{"id":1575,"date":"2012-07-26T20:15:01","date_gmt":"2012-07-27T02:15:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/?p=1575"},"modified":"2014-07-04T09:41:46","modified_gmt":"2014-07-04T15:41:46","slug":"evolutionary-psychology-and-the-intercultural-city","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/?p=1575","title":{"rendered":"Evolutionary Psychology and the Intercultural City"},"content":{"rendered":"

Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better<\/em>.<\/strong> \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0–Albert Einstein<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

As noted in a previous post<\/a>, discussion at the recent Venice Seminar on Intercultural Place-Making prompted me several times to think about how studies of the evolved human mind, as well as studies of urban forms that existed in the epochs before written history, can be guides for improving city-building today.\u00a0 I\u2019ll look at evolutionary psychology<\/a> here and urban archaeology<\/a> in a future post.<\/p>\n

Evolutionary studies of nature might not help us to understand everything better, but they might help us identify some \u201ccommon denominators\u201d of human taste that could benefit intercultural city-building. \u00a0That is, allow us to better design and construct places conducive to producing the “new forms of social and spatial belonging”\u00a0that Venice Seminar participants seemed to agree is central to the intercultural cities project.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Most anthropologists (as well as a majority of humanists and social scientists) tend to dismiss the sciences of human nature, in particular sociobiology<\/a> and its arguably more nuanced descendant, evolutionary psychology. \u00a0Critiques<\/a> of these fields of inquiry abound.\u00a0 I personally believe that anyone who accepts that Homo sapiens<\/em>\u00a0is an evolved species should take the sciences of human nature\u2014and human evolutionary psychology\u2014seriously.\u00a0\u00a0 (The vast majority of professional anthropologists and scientists at least take the concept of evolution seriously; nearly half of American citizens, however, don\u2019t<\/a>). \u00a0Steven Pinker<\/a> is especially good at framing the possibilities and potential pay-offs of an evolutionary view, especially in his wonderful book The Blank Slate<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0 There he notes\u2014ever so briefly\u2014the sometimes disastrous consequences of modernism<\/a>\u2019s failure to consider human nature in its approach to architecture<\/a>\u00a0and urban planning. For Pinker:<\/p>\n

\u2026Authoritarian High Modernism [is] the conceit that planners could redesign society from the top down using ‘scientific’ principles. The architect Le Corbusier<\/a>, for example, argued that urban planners should not be fettered by traditions and tastes, since they only perpetuated the overcrowded chaos of the cities of his day\u2026He planned his cities around freeways, large buildings, and vast open plazas with no squares or crossroads\u2026Homes were \u201cmachines for living,\u201d free of archaic inefficiencies like gardens and ornamentation, and thus were efficiently packed together in large, rectangular housing projects\u2026Le Corbusier was frustrated in his aspiration to flatten Paris, Buenos Aires, and Rio de Janeiro and rebuild them according to his scientific principles. But in the 1950s he was given carte blanche to design Chandigarh<\/a>, the capital of the Punjab, and one of his disciples was given a clean tablecloth for Bras\u00edlia<\/a>, the capital of Brazil. Today, both cities are notorious as uninviting wastelands detested by the civil servants who live in them. Authoritarian High Modernism also led to the ‘urban renewal’ projects in many American cities during the 1960s that replaced vibrant neighborhoods with freeways, high-rises, and empty windswept plazas.<\/em>” (pages 170-171).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For Pinker the modernist project reflects a minimalist conception of human nature.\u00a0 It’s a project that omits human aesthetic and social needs. It fails to consider that these needs might be better satisfied by providing human-scaled and appropriately-ornamented buildings, and intimate public spaces where people can hang out in small groups of friends and family.\u00a0 \u00a0Nikos Salingaros<\/a> has called Pinker\u2019s insights to the attention of a wider audience. \u00a0Salingaros writes<\/a>:<\/p>\n

[Pinker\u2019s argument] accuses architects, urbanists, and legislators for acting contrary to the biological nature of human beings. As such, it helps to solidify the arguments of anti-modernist critics such as Jane Jacobs, Christopher Alexander, and L\u00e9on Krier by providing them with a biological foundation\u2026 While Pinker’s book is not about architecture and urbanism, it does open the door to what is inevitable; namely, a scientific debate of what type of architecture is more in tune with biological precedent. By focusing on how the human mind reacts to form and environment, the investigation turns away from the imitation of nature, and complements those studies in an important fashion.<\/em>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Charles Siegel<\/a> has picked up this ball and run with it. He argues that, of all the competing urbanisms<\/a> around today, New Urbanism<\/a>\u00a0is the one that\u2019s most in tune with evolved human psychology. \u00a0This is because New Urbanism rests on three principles of a \u201ctimeless way of building<\/a>\u201d that best accommodate our innate predispositions. These principles include:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. use of a hierarchy of scales in breaking-up the built mass of a building, rather than endlessly repeating a form;<\/li>\n
  2. use of a consistent style of building while allowing for variation of individual structures;<\/li>\n
  3. use of symmetry in planning and design, although not to the extent that individual variations are precluded.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Siegel illustrates these principles here<\/a>.\u00a0 What he calls modernism and avant-gardism<\/a> reject these principles and that\u2019s why we find their buildings dehumanizing and even physically repellent where, for example, they induce dizziness and even nausea<\/a>. For Siegel urban design codes should be form-based<\/a>, like the one used at Seaside<\/a>, Florida.\u00a0 Such codes \u201ccreate an urban fabric with the same combination of individuality and general consistency that we find in traditional cities and towns.\u201d<\/p>\n

    \"\"<\/a>

    New Urbanist development at Seaside, Florida<\/p><\/div>\n

    \"\"<\/a>In his book The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution<\/em><\/a>, Denis Dutton<\/a> has similarly worked to identify the features of natural landscapes that are favored cross-culturally as a function of our common evolved psychology.\u00a0 Although it’s not Dutton\u2019s primary concern, these features have implications for the design of city parks, gardens, and other built urban landscapes.\u00a0 Drawing on a variety of cross-cultural studies of human artistic preferences (most notably Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid\u2019s People\u2019s Choice project<\/a>) Dutton suggests that people everywhere prefer natural landscapes comprised of features that would have been desirable for our distant ancestors who adapted to, and evolved in, the broken forest\/grassland savanna<\/a> environments of East Africa.\u00a0 (Komar and Melamid capture some of these common cross-cultural preferences in their series of \u201cMost Wanted\u201d<\/a> landscape paintings).\u00a0 It\u2019s well-known by anthropologists that all of our original hominin<\/a> ancestors depended for survival on social group life and the behavioral innovations allowed by our relatively larger and more complex primate brain. \u00a0As a consequence of having successfully adapted to this original savanna environment (that would have comprised, in part, what evolutionary psychologists call the environment of evolutionary adaptedness<\/a>), humans today prefer the following:<\/p>\n