Designing Antisociality

Disney’s street may be a simulacrum, an imitation of someone’s idea of a real place, but the calming and pro-social effect it has on people is undeniable. This is not to suggest that every public space should attempt Disney’s historical trickery, but we should acknowledge that every urban landscape is a collection of memory-and-emotion-activating symbols. Every plaza, park, or architectural facade sends messages about who we are and what the street is for.

The effect of aesthetics on emotions has been documented extensively. We know, for example, that the frequent sight of garbage, graffiti, and disrepair produces alienation and depression, especially among the elderly. We know from research on biophilia that infusions of nature don’t merely calm the mind, they alter our attitudes, making us more trusting and generous toward other people.

We also know that sharp architectural angles light up the brain’s fear centers much like the sight of a knife or a thorn, releasing stress hormones that make us less likely to pause and engage with places and people. (This effect can be witnessed on the street outside Daniel Libeskind’s Crystal, an addition to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, where giant prisms of steel, aluminum, and glass slice threateningly toward the sidewalk, managing the amazing feat of emptying people from a once-busy stretch of Bloor Street.)

But the urban landscape does not need to adopt a spectacularly threatening stance to drive people away. Antisocial spaces are as common in the city as blank walls. In fact, blank walls are part of the problem.

Jan Gehl’s studies of street edges provide evidence. Gehl and others have found that if a street features uniform facades with hardly any doors, variety, or functions, people move past as quickly as possible. But if a street features varied facades, lots of openings, and a high density of functions per block, people walk more slowly. They pause more often. People are actually more likely to stop and make cell phone calls in front of lively facades than in front of dead ones.

During our experiments at the BMW Guggenheim Lab in New York City, we found that such long, dead facades do not just speed people up physically; they bring them down emotionally. On East Houston Street in Lower Manhattan, the small-lot urban fabric between Orchard and Ludlow was replaced in 2006 by a Whole Foods grocery store that presents a nearly unbroken swath of smoked glass for much of an entire city block. Volunteers who joined our psychological tours of the neighborhood reported feeling markedly less happy on the sidewalk outside this facade than almost anywhere else on their tour. They felt much better once they got to a grittier but lively stretch of shops and restaurants just a block east on Houston.

This points to an emerging disaster in street psychology. As suburban retailers begin to colonize central cities, block after block of bric-a-brac and mom-and-pop-scale buildings and shops are being replaced by blank, cold spaces that effectively bleach street edges of conviviality. It is an unnecessary act of theft, and its consequences go beyond aesthetics, or even the massive reduction in the variety of goods and services that results when one giant retailer takes over a block. The big-boxing of a city block harms the physical health of people living nearby, especially the elderly. Seniors who live among long stretches of dead frontage have actually been found to age more quickly than those who live on blocks with plenty of doors, windows, porch stoops, and destinations. Because supersize architecture and blank stretches of sidewalk push their daily destinations beyond walking distance, they get weaker and slower, they socialize less outside the home, and they volunteer less. Studies of seniors living in Montreal found that elderly people who lived on blocks that had front porches and stoops actually had stronger legs and hands than those living on more barren blocks. Meanwhile, those who could actually walk to shops and services were more likely to volunteer, visit other people, and stay active.