ARCHITECTURE, HAPPINESS AND COMMUNITY

Recently I went to a talk entitled ‘Architecture and Happiness’ at LSE; I have to say I became quite excited at the prospect considering it plays so strongly into my interests expressed on this blog. The event did not, however, quite live up to my expectations; yet in that disappointment I reflected on what I thought of the statements asserted and below are some ideas on the topic that were playing around in my head.

The first speaker, a head of an urban think tank for London, bizarrely talked at great length about his rural summer house before making some last-minute sweeping statements regarding the topic: ‘architects are well-advised not to take happiness into account… it should not be an objective’. A little damning, perhaps, but it was explained somewhat by the conclusion both speakers reached that happiness cannot come if you aim too vigorously for it. To me this seems like… how can I put it? A cop out.

We can’t NOT take psychology into account when making a building or developing an area of the urban fabric just because happiness is an elusive philosophical concept. There have been countless examples of research into how environments – interior or exterior – affect our mood and have the potential to improve wellbeing and contentedness; in fact an entire field is quite clearly dedicated to it: environmental psychology. How far the architecture profession connects with such ideas is difficult to gauge. Although no one wants to veer too strongly towards environmental determinism, there should always be conceptions of how the plan and design are experienced in an emotional way: aesthetics, light, space, function – these all have clear impacts on an enjoyment of a space and clearly filter through to more general emotional wellbeing.

The second speaker, a conservative philosopher, widened the discussion by stating that if we are to aspire to happiness, it must be an ‘architecture of community’. This is an admirable vision, tapping into the current buzz of Big Society and community-oriented planning (neither of which, of course, should be undermined in theory). If we think of an ‘architecture of community’ in practice, it leads us to the idea of design encouraging interaction, which is certainly something to be aimed at, but also – as was the speaker’s angle – architectural configurations built for defined communities. This has indeed been attempted, in utopian communes throughout recent centuries in particular. It has also failed. Building a place so intent on integrating and serving a specific community can in the end just encourage separatism: communities parcelled off unto themselves, so focused on intra-mixing that inter-mixing is forgotten. Of course, this does not create a united and thriving city. Does an ‘architecture of community’ really exist then? Community cannot truly be willed by architecture, although there are spaces which can begin to facilitate it: communal playgrounds, town halls, unrestricted interior and exterior public realm. This is social space, however, and though architecture may sometimes contain it, it does not define it – community is encouraged by people and initiatives, not physical structures (I probably need to say here that architecture of course goes beyond ‘physical structures’, but opening this concept up would render any compact discussion of the topic impossible).

It seems clear that communities which exist, rarely do so because of architecture but because of (pre-existing) social ties. I live in a block of flats: I wouldn’t be able to recognise my neighbours in a line-up. Our communal hall space is empty, with desperately welcoming seats and a sofa hardly sat on. Before, I lived on a lovely non-thoroughfare street of terraced houses – and didn’t know a soul. But I speak only from my very particular situation. It could be that certain buildings encourage people to stop and talk and get to know their neighbours, thus encouraging a sense of community and in this discussion resultant happiness. It could be that creating defined architectural commune-like clusters does the same. It could also be that different people are variably inclined to interact or not interact or feel happy in particular places. So, an architecture of community is difficult if not impossible to prescribe. And though the interaction and friendship inherent in community may aid happiness, I wouldn't say that happiness should not be taken into account by architects purely because an architecture of community cannot be simply built. We need to think on a smaller scale, understand the human need for space, light, safety; architecture can provide and enhance this. For example, one could argue that the ‘space standards’ promoted by CABE are really a demonstration of aspiring to happiness through architecture.

From attempting – and faltering – to define an ‘architecture of happiness’, the speakers then turned to approaching the architecture of unhappiness to make things slightly clearer. It was agreed that architecture in defiance of surrounding urban values would constitute this. While the term ‘urban values’ could be taken to mean an overwhelming array of things, I do agree that to feel connected and integrated is vital, and facilitates what could be called a happy environment. Buildings and developments that do not respond sensitively to their locality (and I am not making a style argument here) are bound to unsettle and upset.

In a more difficult realm of thought, it has often been proclaimed that beauty enhances happiness. There are architectural problems with this: I think the Trellick Tower is beautiful, but that does not mean I would necessarily be happy living in it. While I certainly feel calmer and happier in what I identify as a beautiful space or surrounded by beautiful buildings, this concept is clearly too subjective to use and one that I cannot even begin to explore. Perceived beauty in the built environment results from coordination with perceived beauty in the eye of the architect. Let’s not now get into so-called objective notions of pleasing symmetry/irregularity/novelty/proportion.

