I bought Colin Ellard’s ‘Psychogeography . Places Of The Heart’ in Cálamo, my favourite bookshop in Zaragoza. For those unfamiliar with the term, let’s clarify that psychogeography is concerned with understanding how our surroundings influence us, and its importance for the discipline of urban design increases proportionally to the need to design ever more humane and friendly cities.
Ellard’s views are backed by three decades of experience as a neuroscientist. From his Urban Realities Lab at the University of Waterloo (Canada) he has built up, over the years, a respected track record and a clear voice in the relationship between psychology and urbanism. Ellard’s voice tells us that built space – buildings, public space, our homes – is largely responsible for how we feel. In the long run, it can even affect our mental health, and consequently our physical health as well.
70 years of psychogeography
The psychogeography that Colin Ellard is now updating has its origins in the 1950s. A century which, in urban terms, can be seen in retrospect as a journey through Maslow’s famous pyramid, from the bottom to the top. In order to organise the mass exodus from the countryside to the city caused by the Industrial Revolution, the urban planners of the Modern Movement, arguably led by Le Corbusier, embraced scientific and technological progress in the pursuit of a city that was healthy, safe and efficient in its main productive functions.
Ralph Rumney. Psychogeographic map of Venice
The space thus created was entirely to the liking of both the market – whose industries were efficiently fed by suburbs of endless housing machines – and politics, which had nothing to fear from a working class too busy becoming middle class to think of revolution. But the relative political and social calm with which the West navigated the post-war years was soon to be shattered. In the United States and Europe, groups of angry – and bored – young artists and intellectuals emerged, not resigned to the metro-boulot-dododo life that awaited them after university.
One of these groups, the Situationists, led by the Frenchman Guy Debord, theorised about the need to invent a ‘unitary urbanism’ that would bring together all the arts with the sole aim of building an urban environment designed for pleasure and enjoyment. To achieve this, one of the first steps was to carry out psychogeographical studies of our cities, which would allow us to understand our mental and sentimental relationship with them. Paradoxically, the first psychogeographical study to be published in the journal of the Situationist International was left blank because its author, the young British Ralph Rumney (co-founder of the Psychogeographical Society of London), failed to submit his work on time. An incident for which he was summarily expelled from the movement.
Psychogeography in shopping centres
Although Colin Ellard does not refer to the first situationist ‘psychogeographers’, his book picks up where the situationists left off, highlighting the fact that the places par excellence where the influence of the environment on our impulses has developed the most are shopping centres. Places designed down to the smallest detail to unleash our impulse to buy and thus absorb the maximum of our surplus wealth.
The most modern shopping centres contain replicas of natural environments, connecting us with our most distant desires. It has been proven that sitting by a pond with plants after a busy day relaxes us and allows us to focus on the immediate task of shopping.
Photo from El Confidencial
The part of our brain called the hippocampus contains the opiate receptors that produce pleasure in response to certain visual stimuli. These receptors respond to a specific range of frequencies in images that evoke natural landscapes.
The sentimental domestic space
The emotions aroused by a low-frequency landscape, such as the curves in the image of rolling hills in the famous Windows wallpaper, are different from those we feel when surrounded by sharp peaks with dangerous edges (high frequencies). Great architects such as Frank Gehry or Zaha Hadid have explored the use of curves in their iconic buildings, with the familiar emotional effect on tourists, visitors and politicians.
Gehry’s building at Elciego (Spain)
However, the construction difficulties associated with curved contours make their use in the housing market prohibitive. These difficulties can be overcome by using innovative construction techniques such as 3D printing.
3D printed house by ICON
Other characteristics of the domestic psychogeography that Colin Ellard teaches us are our desire to inhabit places that remind us of our childhood – a period of life generally associated with happiness and innocence – or the curious phenomenon of forgetting what we leave behind that we experience when we cross the threshold of a door, or the security that comes from inhabiting an accessible and defensible space, as Oscar Newmann convincingly proposed.
