Mumbai, traffic, agency

In 2012, I landed on a magnificent opportunity to spend some time, almost a month, in India for a project with the BMW-Guggenheim Laboratory, a traveling think-tank devoted to discussing urban issues in a project-based way, including the conduct of a few experiments on the local citizenry. I was based in Mumbai and I think that over that short period of time, my mind came to mirror the stirring, chaotic, magnificent mess of this city with a storm of ideas, assessments, re-assessments, and epiphanies about how cities, and people, worked. I think back on that experience and others that I enjoyed with “The Gug” as it was called in other world cities as a critical part of my education as I tried to transition from an old country psychologist studying weird, little laboratory-based bits of animal behavior to someone trying to figure out how to apply my methods to issues that mattered a lot to a lot of people.

It’s wonderfully nostalgic to think back on many of the experiences that I had over that month. On my very first day in the city, for example, I decided to walk from my plush hotel to an outdor laboratory set in a lush garden fronting a museum. According to the map, the distance was less than two kilometres. I set off after a hearty breakfast of dhosas, ignoring the calls from the drivers who parked outside the hotel waiting for passengers, with the intention of a quick, orienting walk through the streets. About an hour later, when I arrived at the lab, soaked in sweat, eyes crossed, adrenaline pumping, I realized my education had begun. The streets, so thick with crowds of people, colours, aromas of spices blending with the smells of freshly slaughtered chickens, the din from traffic, shouting hawkers at street-corner braziers offering up simple but heavenly snacks made of nothing more than white bread, potato, and seasonings was an utter feast for my senses. In that hour, I decided I could never leave India. Goodbye wonderful wife, goodbye children, goodbye career, goodbye devoted cats, I had been hypnotized and ensnared. Though I came to revise that latter opinion (to the great relief of my wife and my cats….possibly my children), my attachment to the city has never really waned.

In the trusty care of my local facilitator, Mahesh (1), I planned a beautiful experiment that asked local volunteer participants to take a walk with me while I quizzed them about their feelings about their surroundings and I measured their bodily state with some crafty sensors(2). One of my own greatest concerns, as Mahesh and I led groups of about ten volunteers, threading our way through incredibly complex streetscapes and congested roadways filled with honking cars, was how to keep both the volunteers and myself alive and well through mortal combat with everything from a motorbike to a coughing dump truck. As I watched Mahesh stroll boldly into the roadways, holding up his hand like King Canute commanding the seas to cease their movement, my own pulse and blood pressure went up so much I could hear my entire circulatory system complaining to my buzzing ears. Mahesh looked so damned calm! My volunteers barely broke a sweat. When I asked them about the plight of the pedestrian, they usually greeted me with nothing more than a raised eyebrow or a slight shrug of the shoulders, saying something like “it’s no big deal. You just get used to it.”

This contrast between my own experience and that of Mumbaikers became a bit of an obsession with me. I ended up designing a little experiment in which I led participants to the edge of a busy traffic circle (2), just to see what my sensors was happening in their nervous systems. I’ve written about this many times (3) so I won’t belabour all of this again, especially as it isn’t my main point today, but I will say that though local people might report that these kinds of vehicular shenanigans were “no big deal,” their nervous systems said otherwise. Indeed, and I think this is important, there’s a distinction to be made between the meaning of the different shades of meaning of the statement “you just get used to it.” It can mean that the experience was emotionally neutral and truly “no big deal.” Or it could mean that we get used to it in the same way that, for example, we might get used to a routine unpleasant medical procedure like a colonoscopy or a pap smear. My meters suggested that this latter account might be a more accurate summary of the findings.

But though I think this finding was important, and I’m still waiting for someone to fund me to go back to Mumbai to spend a few months exploring these problems, it’s a slight detour from where I want to get to with this post.

One weekend, in the company of one of my Gug compatriots, I set off to a part of the city that was notorious for traffic snarls and “interesting” pedestrian dilemmas. We both wore a set of sensors as we walked around parts of an informal settlement, some truly odd little park spaces tucked in among the flyways and intersections of the city highway system and then, ultimately, tried to cross the road at the then-notorious Kala Nagar Junction (4). We made a nice visualization of the results so that we could see what was happening to our bodies at various locations along the walk. I’ve put one of the visualizations below (5). The way to read the figure is that the route the contour takes through the map is the nature of the walk that we took and the height of the green contour shows the measured level of physiological arousal at that particular location. As you can see, things go up and then they go down again as we walk (6).

Now. I could never sell this paltry set of data points as an actual experiment (7). I would even have a fair bit of cheek to call it a case study. It might be that, but even if it is, it’s pretty flimsy. So maybe let’s call it something slightly beyond the limen that separates an actual observation from a thought experiment. If you take another close look at the visualization, you’ll notice something pretty interesting. At the bottom of the figure, running from left to right, you see our participant walking along the edge of the road. Her level of arousal is ascending. It’s possible, of course, that this is happening just because she is being exposed to quite a lot of traffic noise (8). But notice what happens when she executes a right-angled turn to face and then cross the traffic. Here, at the most difficult part of the walk, her arousal levels plunge. While she’s actually in the intersection she, like the Mumbaikers I measured at the traffic circle, does appear to be slightly more chill.

