A Conversation with Ann Sussman author of Cognitive Architecture and co-founder of The Human Architecture and Planning Institute, Inc. with Executive Director Abigail Sekely on how technology, eye tracking, and advertising can be applied to the built environment for the health and wellness of our communities.
In this episode, we dive into the historical, sociological, and anthropological influences on the built environment and how it has left us with a collective PTSD and the real design objective behind Disneyland is revealed as we further learn about TheHapi.org‘s state-of-the-art use of research and technology to offer design solutions so we can flourish in our communities.
Podcast: https://psychitecture.podbean.com/e/can-bad-design-harm/Rachel: Welcome to the Psychitect Is In. It’s such an honor today to be here with two really inspiring professionals that I really feel so grateful that I got to meet at the Intentional Spaces Summit at the John Hopkins University and we have here, Ann Sussman, who is the author of Cognitive Architecture, one of the most seminal books that I read when I started studying how we feel in space and how we relate in our psychology to our built environment. So Abigail is the executive director and you are the co founder of the Human Architecture and Planning Institute. Which is a non profit dedicated to understanding the human experience of the built environment and improving its design through education and research. So without further ado, I would love to introduce and just, why don’t you please tell me, how did this organization come about?
Ann: That’s a great question. I think what happened is about 10 years ago, I met Justin Hollander. He’s a professor of urban planning at Tufts University, and we did a project together about making an intersection at the entry of a suburban town in Massachusetts friendlier to people. And then we started talking.
I had run into a Harvard professor who was teaching about neuroscience. And I said to him, you know, Justin, there’s going to be a paradigm shift where suddenly we understand ourselves more like the animals we are. And he said to me, “Ann that sounds like a book,” and one thing led to another. He showed me how you send out a book proposal and we ended up writing cognitive architecture designing for how we respond to the built environment and published 1st in 2014. the 2nd edition came out in 2021 and that’s the 1st book we believe in the world to have over 30 pictures in full color of eye tracked architecture. So that’s the big idea. And then we realized there’s just so much science that’s not getting out there we should found a nonprofit. And so we become a tax exempt nonprofit in 2019. And so, yeah, we’re rolling into our 5th year here. And we have Abigail, our executive director, and she’s based in Pennsylvania.
We also have members of our board at the University of New England business school. We have interior designer on our board. We have a number of board members who are different aspects. of just understanding the human experience and design. But yeah, it’s a big paradigm shift because in a way, when I went to architecture school, I do have a master’s in architecture from UCLA. I’m a licensed architect. Nobody talked about psychology. Nobody talked about biology. Nobody talked about stress. Nobody even used the word beauty. And now we’re at a time where, wait a minute, stress matters. And you know, anywhere you’ll read this article, it says the more stressed you are, it’s going to lower your longevity. You know, all kinds of things. We’re talking about emotions more differently. And what’s so fascinating to see as well is how the business schools have jumped on this. You go to Suffolk University Business School in downtown Boston, you’re going to have a full scale eye tracking lab. Which will measure eye tracking, facial expression, galvanic skin response, that sweat gland response, heart rate, I mean, they’re measuring everything.
So you can actually say, Rachel, well, you know, my ad will make people feel good looking at it. So, the business school students are going to be knowing the state of the art tech. They’re using software by iMotions. iMotions is a company, a biometric purveyor that sells the leading tech to Honda, BMW, GM, Tesla.
Now you need to know what those companies are using. Those are the billion dollar companies. It’s really a pivot. The pivot is really understanding that we’re animals. Something that really, you know, we didn’t talk about, and now we know to really design for people. You’re designing for their animal nature and we’re more like animals than we like to think.
There’s a big pivot too in the sciences. The human genome wasn’t really sequenced until like 2005 or 2006. So now we can say every 1 of your cells, you have 86 percent of the same DNA as a zebrafish, Rachel. Go order a fish sandwich now. You know, that’s basic science. It’s basically changed even the syllabi of bio courses.
