On cities, mapping, psychogeography and the experience of places.

mappiness is a research project created by George MacKerron and Susana Mourato of the Department of Geography & Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), designed to gain a better understanding of how people’s feelings are affected by features of their current environment—things like air pollution, noise, and green spaces.

To that end, a free iPhone app has been developed, regularly pinging its users to ask them how they’re feeling, as well as a few other things: who they are with, where they are, what they are doing. The anonymous data gets sent back to a server, along with the user’s approximate location from the iPhone’s GPS, and a noise-level measure.

The project being in its early stages, the map displayed on the website doesn’t really give an acurate picture of the spread of happiness in the country – a huge proportion of respondants being in situated in London! – though interestingly the real-time hedonimeter shows that London people are slightly happier than the rest of the UK. I’m pretty sure this could easily be challenged, but I’ll leave that to the academic paper that will come out of the survey…

http://www.mappiness.org.uk/

Implicitly, we think about the years of our lives in a linear fashion, e.g. in terms of decades: our twenties, thirties, etc. In this linear view, all our years are equal and time moves at a uniform pace.
This simple picture, however, doesn’t quite fit with our perceptions as we age: Where are the long, leisurely summers we knew as children? If it seemed forever to get through the fifth grade, what happened to last year?

The ‘logtime’ hypothesis is that we use our age to estimate the passage of time, resulting in a perceived shrinking of our years as we grow older, and giving a subjective scale of life very different from that of the calendar: In this view, the older we become, the faster we seem to age or, conversely, the shorter the years seem to be. Mathematically, this relationship is said to be either logarithmic or exponential, depending on which variable is used as the reference.

Starting with the premise that the human mind judges the length of a long period of time by comparing it with current age, the logarithmic nature subjective human temporal experiences can be easily rationalized: Hence a year adds 10% to the life of a ten-year-old, but only 5% to that of a twenty-year-old. For the twenty-year-old, two years are required to add 10%.
A consequence of the logarithmic function is that it is the ratio of the years defining an interval of time that we use to judge the duration of that interval, not the absolute magnitudes of those years. For example, the years from ages 10 to 20 seem to pass at the same rate as the years from 20 to 40, or 40 to 80 – they are all of equal subjective duration.

A logarithmic scale: stretched out at the low end and compressed at the high end.

However, the changing nature of our lives when we are young tends to obscure the shrinking years: the twenty-year-old rarely thinks about how life was at age 10; life at 20 is filled with different activities and concerns, and it is the future that dominates reverie.
It is only after life becomes more settled and routine that we become more retrospective, and only then do we have an easier basis for comparing the years.
This sense of elapsed time, narrowly dependent on memory, is also heavily reliant on psychological factors: Intervals of time may be judged differently in retrospect than while being experienced; they may seem longer if you feel you have accomplished much or had a memorable experience.
In great part at least, the foreshortening of the years as we grow older is due to the monotony of memory’s content and the consequent simplification of the backward-glancing view. In youth, new experiences are pretty common and regular, apprehension is vivid, and our recollections of that time, like those of a time spent in rapid and interesting travel, are of something intricate, multitudinous, and long-drawn-out. But as each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine which we hardly note at all, the days and the weeks smooth themselves out in recollection to contentless units, and the years grow hollow and collapse.

William James (1890): The Principles of Psychology. New York: Henry Holt.

Link to the original article on Logtime by James Main Kenney

“Old traps vanish, new ones take their place; the old safe places become impassable, and the route can either be plain and easy, or impossibly confusing.”

Andreï Tarkovski, Stalker

As illustrated by Tarkovski’s Zone, the conception of place seems to be constantly evolving, ever-adapting to the circumstances of one-self.
Bergson sees place as “space in which the process of remembrance continues to activate the past as something which is lived and acted, rather than represented”.
Indeed, the notion of place couldn’t exist without memory – or perhaps even outside memory: when we leave a place, we take with us our own constructed and fantasised version of it: for instance, “home is absolutely an imagined or fictiously remembered place that people want to exist, but it exists almost entirely in memory” (Simon Schama). The tension between memory and present experience is epitomized by the feeling of Nostalgia (from the Greek word nostos meaning returning home, and algos meaning pain), which was once recognised as a clinical condition known to have once rendered Russian soldiers incapable of fighting.