At home in the city
The design of commercial public space has incorporated these atavistic tastes for the economic benefit of the shops themselves. It is common, as in London’s Soho, to enter shopping areas through doors that lead us to a place adorned with the signs of collective identity left behind by emigration.
London Soho
As in our homes, where we can change the furniture to suit our tastes, the possibility of reconfiguring public space by its inhabitants is another quality that improves our perception of it. In this sense, and in view of the rampant privatisation of public space today, we draw attention to the characteristics of open source applied to urban space, a concept that urgently needs to be rescued. One of the degrees of freedom of open source is precisely the possibility for citizens to hack the space in order to appropriate it and use it for the common good.
Although there are housing projects that extend the freedom of spatial reconfiguration beyond decoration and furniture, such as the design of apartments with movable walls that Google proposed for the failed Smart City project in Toronto’s Quayside, or the MIT prototype ‘Cityhome’ that automatically reconfigures the home according to the psychological state of its inhabitants, it is in the digital public space that these powers of reconfiguration can be most easily exercised through the possibilities opened up by technology.
Psychogeography and Digital Reality
Technology has come to the rescue of psychogeography, as the early Situationists anticipated. Colin Ellard’s book provides many examples of how virtual reality, sensors or the Internet of Things (IoT) can be used effectively and economically to create digital environments that are connected to our psyche through increasingly ‘natural’ and less invasive interfaces.
Digital Water Pavillion (DWP) by Carlo Ratti
These new possibilities are not only enabling advances in psychogeographic studies in laboratories with increasingly accessible and sophisticated equipment, but have also been progressively transferred to public space, bringing both their opportunities and threats – in terms of risks to our privacy and the latent threat of control – to the city.
Again, it is in shopping centres that all these digital psychogeographic techniques are one step ahead. As Ellard points out, the novelty now lies in the extraordinary precision and speed with which shopping centres respond to and condition our emotions, hacking into the way we feel and think and using this advanced knowledge of our evolutionary traits to increase our consumption.
Colin Ellard’s Psychogeographical Urbanism
Shopping centres know that we like to be surrounded by just the right amount of people, that we like variety, that we slow down when walking through interesting aisles and speed up when walking past monotonous facades. They know that curved contours make us feel at ease, and that sharp edges make our hypothalamus go on alert and produce harmful cortisol.
Superkilen Park (Copenhagen)
So the most advanced and humane urbanism, says Ellard, should take this psychogeographic perspective into account, to recognise that the most cohesive neighbourhoods are also those where people have fewer mental health problems; that there are gender differences in the way we use the city – different patterns that need to be recognised and integrated into urban design; and finally, that these new psychogeographic techniques of analysis and experimentation – including digital technology – need to be integrated into urban design and planning practice.
Glories Park (Barcelona)
Colin Ellard concludes his book by pointing out the two main ways in which technology becomes permeable in urban space. The first, such as virtual reality, connects our brains to an alien digital environment created by the machine, disconnecting our bodies and limbs. The second, represented by smartphones and ambient technology, works the other way round, connecting our bodies to an alien brain that suggests, recommends and guides us through our daily lives, outsourcing to the algorithm the reasoning and decisions we used to make for ourselves.
It is this last way of connecting us to technology that is perhaps the most disturbing, as we barely notice the ceding of capacities while maintaining a fictional sense of control. Ellard does not go further, leaving it to others to explore the consequences and possible responses from the political sphere to this unconscious surrender of autonomy. But this reticence on the part of the author does not detract from the effectiveness of the message, since his techno-scientific point of view works for an eminently technical audience such as the readership of this work.
Where women look at night. Chaney et al., 2023 “Gender-Based Heat Map Images of Campus Walking Settings: A Reflection of Lived Experience”
Urban professionals who read Colin Ellard’s ‘Psychogeography (…)’ will find deeply rooted neuroscientific explanations for many of the challenges facing the profession. It is only by understanding how our psyches function in relation to built space that architecture, urban planning and design can have a truly positive impact on the lives of citizens.
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