So, is the conclusion that you should be the architect of your own happiness? I think now more than ever we realise success lies in collaboration. Happiness is of course deeply personal and tied up with numerous uncontrollable factors – but it is also often facilitated by environmental experience. Speaking in terms of architecture and urbanism, it is high design quality – through, for example, sufficient space and natural light, and the facilitation of functional and social integration – that is potentially a key factor to achieving human satisfaction. But I’m not trying to define happiness; nor am I endorsing environmental determinism. I don’t believe there is an ‘architecture of happiness’. But I also don’t believe that the two concepts should be separately treated.

memory space.

It is genuinely mind-boggling and entirely unsettling when you happen upon an empty site in the city and start wondering where you might be until it dawns on you that this is the space once occupied by a building that contained your rawest experience. I'm sure this sounds unnecessarily hyperbolic and indulgent but - and I divulge to make my point - I speak of the Middlesex Hospital on Mortimer Street, where I spent weeks at the age of 18, numb in a waiting room, waiting for my brother to die, or for a miracle to happen. Incredibly luckily it was the latter, but those harshly lit spaces, corridors, lifts, wards, windowpanes, the chapel; these were the built containers of his sickness, our sickness, suspended and ended time, numb tears.

This massive, red brick, monumental and endless building became my reluctant home. The spaces are etched in to my life; they stick to me like glue. Of course I never wanted to return there, but having it all removed without my knowledge, I feel as if reality and history have vanished - did it really happen if the place it occurred in no longer exists? I stumbled upon the new, empty, alien space and slowly realising where I was and what had been removed completely destabilised me. Its absence renders both the place and memory dream-like. It also feels as if the very ground has eaten up the walls and all their stories, consuming the bad and good until invisible. And now what? Another luxury block of flats I suppose?

I have always felt that spaces have characters, but in some kind of earthly impossibility, it is as if a space ceases to be - a black hole removes the very fabric of reality, just to replace it with a new space, for a new time.

But this is the city, and this is what happens. Always shifting, renewing, for better or worse.

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22 July: Today, by chance, I opened a John Berger book I've had for 2 years, unread. I came across the following.

"To this human ambiguity of the visible one then has to add the visual experience of absence, whereby we no longer see what we saw. We face a disappearance. And a struggle ensues to prevent what has disappeared, what has become invisible, falling into the negation of the unseen, defying our existence."

Far more eloquent than me, John.

SF: a small musing.

San Francisco is a city where I found myself using the word 'vibe'. I feel deeply embarrassed by this confession; it was out of character.

It may be because in many respects, the city was so alien to London living, particularly the way in which everything (allow me to generalise wildly) feels much more relaxed, as if the pace of life has slowed, the sharp edges of it softened by perpetual sunshine and the dominant stress of timetables and careers washed aside by more leisurely priorities.

This is not, of course, to suggest that San Francisco is not a centre of business and employment; but there exists a marked divide between its financial centre, echoing the advanced metropolitan form (albeit skewed by dramatic topography) of Chicago and New York, and the rest of the city, characterised by low-rise, iconically-beautiful wooden houses, unaltered hand-painted shop signs and ubiquitous technicolour murals. Art, like beauty, is welcomed in this city like few others.

So, it's California living: your peers drink beer and make music in the park, socialise every evening, have a resilient and optimistic demeanour and smoke a hell of a lot of drugs. Street life exists in a way it struggles to in British climes; the popularity of inventive street food initiatives are proof of this if nothing else.

The visual lack of creative destruction (as seen in original unaltered signage and the absence of postmodern/neomodern characterless 'regeneration' schemes), the liberal approach to street activity and decoration, and the striving for (albeit at times homogenous) architectural beauty gives rise to this air of relaxation, contentedness and ultimate liveability that so many cities could do well to emulate.

I'm not sure if I could really live in San Francisco, though. It is pleasant, yes, but it is a world of its own where the middle class revel in beer and zine-making (or home improvements and dog-walking) and the others are forgotten, avoided or (perhaps undeliberately) fetishised. Neverthless, there is something very seductive and powerful about its beauty. Walking through its streets gives me pleasure that is in all honesty intermittent on those of London.

SOFT CITIES

“The city as we imagine it, the soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture” (Jonathan Raban, Soft City, 1974).