In his street-walking itinerancies, Bojan Sarcevic has seeked to highlight the relationships going on between different forms of experience of a place, from tourist to inhabitant: from alienation, to strangeness, to familiarity. The remote and exotic place offers something ‘other’ to those who go there; but the tourists are themselves also ‘other’ to the city’s inhabitant…
On tourism, the sociologist John Urry wrote: “Like the pilgrim the tourist moves from a familiar place to a far place and then returns to the familiar place. At the far place both the pilgrim and the tourist engage in ‘worship’ of shrines, which are sacred, albeit in different ways, and as a result gain some kind of uplifting experience.”
For Erik Cohen, “Pilgrimage is defined by a movement from the ‘profane periphery’ to the ‘sacred centre’”.

Place (Tacita Dean & Jeremy Millar) is released in the Artworks collection, Thames & Hudson.

This post is another snippet from Memory, where Hunter describes the experience of déjà vu as an episode of illusory recognition involving two features which seem incompatible with each other: a present event is recognised as having been witnessed before, yet there is a certainty that this is impossible.
In this form of self-contradictory recognising, we believe that what we say, do or see has been done before in the same circumstances, and we feel that we know what will happen next, as if we remember something that hasn’t happened yet. The present moment is saturated with recollective familiarity as we experience an intense feeling that everything around us has happened in the same way before, and seems out of hand. The sensation of déjà vu, if not the result of a severe brain dysfunction, is usually short and infrequent, merely causing mild puzzlement over unaccountable familiarity.
The opposite situation is alienation, in which intimately known situations and persons are experienced as being strange and unfamiliar.

Déjà vu may be experienced when we are visiting some town for the first time: despite having never been there, the streets look strangely familiar, the scene we are witnessing is somehow not unexpected. A rational explanation could be that this place shares similar environmental characteristics with another place we remember.

In his classic book Memory, first published in 1957 by Penguin Books, Ian M. L. Hunter made some interesting attempts at characterising the processes at work in memory and remembering. He defined and analysed them in those terms:

recalling: reproducing in the present some event from the past. While a person is recalling, they are essentially engaged in selectively constructing the salient characteristics of the original event. This highlights the constructive and selective nature of learning as an active process of registration, in which coordinating relationships are elaborated between old and new. These relationships play a role in subsequent recall.

recognizing: identifying some present event as being familiar from the past.

We sometimes become aware of our attempts at characterising and constructing a framework for remembering past events, using devices like associations of sounds, rhythm, or the context of encounter. By constructing a historical context for the event, we can also localise it in our personal past.

Recollecting constitutes a particularly rich form of recalling, when the warm intimacy of past personal experience is suddenly brought to the surface of the present – see Proust’s madeleine and the idea of involontary memory.

Imaging: experiencing sensory qualities in the absence of appropriate sensory stimulation. Much of our remembering takes the form of imaging, i.e. re-living past complex experiences in vivid sensory terms. We recall the past by reconstructing its sensory characteristics, thus giving us the illusion of going back in time.

The cumulative effects of past experience

The Bartlett experiments¹ have highlighted the gradual and ongoing process of filtering / transformation / degradation occuring with memorised events. The retained effects of past experience form an organised system, progressively elaborated into inter-related systems and sub-systems, where events are selected / re-ordered according to their mutual relevance, which in turn informs the way present circumstances are perceived. A person’s memory is a permanently self-modifying system, their cumulative past constantly enriched and updated by the present.

¹ Frederic Bartlett was a british psychologist famous for his experiments related to the formation of memory. He conducted a series of studies where subjects were told a story, then asked to recall it after various intervals of time.

Lately, my work has taken me to a college in Reading where I teach 16-18 years old kids; Weirdly perhaps, I haven’t been round so much juvenile display for the past 10 years. Being there was like jumping back in time, suddenly putting me back face to face with what I must have been like at that age. Yet because of the progressive evolution of my circle of acquaintances (and my aging!), I didn’t realise how I came to look retrospectively at the places I lived in with a strong connection to a particular age band – London being the most “grown-up” environment, dispossessed of any immaturity, as if pranksters had ceased to exist just because I became oblivious to them.

Coincidentally, Reading was also the set for a comedy series of 6 episodes running last autumn on BBC2, starring two teenagers as they are grappling with the hopes and dreams of moving to London in order to fulfil their lifelong ambition of becoming respected hair-dressers and being around the ‘Beautiful People’. The series amusingly managed to capture the essence of the nineties pretty well – thanks to a heavy load of girl-bands-era soundtrack [CD sold separately]. Besides, the acting was pretty good, especially from one of the characters who struck me by the physical resemblance he bore with me, and the similarities of his views on life.

