the larger environment.
Educating children to make better connections with space, redesigning parks to make them functional parts of the urban core, and tapping into Wi-Fi networks to let walkers hear sounds that correspond to their own movements through city streets might seem like paltry suggestions in the face of a world that many experts tell us is at risk of drying out and catching fire within as few as two generations. My suggestions for redesigning cities, suburbs, and parks might risk comparison with a call to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic. There would be some merit to this criticism if I were suggesting that adopting the measures I have described in this chapter could reverse our current trend toward increasing destruction of our natural heritage. I am not so foolish as to think that my suggestions will be of any benefit unless many other, more dramatic measures are put in place. If we are to save ourselves and the plants and animals that we live among, we will need to rapidly develop alternative sources of energy. We will need to massively invest in carbon-sequestration technologies that capture the carbon produced by certain types of industries (oil sands extraction, for instance) and return it to the ground, and we will need a fast rollout of many other types of technology to halt and then reverse the trend that is beginning to boil our waters and scorch the earth. These measures will take time to put in place, and there is not a moment to be wasted.
But as much as I am aware of the urgency of our plight, it also strikes me that we have known for decades about many of the problems that are now acute. One might argue that only a simpleton could think we could get away with pouring poisons into the air and water of a finite system forever without eventual catastrophe, yet this is how we have behaved. What is even more striking is that we have long understood clearly where much of the excess greenhouse gases are coming from (I remember learning about this as a student in elementary school), and it is within our means to begin to halt the process. Inflated or nonsensical geographic footprints, unflinching appetites for vast quantities of cheap manufactured goods, and a feeling of entitlement to any goods from any location on the planet provided we can scratch up the cash to pay for them all contribute to our environmental crisis. Large coal plants in the United States belch out pollution because people demand and expect uninterrupted services and ice-cold air-conditioned environments in huge houses filled with all manner of power-guzzling appliances on days hot enough to cause the grass to literally catch fire. We burn enormous quantities of gasoline in a daily commute from jobs in the city to houses on the outer fringes of the suburbs, where we convince ourselves that we are in contact with nature, and then we spend our weekends using machines run by inefficient gas motors to shape, chop, grind, pulp, and blow away any parts of real nature that have the audacity to invade our high-fenced outdoor great rooms.
These are not technological problems but psychological ones. The real reason that our planet is dying is not the coal plant in Ohio, the auto manufacturer in Detroit, or the mammoth Asian factories spewing poisoned water into rivers. These are merely the symptoms. The late Stephen Jay Gould, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University and a masterful popularizer of the history, lore, and wonder of nature and life, argued famously that “we will not fight to save what we do not love.”16 To this argument, whose deep truth I cannot doubt, I would only add that we will not love what we cannot see, hear, touch, taste, and smell. The measures I have described in this chapter are not meant as a cure-all but merely as starting points on the road that must be traveled if we are to find ways to remember that the spaces of our perceptions and thoughts must connect with the spaces of our bodies and the fields, forests, streams, and oceans that lie beside them.
CHAPTER 12
THE FUTURE OF SPACE
Our children will pay for our joyride.
ROBERT KENNEDY JR.
We have much in common with every animal from the single-celled amoeba to the bear lumbering confidently through the boreal forest. All animals that move must be able to find the things they need and avoid those that can harm them. At the very foundation, this means possessing the hardware to systematically reduce or increase our distance from identifiable targets, ranging from the box of cereal on the supermarket shelf to the fanged predator lurking in the bushes. Though some clever tricks might be required to coordinate different parts of our body (eyes, feet, hands) with the things that we see, such target-orienting tasks hardly require sophisticated mental maps of space.
When we need to find our way to invisible or remote targets using more complex routes, more sophisticated means of wayfinding must come into play. Like most other animals, we have found ways to use landmarks both to mark positions and to point the way ahead. Just as wasps and birds may use visible features of the terrain to mark a nest or a cache of food, we can learn to use both obvious urban landmarks like the Statue of Liberty or, with training, more subtle features of the natural environment such as a particular species of tree or even a notable formation of rocks to send us on our way. Many early human cultures much more attuned to the land than we are learned to embed such subtle features into long narratives that helped them to locate themselves but also helped to make the emotional and spiritual attachments to place that seem to be lacking in our modern way of life.
Some of nature’s most sophisticated navigators are capable of constructing accurate maps out of brain tissue, letting precisely organized connections between neurons stand in place of the grid lines on the paper maps that are more familiar to human beings. Though people also make maps with minds, they are most often composed of a slippery, rubbery substance where distance and angle mean little but connections between one thing and another count for much. This type of map, more flexible and less constrained than the metric map offered for sale at a gas station, can change in size and shape according to need, purpose, and even mood. Such maps, though they might not lead a bee to nectar, can serve us well by making it easy for us to remember simple, well-traveled routes and to communicate these routes to other people. But in the face of the least uncertainty, unfamiliarity, or unexpected change of course, such maps can leave us quickly and irredeemably lost. Not only this, but such topological maps, based largely on collections of quick glimpses, snapshots, and vistas, can generate idiosyncratic views of how larger spaces fit together. These strange views, in turn, can have strong influences on how we think about and behave in our homes, the places we work
, our cities, and our greenspaces.
Now, in the twenty-first century, we have been successful in using our ingenuity, along with vast amounts of energy, to essentially eradicate real physical space from much of our lives. Most residents of modern cities live in climatically controlled environments, carefully shielded from the outside world in every sense, but particularly in the visual one. When we are outside of our dwellings, our views and vistas consist of the square corners of the carpenter and flat ribbons of road and sidewalk. The most salient connections that we make between one place and another are often forged by electronic switching stations and fiber-optic cables. Though this may not always be an aesthetically pleasing way to get through a day, modern life has its advantages. Acting as though geography does not exist allows many of us to eat and drink whatever we want, do pretty much whatever we feel like, and talk to anyone who is within reach of a telephone, a cellular network, or a computer. More than at any time in our past, human interactions are unfettered by the laws of physics. As I have tried to argue in this book, the makeup of our brainware has not been responsible for our current state, but a brain that allows us to weld together collages of space from one long series of snapshots after another has helped to lay the groundwork for such a transformation. What reaches a kind of apotheosis in the highest accomplishments of virtual reality technology is also apparent in much more humble contexts. We human beings don’t just live in space—we make it. By letting go of Ariadne’s thread, we may lose our grip on the planet’s surface in a way that would be anathema to an ant, a bee, or even a desert scout in a preliterate human society, but we can gain immeasurable riches when we take mental flight, looking back down on geography of our own devising. What happens next?