You understand the interconnectedness the way we simply didn’t even in the 1980s. It’s just a totally different world. I’ve gone on and on. Sorry.
Rachel: No, this is absolutely what I want to hear. And what I think our audience wants to hear is how much of this advancement of how science and the brain and the technology is now coming to the fourfold and kind of in the time when your book came out, as well as the organization is now, you know, we were so divorced from understanding how to design for the human physiology, the mammalian brain, so to speak, right?
Ann: We’re completely divorced from it. We didn’t think of ourselves as animals. And in a way that had gone on for a few centuries. It’s Cartesian thinking. I think, therefore, I am. We’re beyond animals, we’re above. And now 21st century designers for the tech world. 21st century designers for the car companies.
They know that they’re designing for animals. There’s a quote I’ve told Abigail before, the lead designer for the Lincoln car was told to come up with a new design idea because of covid and what did he come up with? “When you get into the new Lincoln you will feel like you’re hugged by your mother.”
Rachel: Oh my gosh. If that isn’t the power of advertising. That’s like what everyone psychologically is going for
Ann: That’s what’s so interesting. How the car designers prioritize evolutionary biases the average consumer doesn’t even know they have. To be designing for one of the most powerful companies in the United States and telling them you want to be hugged by your mother. People don’t know that. They know that. I recently was in a new car and I thought, oh my God, I feel so good. I feel so, you know, I hate cars actually. I hate driving. Suddenly I’m so cozy?
Rachel: Well, the Lincoln, I almost feel like they designed almost like for your living room. I felt like those cars were like, hi, I’m just going to have my living room couch in the car too.
Ann: Yeah, but the irony too is as this Harvard University professor, Dan Lieberman, says in a famous lecture, the male body evolved to walk 12 miles a day, the female 9. We’re not evolved to be sitting in our living room and sitting in a car. So one reason America is now 47th in longevity, the lowest longevity of any developed country in the world. Also the gap between male and female longevity is also increasing -men live now on average in America, five years and eight months less than women. So there are many reasons, 40 percent of the population is obese in the United States, 70 percent is over weight. One reason we’re not walking. And one reason we don’t walk is our cars are too comfortable.
Rachel: Right and I think this is to the point of all that you research, you write about, you speak to, you and Abigail. To understand, and this is kind of where I want to bring the audience and this is why it’s so crucial to bring you two into understanding how we feel in the built environment, how to design for these true statistics and what our bodies need. And I think it goes from as you bring it into a historical context of how we design, how we truly can understand the difference of maybe men and women, physiologically speaking, but how the priority of designing for cars in America, let’s say, versus getting out and walking. So, when we talk about cognitive architecture, environmental psychology, neuro design, I mean, you know, I’m throwing all this out here. It goes beyond, you know, just the built environment. And I think that’s what I think is so fascinating about your organization is you’re designing for understanding the public space, the community, right? And how we flourish in the community realm and how, you know, space becomes place. And so this becomes anthropological, sociological, biological, and we look at all the social sciences and the brain science and you guys are compiling this research that it is state of the art in the sense that like you’re saying it was happening in advertising, but why not in our immediate spaces that can be Supporting our health and mental health. And Abigail, this is what we were talking about. It was so enlightening is how harmful our environment can be. And it’s really now starting to alert people to how we can feel harm in our environment. So Abigail, can you talk more to that and what you’re doing at your lab or your research organization?
Abigail: Absolutely. So there’s been incredible research that we just built upon where folks have been measuring stress and different responses to the built environment. And we see that if we’re repeatedly put in office buildings that have Those harmful fluorescent lights buzzing over your head all day, you’ll consciously report that you’re having an unpleasant experience, and that’s related to a bunch of other longevity indicators, like Ann mentioned before, where you will have higher rates of migraine, which will relate to other issues in your body, like it really is all connected, like you were saying, so we’re interested in bringing in those multidisciplinary Experts to have conversations that better inform how we move forward in the built environment, but as a research lab, we really, I think have an opportunity to do that because we’re a nonprofit, we’re a research group with experts from urban planning, interior design, architecture, education, we’re kind of having these conversations within our group, but it’s great to talk to people like you who have expertise in social work and psychology and that brings in a whole new level of expertise that we wouldn’t have otherwise.