The journey to London they undertake towards the end of the series is a lot more than a mere 30-min train ride: it tells of the irresistible attraction of the big city, the very embodiment of ambition, freedom, stardom: everything one craved as a teenager. It clearly represents the symbolic transition from one age to another, from one status to another. Only to realize that after all, the life of the Beautiful People isn’t as desirable as one might have imagined.

Beautiful People on bbc.co.uk

An article published in the Guardian Weekend last Saturday (18.10.08) looked at the peculiar and often overlooked psychology at work inside our homes:

After having relished open-plan living for years, the author admitted freaking out because of the absence of doors in the loft she just moved into – a reaction that seemed natural when put to an anthropologist’s vision of primitive human needs of seclusion and sociability, which doors (and walls!) are central to fulfilling.

Because housing design is taken for granted, Peter Carolin, a former professor of architecture, argues that “we’ve subsequently lost our sensitivity and awareness of psychological issues. This is because our houses and flats have become more commodities than homes – ‘buy to let’ has furthered this trend. We’ve lost the ability to be shelter makers.” We’ve lost sight of the basic functions of a house, which is to provide safety, shelter and privacy. Fire, used for warmth and cooking, is also a strong symbol of sociability.

Johnny Grey is at the forefront of new research into the relation between human psychological needs and how they’re met in housing. “Anything that’s in peripheral vision demands more brain action. Sharp edges or corners might cause anxiety, however subliminal, because we think of them as things to avoid.” Likewise, he discovered that things that are happening behind us increase adrenaline levels; “That’s why tables in restaurants where you can sit with your back to the wall fill up first”.

In his book A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander argues that low window sills (30 to 50 cm, so that you could sit at the window) aren’t a luxury but a necessity, because they allow us to look out and still see the ground. A room deprived from window space seldom allows you to feel fully comfortable or at ease, keeping you in perpetual unresolved conflict and tension. In contrast, long views out of the window means that we know where we are and therefore feel more comfortable.

Windows of the mind [article from The Guardian]

À la fois entrée dans la ville et porte ouverte au voyage, la gare est un lieu chargé d’affects aussi bien collectifs que personnels :

La gare est d’abord le symbole physique et allégorique de la terminaison du chemin de fer dans la ville. Mais les gares matérialisent aussi les noeuds et carrefours de notre existence, nos histoires fragmentaires et stratifiées :

« Peu de bâtiments sont assez vastes pour y retenir la résonance du temps. Dans la gare comme nulle part ailleurs, des hommes convergent pour un moment, débutant ou achevant d’innombrables voyages, prétextes a des retrouvailles ou des adieux, et l’on peut y retrouver, en un seul instant, un tableau entier de la destinée humaine. »

Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again, 1934.

La gare a une importance symbolique caractéristique dont la psychanalyse rend compte : elle est au commencement de nos entreprises matérielles, physiques et spirituelles ¹. Elle est le point d’arrivée ou de départ de l’aventure, vécue ou mythique ; C’est un lieu de passage par excellence, et lieu du passage : Seuil physique et initiatique du voyage, c’est le lieu du « franchissement » dans la Recherche proustienne.

La gare et son architecture sont puissamment investies par toute la symbolique du voyage, avec ses perspectives d’aventures, d’évasion ou de mise à l’épreuve tour à tour promises par les noms de destinations inconnues ou chargées de sens. « Derrière ses arcades, derrière ces places, s’étendent ces horizons lointains et lourds d’aventures » (De Chirico, Hebdomeros).

Baudelaire était ainsi saisi par le charme de ce monde suburbain ; Sa Poésie des départs et des arrivées – la chorégraphie des trains en gare, son climat de fébrilité, l’affichage des tableaux, la magie blanche des noms de villes qui sont attendues, rêvées – tout cela lui permettait de voyager sans bouger. La gare pourvoit au dépaysement, au changement de perspective, attribuant des significations nouvelles – la dialectique de l’ici et de l’ailleurs, du dehors et du dedans. Elle relie l’éphémère relatif du voyage à une impression durable.

William Powell Frith, The Railway Station, 1862.

¹ Jean Chevalier in Jean Dethier, Le Temps des Gares, Centre de Création Industrielle, 1978. p.11