So here comes the arm-waving. What I wonder is whether the reason for the rise in arousal, as she approaches the crossing point, comes about because she is processing feverishly. She’s scoping out the roadway, the cars, her footing on the ground. She’s visualizing movements, calculating gaps, dealing with the massive complexities and uncertainties that are just ahead for her. Then she steps off the curb. But by the time that happens, she has a plan. Uncertainty begins to crater as execution begins. I hope that by now you’re getting a glimmering of how what I’m saying now about navigating roadways might connect up with the previous few posts. There, I was talking about vitality, what it is, and how it might somehow connect with autonomy—that ineffable feeling that we all know where we belong in a landscape because we are imposing our own will, our own choices, our own decisions on it. We are participating in the construction of cité against the backdrop of a ville created by others (9). We are generating friction. And the mark, in this case of that friction, what makes it visible, is the readout from a bodily-worn sensor.

So extrapolating madly from a decidedly unpleasant observation of some street-crossings to our general experience of cities, what I’ll argue is that, more generally, the reason that we see higher levels of arousal and (usually) positive feelings in complex settings in cities (or anywhere else for that matter) is that these are the palpable marks of the experience of agency. And that’s the reason it always feels so damned good (even when, as in Kala Nagar, it might also be a bit damned bad). What we want in cities or any other kind of setting is that feeling that we have some control. That if we are pushed around by things, we can push back.

I think that craving for agency is what’s really behind the apparent craving for complexity or vitality or whatever we might want to call it. And I think it’s related to something that is quintessentially human. It’s a little bit of a downer, especially in light of the world’s current sorry state, but I think it all has to do with death. I’ll try to explain next week.

Self-Indulgent Footnotes

(1) Mahesh was a most brilliant assistant who became a good friend. Outside the ambit of our work together, he led me on many merry adventures in Mumbai, not all of which I can even tell you about. Among the most memorable of them was a day long “unofficial” tour of the lesser-known areas of Mumbai. Before we visited each destination, there was a thorough briefing on how not to get caught being somewhere we shouldn’t be and what to say if we did get caught (which mostly required invoking the idiocy of a lost, pudgy white man being assisted by a savvy local). I’ve lost track of Mahesh now but I miss him very much and think of him often. If you click on the video for footnote 2, you’ll see Mahesh. He’s the handsome man in red.

(2) Here’s an old video of me explaining all of this with youthful enthusiasm. You should see what I look like now. Or maybe you shouldn’t.

(3) Here’s a slightly more formal account of our work in Mumbai.

(4) I haven’t been back to Kala Nagar since 2012 but I understand that there have been some major changes at this site. Easy to look up.

(5) It might catch your attention that there’s only one set of traces here. Full disclosure is that my own sensors were essentially flat-lined for the entire experience. We ruled out the hypothesis that I was dead and our conjecture was that the events of the night before (with Mahesh and some interesting Indian whiskey) had perhaps left me a bit dehydrated.

(6) Things go up and then they go down again. And then up. This seems like a set of results that might describe the outcome of every experiment I’ve ever been a part of.

(7) I actually tried to do this recently in a submission to a peer-reviewed journal. It didn’t end that well.

(8) I measured this all the time during my visit to Mumbai. Using cheap consumer-grade apps on my cellphone, readings were often well over 100 dB and sometimes as high as 120 dB (think of standing beside a running chainsaw with no ear protection).

(9) If you haven’t been reading along, you’ll need to go back to my previous post to understand this ville and cité business (or for a real treat, go to the source and read Richard Sennett’s recent books).

What I’m reading

It’s been a bit of hairy week for me again this week, so my serious work reading has been minimal. But I am reading a great novel.

Heather O’Neill (2022) When We Lost Our Heads. I’m only about halfway through but this book is seriously immersive. I think back to when I was a teenager. I’d get so lost in books that I’d lose track of my surroundings. I’d take my nose out of whatever I was reading and notice that the sun had set, the dog was starving, everyone in my house had disappeared and I had no idea what had happened nor how much time had elapsed. So far the book is sad, strange, captures the mentality of young girls (rather odd young girls albeit) and is filled with arresting images and metaphors that halt me in my tracks. I know that’s a lame review but, like I said, I’m not done yet.

What I’m eating

It hasn’t been a super-adventurous eating week for me but last weekend my beloved and I splashed out for some higher-level takeout food. My own choice was a cappelletti stuffed with goat cheese and accompanied by bay scallops and shrimp as big as my head, all wrapped in the most amazing rosé vodka sauce. I’m drooling even as I describe this. I ate half and had the other half the next day.