So it really is Fundamentally, we are humans trying to understand human habitat. And that happens in community, and that happens through conversation. And it’s all people. We know that our energies are related. I’m talking to you, you’re talking to me. Our neurons in our brain are mirroring one another. So you smile at me, I smile at you.
That’s all deeply understood evolutionary history and science that is not applied to the built environment. So we’re really just trying to bring as many people in to bring all of this knowledge that’s happening in small pockets all together. Does that answer?
Rachel: Yeah, absolutely. That’s so well summed up as to the disciplines you’re bringing together and to have this conversation. And Ann, were you going to say something?
Ann: I was just going to say it’s really well said, Abigail. And I think the other thing we need to know is there’s this great quote that I’m sure you might have heard me said before by Daisaku Akita, a Buddhist teacher, “A successful vision of the future is not possible without an accurate knowledge of the past,” and so we really don’t look at how modernism happened. How did the car centrism that the world had never seen before take over the United States? What happened? And when you start looking into that, you really realize war gave us our world. And we don’t realize that modernism is totally entangled with World War I and World War II.
And that we need to look at, and the highway centrism happens because of war. Eisenhower’s the general, we’re going to build things, you know, route two. And that’s when track housing and modernism, and getting rid of the trains and stuff. You know, a lot of people don’t even know that so much of their surroundings are directly because of war. So even in Boston, there’s a famous route two that goes from the suburbs into Boston. Why was it built? It was built in 1937 because in central mass, they had tanks. Devins was a military base. They couldn’t get them to Boston. So what did they build? Route two to get them to Boston. Most suburbanites don’t realize that. Are there good crosswalks over route two? No. Is it good bike lanes on route two? No, they were designed just for the military need.
Rachel: And that truly is revealing around how the built environment responded to war and how if we don’t understand our history and our past, that so much of it is, I think now what I’m learning in my neuroscience and design course is, we’re really looking back at like our evolution as people and how did people used to build before this?
Ann: But then you also understand when you study PTSD, there’s a reason Gropius would say to his students at Harvard University in 1930s, forget the past, start from zero, make modern architecture all new, right? Well, because forgetting the past is a PTSD survival response.
Abigail: The brain literally changes. The structure of your brain can literally morph.
Rachel: Oh my gosh, that’s so true.
Ann: If you want to forget the past, you forget the past. Why are we speaking English? Because of war.
Rachel: I mean, wow. That is just coming from me who works with trauma recovery and is now studying more about the brain and the built environment. This is so eye opening that I never thought about our own collective PTSD trauma response.
Ann: Exactly. And that was the big thing, you know, the the rush to forget the past and be modern. My dad’s first job in the 1950s was making plastics. It was all about that. It was rushing to new technologies, being modern, forgetting the past. You know, it’s so funny when I think of my ancestors a generation or generations ago. They made their living as seamstresses and tailors. That kind of ability Our technology is taking that away. It’s very difficult to support yourself like that. You just go to Target and buy clothes. You don’t go to a seamstress, you know, it’s a little different.
Abigail: To hop in there, like , the factory line and the manufacturing streamline all turned from people building military equipment to then pivoting to how do we sustain the American economy? How do we keep people in homes? How do we keep people employed?
So we need to look at this history deeply and with deep empathy, because all of these things are interconnected. So how do we move forward with that understanding?
Rachel: And would you say it’s in this patriarchal lens, so to speak? In how, I guess you know, I think about just how we work with color and sound and lighting and how our ancestors really, you know, used all of these elements in a way that was so intuitively healthy.
