Inspired by life in London, this is a review of ideas from the field of psychology, and what they may mean for urban spaces as the urban grows in terms of density and human concentration. The findings intend to contribute to existing practices in urban innovation, policymaking and planning.
27th March 2019
According to the United Nations (2018), more than half the world lives in urban spaces and this is rising, but what is the urban for the people that move through it? Does it smell like smoke in Mumbai, fried chicken in New York, wet grass in London or dust in Dubai? Does it taste like carbon? Rubber? Kerosene? Mould? Does it sound like Mandarin tourist chatter outside a window in Amsterdam? Does it sound like an evening traffic jam in San Fransisco? Does it sound like silence on the metro in Tokyo? Brenner (2009) distinguishes the urban from the rural in terms of land-use and walkability, infrastructure that supports socioeconomic and political activity, and capital accumulation to facilitate infrastructure development. Yet the urban is also sensory and experiential, it has negative associations and positive ones. It is builds upon perceptions and memories.
In considering plans for urban development and innovation, psychology offers a means to inform decision-making that is sensitive to behaviours and attitudes of the humans that inhabit these urban spaces. This piece aims to draw-out some key takeaways from the field of psychology, for the larger framework of urban thinking. These include the role of cognitions and emotions in areas like communities and belonging, stress and well being, gender, climate change and trust within city spaces. It is directed at policy and practice in urban innovation.
Let us start with a need that transcends cultures and societies, the need the individual need to belong to a collective. Maslow argued that it is inherent, only secondary to primal needs like hunger and safety. It is assumed that it is the need to belong that underlies the need for cooperation amongst individuals. In turn this feeds into shared needs like reproduction, safety and resource-use. Others do not distinguish between the need to belong in such a typological manner. Instead, they assume that people generally need to perceive stability and continuation in their interactions, however old relationships may be replaced with new, long-term ones.
The need to belong can be seen in the context of Freud’s conception of the filial bond, which can only be fulfilled by certain relationships that are irreplaceable. Specifically, it is seen in the context of children and their parents. It has been suggested that children form social attachments very early in life, well before developing cognition in areas like speech, and then draw on the need for shared experience and intimacy as they grow up. Regardless, a city must then be a place where adults, and particularly children, engage in positive, deep, frequent contact with others. People need to feel belonging.
Often, the need to belong manifests itself through expressions of attachment and intimacy. While expressions of belongingness may be articulated through various ways in different cultures, the overall need to belong seems to take primacy over individualistic needs like those of self-actualisation.
At times, preferential treatment of in-group members may place community needs higher than self-actualising needs, but it does not dismiss the possibility that the need to belong is essentially a self-motivated need. Particularly, seen in the context of violence, closely knit group needs (e.g. family units) will take precedence over wider community cohesion (e.g. neighbourhoods) when a threat is perceived. This opens up the floor to other areas of psychology that may influence cooperative relationships, reinforcing long term stability in relationships for self-actualised purposes, such as those pertaining to competitive advantage amongst groups via mechanisms like social contracts (e.g. local government bids).
While this blurs the lines between individualistic behaviours and community-oriented ones, the implication for urban communities is still as follows. Human beings of all cultures aspire to live within communities that take the form of groups with goals that are shared, but with limits on the number of people within groups, due to the satiation and substitution of relationships aimed at fulfilling the need to belong.
Perhaps the truest story then lies in Lefebvre’s words for the urban as a place where incredible social experiences arise from “inward-turning histories, pasts that others are not allowed to read, symbolisations encysted in the pain or the pleasure of the body.” On the topic of body, an important topic lies in the role of gender in conceptions of the self, spaces and where these two meet. While recognising that gender is a fluid concept in itself, it seems that males and females have different emotional and physical with space.
This becomes an even more relevant it becomes clear that men have historically led policy and planning in urban spaces, leaving women to derive their own psychological needs from physiological spaces. Former director of the London-based Women’s Design Service, draws on frustrating examples like the need to physically campaign for childcare rights, demanding ‘space for buggies on buses’ or ‘changing facilities in public toilets’. Other campaigns are resorting to digital spaces, like the ‘MeToo’ movement, but then we risk running into the realm of politics in the urban- rather than psychology.