It is clear Raban is affected deeply by the ideas of Situationism in his meditations on the city. The Situationist International, a group founded in 1957 and led by Guy Debord, argued for an urban realm ruled by the imaginative; they wanted to counter the increasing rationalisation and meaningless capitalist spectacle of city life. Their tools to chart and promote the emotive urban existence were the dérive (or ‘drift’) and psychogeography. Through both, they attempted to discover and articulate how the city and its districts affect us emotionally and the personal geographies we create for ourselves out of them. 

Focusing on these personal imaginative geographies, psychogeography set out to create maps that better represented the way we see cities. These described and promoted certain dérives, in which members of the group would explore the city by means of free association and chance, giving rise to unexpected meetings and meanings in the landscape. Their wanderings traversed what David Pinder (2005) calls the ‘emotional contours’ of the city. Debord’s best-known psychogeographical maps, Guide Psychogeographique de Paris and The Naked City (1956-7) were made through cutting up parts of traditional maps and reorganising them subjectively to describe journeys and selective significances of parts of the city.


This is a physical representation of an activity in which we all partake: cognitive mapping. How we see the city and its organisation is defined by the routes we take through it, the memories we associate with certain places and the myths we identify with unexplored areas; realities wholly unrepresented by traditional maps. Henri Lefebvre (1991) differentiates representational space, bound up with the symbolism of social life and lived experience, from representations of space, which are tied to production and order. We can never perceive the world in completely accurate terms – whether figures or maps. So if our cities are experienced through our mental comprehension and experience, so they will always be malleable to our distortion, subjectivities and associations. In this way, cognitive mapping is a way of coping with the immense amount of information the city offers us.

‘It is precisely because the city is too large and formless to be held in the mind as an imaginative whole that we make recourse to irrational short-cut and simplifications’ (Raban)

By any account, cities are overwhelming organisms to comprehend, let alone live in. In reaction to this bombardment with information and options, we choose elements of the city to create an identity and a reality of our own imagining. One theorist attuned to this overwhelming nature of the metropolis was Georg Simmel. His ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ (1903) talks of the ‘intensification of emotional life due to the swift and continuous shift of external and internal stimuli’. Simmel states, however, that this has lead to a supersaturation in which city inhabitants can no longer respond to the plethora of stimuli, and consequently adopt a blasé, unemotional, rational attitude. It is clear, however – and only natural – that emotional engagement has not been dissolved in the city; as has been discussed, it is merely limited and defined to personal imaginations of identity. While we may admittedly emotionally invest less in the proliferation of events and strangers around us, this only serves to intensify our own individual experiences and associations; our own mental life.

Robert Park, leading member of the Chicago School, once said that the city is ‘a state of mind’. In the city especially – rather than the countryside – everything is concentrated, overwhelming, giving rise to a variety of thoughts and feelings. We focus on personal geographies and particular mythologies in order to make sense of it, while spaces and activities proliferate that make us feel anxious or hopeful.

What the Situationists aimed to do was reclaim the city in terms of imagination and emotion. While emotional realities and imaginative interpretations have not subsided, we could also realise their political potential in combatting increasingly regulated systems of metropolitan existence. Leonie Sandercock (2007) argues for a new kind of planning approach that embraces the imaginative realities of urban life: ‘we need to be more attuned to the city of spirit, the city of memory, and the city of desire: these are what animate life in cities’.
When we conceive of an experienced city, we think not of facts or figures, or official maps. We remember memories, moments, myths. Places evoke particular emotions and associations: we get a ‘sense’ for them. We conceive of the city as a subjectively connected agglomeration of experiences; whether home, work, favourite places or poignant reminders of love lost and found. Our maps are mental; as Raban articulates, ‘one man’s city is the sum of all the routes he takes through it, a spoor as unique as a fingerprint.’ 

Urban statistics chart the actions we carry out in a city. But these actions speak of lived experiences; experiences grounded in subjective perspectives and emotions. Statistics and monographs do describe a reality; one that is a scientific tool for analysis and understanding. Our reality may be framed by this – i.e. wealth, location, schooling – but we do not naturally analyze these formal classifications; rather we deal with the hopes, anxieties or myths they play into, produce, supply or embody in a constantly shifting, personal mode of imaginative experience.

Both cities and their inhabitants change every day; the production of meaning and reality is never complete. We must go on what we know, and that is a life shaped by feeling and memory. As with the example of mental and psychogeographical maps, we chart our own city: the one that makes the most sense to us, taking the urban structure and moulding it into a place defined by subjective experience and imagination. This, as Raban would say, is our reality: our Soft City.