From Greenery to Vitality

New ways of thinking about biophilia

The vitality of a rugby practice

A couple of weeks ago, I described some of my thoughts about the state of research and popular conceptions of some aspects of biophilia – our purported innate attraction to nature. If you don’t want to go back to read that earlier entry, here’s the two-sentence summary: the spanner in the argument that we are attracted to nature because it is “good for us” is that if this is truly some kind of innate, evolutionarily acquired thing then it begs an important question. Before there were such things as human, built, artificial environments, what else was there other than nature? What were we being lured away from? That’s a pretty simplistic account of what turns out to be a complicated set of arguments, but that’s the gist of it.

I promised to lead you down another garden path later on, so here we go. Let’s evolve the story a bit more. About three years ago (I think it was…I’m still on pandemic time so for all I know it could have been some time in the 18th century) I started to shift the way that I talked about my own work on nature by using the word vitality. There were a few different reasons for that but I’ll tell you the first inspiration for this shift: it came to me when I attended an early morning sports practice with my son. I think it was for his rugby team. Except perhaps for the South Pole, there’s nothing more frigid than a mid-November Canadian sports field in the barrens of a small-town suburb. Even fortified with a small cauldron of hot coffee, I was shivering. But as I looked around at the swarm of teenagers, both players and their fans (honestly…people who didn’t have to be there came anyway!) I was swept up by a wonderful feeling of excitement, movement, and effervescence. It was life! And it made me feel good! I actually wanted to be there! It was clear that this had nothing to do with “nature exposure” as we science boffins like to call it. The only nature in evidence was the brown, stomped-down remnants of grass in the field. Something else was clearly at play.

Like the pointy-ended rugby ball, my mind took a few unpredictable bounces from one thing to another, and those things happened to be the architectural theorist Christopher Alexander and the urbanist Jane Jacobs. Let me explain.

Christopher Alexander and our attraction to life

Christopher Alexander worked for most of his career as a professor of architecture at Berkeley, where he produced a series of notable books including the widely cited A Pattern Language and the multi-volume opus The Nature of Order. There are a few common threads in all of this work, one of the most important being his idea that we have a well-tuned ability to recognize life. That seems like an odd statement, but one of his methods of illustration was to show people pairs of images and to ask them to indicate which of the two images “has more life.” It’s actually quite a lot of fun to do this, so I’ve given you a couple of images from my own collections to practice below. You should notice that this is pretty easy to do. It’s reflexive. Without even thinking about the whys and wherefores, an immediate response springs to mind.

Which of the two images below has more life?

Alexander’s argument is too long and important to do justice to here, but the quick version is just that he believes that there is something precious and attractive about life: we know it when we see it and when we see it we want it. Whatever it might be.

Though we’ve never met, I’ve had an on-again off-again relationship with Alexander’s ideas for a very long time now. I first encountered them during my first collaboration with an architect – a wonderful man named Thomas Seebohm who was taken from us too soon but who set me on an interesting path. I’ve occasionally talked about Alexander during my lectures. I sometimes tell my students about him. Some of them find him for themselves. What occurred to me was that his argument about life, and what I’ve come to call vitality might be a way out of the nature exposure conundrum. What if whatever it was that Alexander was talking about was a kind of common root from which both our attraction to nature but also our attraction to other kinds of things (screaming teenagers on sports fields, happy buzzes in cafes, lively streetscapes in Stockholm) arose?

I’d certainly not be honest if I were to claim that I was the only person who had thought about this. I think there’s currently a small resurgence of interest in Alexander and in some quarters he seems to have achieved cult status. Rightly or wrongly, those who shun modernism in favour of traditional designs, for example seem to have flocked to him.* For me, the main thing is that I can see at least a fuzzy line that connects Alexander’s arguments with my beefs about biophilia.

Jane Jacobs and Vital Little Plans

Jane Jacobs was a noted urbanist who wrote a dazzling book called The Life and Death of American Cities for which she is well-remembered. But she was much more than this. She was a public intellectual in the truest and best sense of the phrase. She wasn’t afraid to wade in and to take a stand, even it pitted her against the prevailing currents of thought. Jacobs was also an activist who promoted human-centred urban planning (that’s such an understatement but there we have it) and perhaps most famously stood up to Robert Moses, a public official in New York City who was very fond of big highways, especially highways that blazed through beautiful, organic New York streetscapes, it seems.** But all of this you can get from Wikipedia. The clang association for me (or the rugby ball bounce if you like) came from a conversation that I had had with a friend of mine named Nathan Storring, who also happened to edit a volume of Jacobs’ shorter essays and talks. He drew my attention to one particular speech that Jacobs had given to a planning conference in Hamburg, Germany, where she advocated for what she called “vital little plans.” The underlying idea (and honestly I’m not sure where Jacobs ends and Storring begins) is that there is something precious about an urban streetscape, built from bottom up, involving the democratic application of many small hands rather than the giant catcher’s mitt of a Moses-style planner. It’s almost as if we can sense the democracy, the dynamism, perhaps the human agency*** that exudes from the design. And like the other examples I’ve mentioned, we like it. So perhaps one part of vitality, which has nothing to do with potted plants, has to do with what we can see underneath. How we understand where things, like chaotic jungle-scapes or mesmerizing urban marketplaces, have come from.

Jacobs’ argument perhaps helps us along a little in understanding the big root hiding underneath our love of pictures of forests and flowers. The lines are still a bit fuzzy. I have to wave my arms like mad to convince you still perhaps. But we are inching a little closer to a set of ideas that might help to account for a good number of those experimental findings that suggest we feel good and operate well when we are surrounded by nature/life.****

We still have a way to go from here to get to the bottom of things. More arm-waving will be required next time when I take you from here into the world of rats, beetles, aesthetics, complexity and a few other things besides. I hope you come back.

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Self-indulgent footnotes

*I remember an early talk I gave to a room full of architects about my work. At the pre-production meeting for the forum, I mentioned that I was going to relate my work to Alexander’s theory and the moderator urgently suggested I not because “nobody believes in those ideas anymore.” Names withheld to protect the innocent and the guilty. Things have now changed a little.

**Though I never met Jacobs, there’s a weird personal connection. I grew up in the suburbs of Toronto, in an area called Scarborough (though we often referred to it as “Scarberia”). Jacobs spent her later years living in Toronto and one of her missions while she lived there was to militate against a proposed highway that, like the one she defeated in NYC, would tear through my neighborhood. Indeed, the plan went so far as to cause houses on my street to be expropriated. My parents were given some dough for our house and we were forced to move. But thanks in part to Jacobs’ arguments, the expressway was never built and that old house is still there.

***I’ll have more to say about agency later. Come back for it! It’s important!

****I’ve actually got some of these ideas down in print and if you want to read something a bit starchier and more formal, go here. This paper came out of a conference I attended with a delightful group of students and academics at the University of Indonesia, back in the before times when it was easier to go to far-flung places. The back-story to this paper is that I had somehow not fully understood that when I arrived at the conference I was to have brought a manuscript with me that could be published in the journal on urban behaviour that they had spearheaded. When the organizers asked me to produce the paper and I confessed that it “wasn’t finished” (aka “wasn’t started”) they let me know that was ok but that they needed it before I left Indonesia. Thank goodness I had extended my stay by a couple of days to look around Jakarta. Thank goodness also for the jetlag that helped me work all through the nights. Also for the rooftop infinity pool at my hotel that provided inspiring vistas. And a bar that served beer. Quite a lot of beer.