And now it’s kind of, You know, you think, oh, it’s, it’s so wild to use color. It’s like, you know, something that you see , in an inner city and, and it’s like, no, these elements were given to us back in that time. So if we don’t go through our historical intergenerational trauma, so to speak.
Ann: Oh, it’s huge. Intergenerational trauma is huge. And then the trauma in the founding of America, and the trauma carried through, they now know, you read Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score, right?
Rachel: Yes.
Ann: I met Andrew Kolk I presented at his conferences.
Rachel: Oh, I would have loved to have seen that.
Ann: He has conference every year here and they’re leading psych medical conferences on trauma. And there’s so much more they know in the 21st century. I mean, his famous book didn’t come out until 2014, but that’s kind of the pivot. Understanding trauma is real. It gets passed along in families, maybe as much as three generations. And now there’s ways of dealing with it through dance, through drama, through all kinds of therapies that just no one talked about in the 1990s, you know
Rachel: Right. That’s so interesting that you’re pulling this together because you have such a worldview historically that I don’t really, that’s not how my brain typically goes and now, you know, working as a licensed clinical social worker, I work in somatic experiencing. That is a model of trauma work that was started by Dr. Peter Levine with his book, Waking the Tiger, and it looked at how our fight or flight, dissociative, You know, even now I’m learning about even fawning, how we really adapted our bodies to trauma response. When I worked in somatic work, which is allowing the body to recover its own defensive mechanisms. That is when I started to say, well, how do we work with the environment in the sense of how we regulate? So if we’re looking at intergenerational trauma and just trauma and how we experience a car accident. Dr.
Peter Levine, he got in a car accident and his body was trying to shake it off and the paramedics were like, no, you know, holding his legs in and he was like, no, I have to shake it off like a dog. Like, as humans, we don’t shake it off. Right? You know, when the dog gets out of their bath? So, I think what’s interesting is the movements of the body and the mind now connecting again, right, with cognitive architecture, with the body keeps score…
Ann: Really the paradigm shift as I see it is maybe too simplified: is actually understanding it’s the body that’s superior than the mind. The body is superior. The non conscious experience directs your thinking. That’s why the lead designer for Lincoln says, you’ll feel hugged by your mother. Then consciously you’ll think, oh, I need to buy this car. So that’s the 21st century paradigm shift we’re talking about. That the body and the brain non consciously. So for every minute 11 million bits of information go into your brain. A bit is a unit of information. 11 million when you’re awake. 10 million are visual. 1 million is touch. 50 is conscious.
Rachel: 50 is conscious…
Ann: So that’s why the lead designer for Lincoln is designing for what? The non conscious. That’s why Apple hires PhD neuroscientists, and what do they do? They design the interior of the Apple Store. When you walk into an Apple Store around the world, what do you see? People. What do people non consciously most need to see? Not, even if they think they’re buying a computer.
They need people. Faces. And so where do you go? Oh, you’ll go up to the Genius Bar.
Abigail: But also their products are placed right there for you to grab. So there’s a sensation of that body brain connection where you touch something, you want it. I can’t remember the name of the sensation.
Ann: The endowment effect.
To survive on the Savannah we developed. So the brain you have is exactly the same as a homo sapien primate on the Savannah 40, 000 years ago. No change. And to survive on the Savannah, we would pick up a flower, we’d pick up a fruit, and we’d think it’s ours. . So, when you walk in, you see this big dining room table with eight iPhones on it. Makes no sense. Do you need a 300 pound table for eight iPhones? Yes. Because cognition is embodied when you see something on something heavy, it’s important. When you touch something non consciously for survival, you feel you own it, even if you weren’t looking to buy an iPhone.
Rachel: So when they’re designing their space and implementing the Savannah effect, I mean, I think that’s what’s so important is we really haven’t evolved in our physiology have we? .