Back to psychology then. To take it full circle, the perception of a shared identity amongst city-dwellers arises again. A study on Muslim women suggested that some spaces are more hospitable due to the presence of a mix of ethnicities or families who also wear headscarves. Building upon diversity in ethnic groups and religions, it appears that urban spaces may increase feelings of security and familiarity if their mix of ethnicities promotes some symbol of shared culture.
Indeed, the urban varies considerably in terms of spatial and cultural dynamics across countries. A city like Hong Kong and its ‘matchbox’ apartments imply that city-dwellers live in spaces so cramped that their toilets and kitchen are within the same space (talk about bad feng shui). In a city lit up by dazzling opportunity like Hong Kong, citizens describe feeling ‘trapped’ and ‘ashamed’, and even displaced in own their sense of self. Ironically, these spaces are so dense that neighbours are likely to know each other’s bathroom habits- wittingly or unwittingly- even if they don’t know one another by name.
This raises questions about how crowded urban spaces with fleeting interactions may essentially displace people’s sense of shared identity and belongingness within certain urban spaces. In other cities like Karachi, city dwellers gather in larger spaces to know intimate details about their neighbours. They know things like their neighbour’s grandparents names, and the spices they used in their afternoon curry; a smell that drifted through into a bedroom window and stayed for too long. It’s almost like a rural community in an urban setting.
However, there is consistency in the fact that temporal experiences in both Hong Kong and Karachi are essentially shared across urban landscapes. These shared temporal experiences raise questions about the role of shared memory and how citizens’ experiences of the urban may frame perceptions of the self. For example, the upbringing of children in the same neighbourhoods over long periods of time may impact the way citizens perceive themselves. With particular applications to urban innovation, pertinent questions arise around perceptions of the self, particularly in making inferences about similarities between the self and others.
A longitudinal study on the role of proximity to others over long periods of time was conducted through studying friends who live together. The study suggests that experiential bonds are more cohesive than those of shared race and age in most cases. This relates directly to the role of space and place in shaping identity, dispositions towards violence, and how natural and built environments may influence social identity through invoking memories and emotions.
A recurring theme in conventional urban spaces and beyond, are the role of stress and wellbeing in society. In the context of congested living, the topic overlaps with ideas of belonging, but focuses on spaces where the potential for frequent social interactions is high. Cities like Karachi, Dhaka, Mumbai, Jakarta, Hong Kong and Tokyo are prime cases for dense urban living, as we have seen.
In a comparison between two groups of children, those who grew up in poorer but denser urban areas were found to have stronger social ties than those from more affluent neighbourhoods. This may be due to frequent contact with other children in the neighbourhood, in terms of learning, playing and sharing. In essence, these findings suggest that a core need for communities is the perception of continued relationships into the future. Another perspective on communal living and a shared sense of identity is offered by migrants living in wealthy London neighbourhoods. The migrants are predominantly families, elderly people and vulnerable populations, who described feelings of ‘isolation’ and ‘well-bring’ affected by noise, pollution and limited space. The two seem strongly interlinked.
Similarly, it was found that higher tolerance and assumedly social contentment existed amongst wealthy members in villages of Wiltshire when compared to those in London boroughs. The observation of tolerance as a proxy for social contentment is not necessarily reliable as villages may have had stronger social norms that reinforce tolerance via informal social contracts (e.g. the stickiness of reputation).
A more measurable story was observed through the MRI. It goes like this: people who were brought-up in urban spaces and displayed higher responsiveness to stress than those brought-up outside cities via MRI technology applied to stressful situations. Another MRI story follows: males with an early upbringing in urban environments are at a higher risk for schizophrenia risks than others. The reliability of MRI portrayal for such and the absence of any longitudinal information about these males in their youth, makes it difficult to establish a direct causality between urban subjects and schizophrenia. Nonetheless, urban spaces contain more people, it appears that relationships are less secure and more estranged, and social stress is high, hence contributing to higher feelings of loneliness and well being in cities.
