You Are Here (37 page)

In recent years, as awareness of environmental issues has been brought to the forefront of academic curricula, schools have made some remarkable strides in teaching ecology. Many innovative programs have included outdoor classrooms where traditional pedagogic methods have been banished in favor of hands-on lessons that encourage children to think of the functional connectedness of natural ecological systems. Such programs are of tremendous value and should be supported by all parents. In sum what I am proposing is that the next step in healing the rift between our children and the larger world is to encourage them to see past the fractured views of space offered by their own nervous systems. This can be done by giving them opportunities to learn about the spatial linkages of things in environments that are specifically designed to facilitate such experiences.

As with so many things in life, in trying to put ourselves on a healthier trajectory with respect to our connections with natural spaces, our money and time are best spent on the requirements of children. But what about the rest of us? How can we make interesting spaces a larger part of our own lives? How can we break down our sharply drawn conceptions of a radically schematized space composed of a sequence of short glimpses collected while driving on freeways or hurrying along urban thoroughfares to complete the day’s appointed tasks?

Many of the same principles that might apply to the redesign of play areas and schoolyards for children would have beneficial effects for adults as well. In cities, urban parks, instead of being
calm oases existing apart from the main course of events and segregated from pedestrian traffic, could be placed as an integral feature of the urban environment. As much as possible, parks should present interesting wayfinding alternatives for pedestrians intending to walk from one place in the city to another. New York’s Central Park, for instance, is tightly woven into the urban landscape in such a way that it not only serves as a landmark but is large enough to immerse visitors in wild areas. In addition, Central Park serves as the site of a vast number of cultural activities, ranging from theatrical performances to free rock concerts. Another successful greenspace on similar scale but with a very different design is Chicago’s waterfront Lincoln Park, which is a recreational area but also integrates well with several adjacent urban neighborhoods.

City greenspaces are not always managed so well. The National Mall in Washington, D.C., for example, is enclosed by many of the country’s most significant museums, yet it is nothing more than a vast rectangular space devoid of interesting features, natural or human made, or even much in the way of comfortable seating. This huge piece of urban greenspace holds vast potential but is currently wasted. Similar spaces, though much smaller, can be found in midsized cities throughout the world. Open rectangles with paved pathways, brick planters, and perhaps one or two trees may satisfy city plans that mandate greenspace density, but they do little or nothing to place us into contact with natural settings.

On my own walk to work in Waterloo, a typical midsized North American city, I pass through a small, dense urban core and then enter a large city park with forests, fields, winding trails, and even a small area housing a number of interesting animals, both local and exotic. The park connects the urban core to another belt of development, which contains university buildings, student housing, and some commercial areas. There are countless ways of passing through
the park to get to my workplace, many of which carry me into small groves of trees surrounding a creek. In these groves, I see otters, squirrels, chipmunks, waterfowl, and a profusion of songbirds. I am lucky to live in a city that has had the foresight to preserve slightly more than 40 hectares of greenspace close to the urban core and has, so far, resisted the wiles of developers, but many of the best features of this park could be managed in a much smaller space.

Another nearby preserved area consists of a small ravine filled with dense forests of birch and maple trees crisscrossed by trails and punctuated by a sinuous creek that serves to carry storm runoff away. I have spent many years walking and running in this ravine of less than eight hectares, and it seems as though every visit brings a new view or an unexpected connection to light. The undulating trails make my impression of my precise location just ambiguous enough to bring me to a pleasant state of surrender, curiosity, and attention. Unlike the larger park, this area makes weaker connections with the rest of the city. Many who live in Waterloo are not familiar with the small woods. Placed in a different situation with respect to the surrounding area, woven into the core of the city, such a space could not only serve as a cool respite from the busy grid of streets but could also challenge our spatial senses, remind us of the fragility of our grasp on place, and encourage us to pay closer attention to our ephemeral connections with the rest of the planet.

Even in suburban areas some fairly simple measures could effect profound changes in the ways that the landscape stimulates human awareness of space. I have already mentioned the possibility of corralling shared wild space by removing fences between overly generous back yards to produce larger, wilder spaces. As well, the generous setback of houses from the street leaves vast amounts of space with the potential for redesign. Roads could be narrowed, which would increase the amount of available space considerably
and possibly redirect traffic entirely in some areas, leaving the suburban equivalent of an urban pedestrian boulevard.

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.

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 multisensory 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.