Ann: That’s right. We are completely primitive. We are what the neuroscientists say we’re Pleistocene. The Pleistocene ended about 11, 000 years ago. We are Pleistocene. We haven’t changed. So they designed for the hunter gatherer. You walk in, you feel like you’re in almost like a community space where you can touch things. Steve Jobs designed a glass staircase. Why? Because then people will see other people Moving up the staircase. So there’s only one retail center in all of Massachusetts where I’ve walked up three flights of stairs. Where is it? The Apple Store. Why?
Rachel: I never realized that. Yes, because it’s so many people. I mean, you’re seeing everybody in the foot traffic.
Ann: And the chair, it wasn’t even really that comfortable, but everybody sees it. You’re welcomed. And they have people welcoming you as you walk in…
Rachel: And do you find it’s obviously how they even just created their algorithms for social, I mean, all of this is kind of geared towards our mammalian brain.
Ann: It’s the paradigm shift I talked to you about five minutes ago, the non conscious direction. The non conscious, that’s the shift. Conscious thinking matters, but when you’re selling something, not as much as you think. So that’s why I have my students study an Apple poster, an Apple poster will have beautiful pictures in it and maybe 12 letters because they know the more letters in an ad, the less people read it.
Rachel: Yeah. Sometimes I say, why so much copy on emails or announcements? Like no more letters.
Ann: So Apple ads they’re selling the most sophisticated technology in the world in history using just what you said, our most animal nature. Do you see this? Imagine if we designed hospitals, imagine if we designed crosswalks with the knowledge that Apple has. That’s why we formed the Human Architecture and Planning Institute. So all of this science, all this neuroscience is being used to promote consumption.
None of it is being used to promote well being, equity, healthy aging, safe walk to school. I live in Concord, Massachusetts, home of the famous writer, Thoreau. He always talked about walking so he wouldn’t be depressed. Now every parent I know is afraid to let their child walk or bike to school.
Rachel: And walking helps reduce dementia and Alzheimer’s, right?
Ann: Yeah, I just read that article. I just read that article. They now have a number to it. 25 percent less chance of dementia as you age if you walk at least 4000 steps, but we designed our elderly living communities in places where people can’t walk anywhere.
Abigail: Car centrism strikes again.
Ann: But what’s really important to know about the history, too, the car centrism really happened because of war. If you read the book by it’s called ‘Confessions of a Recovering Engineer’ by Charles Maroon. It came out in 2020. He explains something nobody ever told me: is that what happened because of 1945 and the money stopping for the car companies that were making tranks and armament, They were terrified of going back to the 29-39 depression, so they pivoted to non evidence based suburbanization, car centrism. Whereas architecture up until then was basically always evidence based. Venice was so beautiful because they kept building buildings that were beautiful. Paris was so beautiful they kept building buildings around it that were beautiful. Whereas we stopped doing that. We pivoted to car centrism, being modern, forgetting the past.
Rachel: Forgetting the past. And that’s What’s such a national trauma or an international trauma.
Ann: But also the patricity does have something to do with it because I think the male brain is not as empathetic as the female brain and has more trouble dealing with weakness or sorrow than the female brain because the men start feeling less manly.
Abigail: Also conditioned through culture.
Ann: Yeah, but I also think there’s actually a genetic thing that women are more not only do we live longer, not only they now finally studied it: the male brain declines faster. They now have three years faster than the female brain, and the male brand isn’t as adept at dealing with, and talking about trauma usually as a female brain.
Rachel: Right. They’re kind of more wired to fix versus to heal.
Ann: And to think in sequences, and to think in spreadsheets.
Rachel: There’s control, right?
Ann: And they do all these LEED sustainability buildings. They say they’re LEED certified, but they don’t talk about the emotional experience. How can it be sustainable if you don’t mention emotion?
Rachel: Right. So that’s where I always thought, okay, sustainability, but what about, you know, quite simply how we walk in a space and say, God, that is a good vibe, and why does that have a good vibe? And why is that healing? And why that can be accessible and also belong to all of us, right? The sense of, I don’t know. I look psychologically at like Maslow’s hierarchy feeling safe, right, you know, feeling, you know, like survival, you’re at that level. But, but I think, you know, what you’re saying, the unconscious brain and the conscious how what you’re doing is really shedding light on what are these unconscious drives that really Support our emotional life in the built space or in our communities, right? So it’s not just in a building or a home. It’s really how we navigate our surroundings.