If you as an urban dweller were asked what you might conceive as an ideal future, what would you say? The Social Representation Theory already did this, in an effort to investigate how city dwellers interpret personal well being and whether aspirations of the future correspond with behaviours that might negate climate change. As the impact of climate change increasingly and disproportionately affects life in urban centres, it becomes essential to understand attitudes towards climate change.
Now onto the theory. The Social Representation Theory assumes that there is an implicit threat in the ‘unknown’ for humans. To counter the threat, humans that is anchor the ‘unknown’ in the ‘already known’ or the familiar. This enables people to make sense of uncertainties based on symbols from past and current experiences. It aims to visually and verbally depict preferred future cities, alongside a set of semi structured interviews with participants across London and Birmingham. It is based on the assumption that people are able to define and articulate what personal well being means to them coherently. The theory enables free expression via methods of association.
In these ‘ideal future cities’, it is interesting that recurring references include ‘more green spaces’ and ‘community’ living as expressions of personal well being. Similar to the idea that feelings of connectedness and well being are experienced ‘collectively’, the role of physical interaction becomes key to this sense of ‘community’. However, the word ‘climate change’ as a social cause of concern, is not directly associated with the ideal place to live. It seems fair to assume that a preference for ‘green spaces’ is somewhat linked to climate friendly urban spaces, but suggests that individual conceptions of well being take precedent over social causes, in association theories. Based on the unstated implication that people express their expectations from uncertain futures by building on emotions of the past, it seems that human behaviours are highly influenced by people’s conceptions of their own well being rather than society’s well being.
Finally, there’s the never ending worry about public trust and this moves beyond just climate change and urban dynamics. With ample information and much noise, mixed signals from policymakers and media networks are likely to diminish public confidence. For example, the ‘climate gate’ scandal suggests that values and preferences determine how people filter information. Through a process of ‘motivated reasoning’, public perceptions about the threat from global warming can be framed by reinforcement biases. Essential to climate change and applicable to multiple realms of information, individuals who are already aligned to certain anti-climate change policies are likely to be predisposed to scepticism about climate change. Such individuals will consciously or subconsciously choose to amplify risk perceptions about threats from climate change, if given the opportunity to reinforce their bias.
The role of psychology in urban innovation is quite deeply connected to areas like spatial and policy planning. In the case of loneliness and belonging, policy has gone so far as the UK government’s appointment of a Minister for Loneliness. The concept of urban innovation appears to be linked to the concept of ‘sharing’ in an interesting way. The process of giving and receiving from others has been deemed a socially fulfilling act that also increases safety. An example of sharing agricultural produce, exists in examples like One Brighton UK. In areas like the urban environment, policies can be designed to ‘nudge’ people to adopt low-carbon behaviours that enhance their individual well being while achieving social benefit.
Innovations include concepts that bridge gaps between isolated communities, resources or digital spaces through changes in governance and business in urban areas. Other examples of applied innovation based on psychological insights include understanding the spatial aspect of fear. A mobile application has been designed to report fear in different time periods of the morning and evening amongst women and LGBT communities. The application has enabled urban interventions, like moving a bus stop away from a pub because pub-goers displayed homophobic abuse towards LGBT communities.
A critical assumption in most theories is that negative feelings like loneliness and positive feelings like contentment, are measurable and reliable indicators of well being in and beyond urban spaces. Considering that the representations are often of a limited sample size who face different challenges in every day life, the correlation between stress, loneliness and urban living may often be overstated.
Across most studies in psychology, there are limitations. These pertain to problems that arise from an inability to generalise results across urban spaces. Often, this is because most groups are disproportionately represented in terms of ethnicity, and in most comparisons between urban groups, the bias of ethnocentricity is always present. For example, to validate the role of belongingness, a common limitation to all studies is the lack of long-term empirical evidence within the urban context. It is also difficult to establish the empirical link between the assumptions underlying theories and evidence that goes deeper than what individuals self-report through interviews and lab-based experiments. In essence, the phenomenon of belongingness is experienced by the individual alone.