Ann: A lot of the thinking that we were taught about design was false because the foundational thinking is false. The mind is not a blank slate. Unconscious, non conscious behavior directs our thinking.
Rachel: That’s where I got tripped up when I was in architecture school. Somebody said, oh, you design on tabula rasa, it’s a blank slate. And I’m thinking historically working as a Jungian analytical certified therapist, I’m like, the archetype and collective of what we know in a plant or a survival of a fearing a snake, you know, how could you say that we’re a blank
Ann: It was false. But I think we did go that way. I mean, the 20th century, even before the idea that it’s mind to blank slate was very, it’s tabula rasa was common and, but it’s false. And the car companies know it’s false and trillion dollar companies like Apple know it’s false, and they make money on it.
And so we need to pivot, and we also need to show that it’s killing us. It’s literally killing us. One reason that America has 30 percent higher carbon footprint than any country in Europe is because we drive so much, we made it so unlockable, and that’s increasing our lower longevity spans, our declining longevity in the United States. Rising obesity.
Rachel: Yes. I was talking to Abigail and I even brought up like the blue zones, like that whole research in what makes, you know, a certain culture, you know, their longevity. What are the variables that support, you know, there’s Sardinian in Italy, the Sardinian culture. And it was a sense of belonging, going outside to garden. Seeing people. I think that brings in like something that’s, you know, obviously big is biophilia. We need to be outside. We need to experience nature. It regulates us and communities have done this back in time and to restore this is like a public health announcement, right?
I see your research that you’re doing is like, it’s a public health emergency in that way, primary, secondary, tertiary, right?
Ann: And it’s going to get worse. I’m in a baby boomer. Those are people born between 46 and 64. There’s 70 million of us. It’s called the silver tsunami. They’re never in the history of the United States have there been so many aging and it’s going to be a disaster. We don’t have the housing for them. And we don’t have the transit for them. Do you want 50 million 85 year olds driving? An 86 year old woman just killed a year and a half ago, killed a woman in a crosswalk in Concord Center. Well, she’s driving because her elderly living community is designed where you can’t walk anywhere. So it’s going to be catastrophic. It’s going to be catastrophe.
Rachel: And with this, you know, impending catastrophe is, and you guys are doing such amazing research. I was talking to Abigail. About a research study you did on just looking at a mural at a bus stop, right? Wasn’t that one of your studies you did? And I thought it was fascinating that even though there’s this doom and gloom around how we’re set up there are these simple, you know, implementations of what we can do to really shift some of the rhetoric or just the health of the community by putting a mural next to a bus stop. You showed in your research that in facial recognition, can you just give us a readers digested of that?
Abigail: Sure. So we use iMotions online for a study that was a collaborative effort between ourselves, ITDP, Ad Hoc industries, La Collaborativa, MBTA. There were a whole slew of collaborators for the city of Chelsea.
We were brought in to look at a bus stop, And we took pictures before, we took pictures after, of the design intervention change, and we used eye tracking and facial expression analysis to quantify the different levels of engagement based on our design intervention. So, we added a bench to the bus station, the shelter was just a glass, three sided structure. And there wasn’t a bench there. There were two parking spaces in the street that were blocking the view of someone standing in the bus shelter from seeing if the bus was coming. So there were all of these logistical, technical problems and through this whole collaborative effort with these different groups of people, we were able to get the car spaces removed, the parking spaces removed.
We added a platform that made accessing the bus level with the sidewalk. So folks who were using the bus stop, didn’t have to step down into the curb or off the curb into the street, back onto the bus. So it’s just promoting accessibility through redesign without a tremendous budget, without a tremendous timeline.
But really with a tremendous amount of energy and care for the people in the area. So when the installation of the flower walk was happening, the local business owners were coming out of their shops. People who were employees for the Department of Public Works were coming on their days off because they wanted to see the project succeed, because they wanted to be involved, and it was like getting people together, and that’s where real change can happen, because communities are the glue of everything else. We just add more information to the story they’re already telling.
Rachel: That’s so well said and described as to how one project that you also, it brought like business online. So I think this is a money maker in its own way, right? Like if, if we want to like sell this really supporting the healing of our environment on a historical and the cognitive, you know, how we really speak to the unconscious in that way. It’s a business decision like this.
Ann: Yeah, I think we could do a study for L. A. Do you know anyone in the L. A. transit authority? We could do it for them.
Rachel: That would be great. I would love to be a part of that.
Ann: We could do that. We could propose it, because the whole idea in Chelsea, they were seeing, that’s a poor neighborhood near the city of Boston, and they were seeing people who were taking the bus. Well, one reason the bus stop was hard to see, and was really not attractive.
And suddenly people were smiling and laughing with their kids when they went up to it. They suddenly realized, oh, look what’s possible.
Rachel: Yes, I would love to see that in Los Angeles, because I do feel our Our public trans transit system. It feels threatening. It doesn’t feel fun.
Ann: And we actually get the science that it is threatening. It doesn’t feel good. And we’d be happy to do a proto study. We can send you the links to what we did for the city of Chelsea to make it more humane and also for them to prepare for the aging baby boomers. But also it’s important for younger people that they are able to see it and their grandparents.
I mean, the ugliest public places are the transit stations in Boston, you know, they look like they don’t look beautiful and they could!
Rachel: And they could, and I think that’s what I’m so inspired and just grateful for the work that you both do is just how you say humanity. It’s to live a dignified and humane life that we all should have an experience. And, and you say it’s intergenerational, and I think that’s really such a proactive way of reformatting.
Ann: If you want to jump on a call next month or the following or after summer about co leading a grant. Because I’m for the National Institute of Health. We could apply anywhere.
Rachel: Yes, let’s do it.
Ann: Let’s make LA not famous for driving. Famous for safe walking and mass transit. Same as what I’m seeing in the younger generation, like Abacus generation and they’re really interested in not only driving. They want to walk.
Abigail: We need public transit. It’s an environmental crisis, too.
Rachel: It is. I They’re really, really trying to attack this and I don’t hear, “Oh, how do we beautify it?” Because I think beauty as we started off with how that is Healing. Beauty is not like superfluous.
Ann: And there was a reason I understand the post world war was horrific. I understand why they ran from it. It makes sense. I have compassion for that, but now we need to bring it back.
Rachel: Now we need to bring beauty back and I think that’s really and how we can bring art and murals–
Ann: I didn’t mean to interrupt you there but we talk a lot about a lot of American social fragmentation. And I think what’s happening is this is contributing to the social fragmentation. When you have a beautiful street there is one beautiful street in Boston, newberry Street, they actually close it to all cars, even parked on Sundays in the summer. People of all ages walk down slowly holding their hands. You know, you see everybody walking. We need that community experience and we don’t have enough. But another great example is California, just where you are right now.
Why did Disney open Disneyland in 1955? What motivated him? He grew up at a time where he could play in the street. He grew up at the turn of the century in 20th century. You could play in the street. And when he had his daughter, kids can’t be in the street anymore. So what does he do? He designs Disneyland main street, you know, what three quarters of a mile or something, or a half mile of 52 different highly ornate building elevations with almost no cars exactly to replicate what? His childhood, because his daughters growing up in LA couldn’t do that, and then now there’s six Disneyland’s around the world.
And Disneyland Paris opened, I think, late 1990s, it now has more visitors than any other tourist spot in Europe.
Rachel: Because we’re craving just community play.
Abigail: Play is so important.
Ann: Isn’t that a place you can go with your grandmother, your kid, your friend, craving a place you can walk and not worry about where am I going to park my car, you know.
Rachel: There’s a containment.
Ann: Yeah. And also, this is brilliant that Disney did. He invented the term Imagineers and he sent his Imagineers to look at the streets in Europe where what? People were happiest. They studied that. They studied that where people were happiest. What planner the United States thinks about designing a happiest, heaviest, you know, the only plight we’ve done evidence based planning is really disneyland Main Street and it’s so successful it’s now on three continents.
Rachel: Disneyland Main Street. That is so fascinating. And I think it also brings up. It’s so hard to wind down. I mean, every conversation with both of you or anyone from your organization for that matter, that I even talked to at the summit is just, I don’t know.
Ann: But you’re in LA. We should get a movie out of this. Here you are in LA Not even knowing what made Disneyland Disneyland.
Rachel: This is a doc. This is a doc in the making.
Abigail: The public needs this information. The public needs this.
Ann: We’ve lost what cities used to feel like, except now whole parts of Paris are car free. And I don’t know if you know this, Paris for the July Olympics, they’re taking out 144, 000 car parking spaces permanently.
Rachel: They are to make it more accessible for pedestrains?
Ann: More walkable. Yeah.
Rachel: So that’s a positive move in the right direction. The Olympics are really forcing cities to rethink how their cities are operating.
Ann: That could be a documentary. Every one of the things you talk about, really, we need a big grant. We need a 10 million grant to do a documentary on what we lost, what we need to bring back. I don’t want to bring back slavery. I don’t want to bring back the time where women couldn’t vote.
I’m glad we got that. We really need to look at, you know, what Disney did. I think it cost 145 to get into Disneyland today now. To experience what everybody used to experience for free.
Rachel: It was like a human right and well, right. Sometimes that’s philosophical right is given to us. It’s actually there is a power that we that gives us the right.
Ann: Look at what cars took away.
Rachel: And you know, it’s so interesting. I’ve been had a car for 3-4 years since the pandemic and I walk everywhere. I’m in West Hollywood and it’s pretty walkable in West Hollywood because we have cedar Sinai right there. I have my grocery store. It’s this village in LA that’s more walkable. And I say, gosh, I can still walk when I get the car, but I want to bring up one last point around how historically, you know, Whatever happens politically and how war has shifted the way that the built environment worked.
Prozac. I, somebody told me that when Prozac came online, that was when kids, like you said, I’m just bringing back to your original point, like in Boston where there was a community and kids would play. It was when there was some kind of fear of kids playing outside that’s where you saw Prozac. You know, start to be administered and prescribed.
There’s a very interesting antidepressants with losing that community and, and when in the eighties. Maybe it’s the 80s. I don’t remember. I can’t recall, but there’s such a parallel of what was going on with our connection in our spaces.
Ann: Totally connected. I also think what I’m seeing too, compared to my child, is people buy much more stuff than they used to. Huge trash cans. When I was a kid, people had just a tiny little thing, you know. There wasn’t, I think people are, I think a lot of it is the loneliness. Yeah. And the lack of connection that when you feel you’re walking down Disneyland Main Street or you’re walking down the street in Paris, you don’t feel the need to get so much stuff.
So what’s happened is we’re compensating in ways that actually are unhealthy, right?
Abigail: We’re getting that stimulation in our brain, like the dopamine is spiking and the serotonin spiking, because we have that new item, that new thing, and then it fades really quickly.
But if we’re instead living in urban settings that have opportunities for engagement, green space and markets with fresh produce and all of these wonderful attributes that our ancestors had. That is more attuned with our human animal nature. We can build that. We have the capacity and the infrastructure and the ability to shift across the globe towards this way of thinking and design, but it is not commercially advantageous for people with big money who are doing big real estate developments. And also, there’s a fundamental misunderstanding like we’ve been saying about architectural education, about what makes places successful, about how design should be.
It’s very much misinformed. But we do need to keep hope that there is an alternative. We can change it.
