I Just Need Some Space

[00:00:00] Foreign. [00:00:08] Welcome back to Read the Room. I'm Katie Pedito and this is episode four. Quick note before we get into it, this is the audio version of the newsletter. Read the Room with a few extra tidbits beyond what's written. If you're not subscribed yet, you can find it at newsletter.katypedito.com okay, so I need to start with a confession. It's been a month since I released an update to this supposedly weekly newsletter. I wanted to perfect the audio and that led to a whole rabbit hole of information and equipment. So now I'm back and hopefully it sounds good. [00:00:46] But Last month I was leaving Amherst, Massachusetts after having been at the Edger Conference. I had only been there for a few days. I was visiting for the first time. I and the story that really inspired this week's topic. I was driving a single lane like Country Road as the sun was coming up. I was listening to Noah Kahn's new album and my heart kind of started to hurt and I got like teary. And I know how that kind of sounds, but I want to be clear. This is not just a me thing. This is place attachment. [00:01:18] That's what this whole episode is about. I fell in love at first sight with Amherst only for the vacation romance to end abruptly. Three days. [00:01:28] So grab a pint of ice cream, put on your favorite rom com, and grieve with me over our lost places. [00:01:36] And in reality, I'm actually saying that pretty lightly. There's a lot of depth here in today's newsletter, but first, let's start in Boston. 1958 the city bulldozed the West End and 12,000 residents were relocated. It was called Urban Renewal. The neighborhood was originally a dense, walkable, working class, Italian, Irish, Eastern European, Jewish community. It was right on the Charles river and it was completely razed to make way for luxury apartments and a hospital expansion. It's all part of Mayor John Hines's plan for a new Boston. And the West End had really scenic views of the river, so the city administration considered those views wasted on what they had called a blighted neighborhood. [00:02:26] A few years after the seizure of the West End, sociologist Mark Freed went back and interviewed former West End residents. And then he wrote it up in a landmark paper. He found that people were grieving, and not metaphorically grieving, literally grieving, the same way someone would mourn the loss of a loved one. [00:02:48] Residents showed persistent sadness and depression, difficulty functioning, a longing for something that they could no longer have. So he wrote in 1963 a paper called Grieving for a lost home, where he wrote that over half the women and a third of the men showed what he called fairly severe grief reactions. They had lost a neighborhood. And literally that loss registered the same way as losing a partner. [00:03:17] Environmental psychologists started to call this place attachment. It works a lot like human attachment. There's falling in love at first sight. That was me with Amherst. And it's influenced by both personal and physical things. You might form an immediate bond like that because the local residents share similar ideologies, because the area looks and feels like somewhere you used to live. [00:03:42] But you also might bond more quickly if you live on a cul de sac versus a long street. So there's a design element to this too. We tend to form stronger bonds with medium sized places like towns rather than hammocks or continents. But either way, it's the feeling of being at home immediately, even somewhere you've never been before. [00:04:05] And then there's the slow burn, the bond that builds over years. [00:04:10] For me, that's Geneva, New York. It's a tiny little town in western New York where I lived during grad school. I met my new husband. [00:04:19] It's where we adopted our first dog, where we bought our first home, where we walked to Char Burrito bar every Thursday. Shout out, Burrito bar. But these places accumulate meaning the way that relationships do through time, through repetition, through the memories that happen within them. And I can still feel that place place deeply years later. And it's kind of both a sad and a happy feeling, like thinking about a first love. [00:04:46] And then there's the way a place gets into your Soul. In the 70s and 80s, Harold Prashansky. Yes, great name to know in environmental psychology. He introduced the concept of place identity to describe how physical environments become woven into our self concept. [00:05:05] The places we inhabit shape how we understand ourselves. And when those places are torn down or we're prevented from going back, something in our identity is lost. And that's where the grief comes from. It's leaving a place like a hole in who we are. If you want a visual on this, Missy Jessup's love letter to the Utah desert on YouTube. I start every lecture on place attachment with this video. It's four minutes long, totally worth it. Link is in the newsletter. [00:05:33] Overall, the West End is one of the more famous examples of place attachment. There's a West End museum now with a lot of these archives, but it's really far from the only example. [00:05:43] Since I was a grad student, I've been struck by Uttanavad's work on auto constructed housing communities in Ahmedabad, India. [00:05:51] Her 2021 study was the result of years of fieldwork following a community being moved from informal settlement housing to to new apartment style homes as part of this housing redevelopment intervention. [00:06:06] She does have a footnote in the paper on the language around using the word slum in urban development, so that's worth reading if you pull up the study. [00:06:16] So over nearly a decade, there were two waves of data collection. Dr. Vad tracked housing quality before and after redevelopment. She conducted observations, she conducted resident interviews, she conducted focus groups. [00:06:32] Even though the new professionally designed apartments were objectively higher quality and objectively safer, residents who moved into the replacement housing showed a significant drop in their sense of ownership and control over their environment, and they stopped investing in maintenance. [00:06:52] Meanwhile, residents of the original informal settlements, where people had actually spent time to build and modify and almost customize their own homes incrementally over years, they kept improving their housing conditions without any government intervention whatsoever. [00:07:11] When people create their own environments over time and cultivate that, especially as part of a community, the attachment that develops is qualitatively different than what happens when someone just moves into a finished home, no matter how nice it is. [00:07:29] The process of making is part of what creates our bond, similar to any human relationship. In this case, moving people into higher quality state sponsored apartments might sound like a straightforwardly positive intervention, but Dr. Vad's work suggests that there's a lot more nuance than that. [00:07:48] We got two more threads to pull on here before the design piece. I promise there's a design application for place attachment. [00:07:56] But first, indigenous communities have understood place attachment at a physical scale and time scale that Western psychology is still even working to comprehend. The relationship with land in many indigenous frameworks is constitutive, which means the land is part of who the community is. It's part of their history, it's part of their cosmology. It's part of their sense of cotton continuity across generations. [00:08:21] Mindy Fullilove's work on black American communities has a similar thesis, and it builds directly on Dr. Fried's work. Dr. Fullilove coined the term root shock to describe what happens when neighborhoods are dismantled through something like urban renewal, but also redlining and highway construction. So root shock is another word for that traumatic stress reaction to the destruction of one's emotional ecosystem. [00:08:50] She suggests that it has measurable effects on health outcomes, social cohesion, and community resilience that persist for decades, just like Fried found in the West End. So she wrote a 2001 article it led to her 2016 book, which is called Root Shock. That is also worth picking up and following up on. [00:09:11] The last few episodes have focused on interiors, and this week we move to a bigger scale. The urban scale. Urban design. But the same thread runs through both scales. How can this space best accommodate people? What do people stand to lose if this place changes? And can our design process account for that? [00:09:33] And I want to be clear. I'm not advocating that we just preserve every building just for preservation sake. I'm advocating for. For designers to think about the emotional ecosystem of a place before changing it. We already do this with a lot of things. We investigate the structural conditions before we dig in. We look at site hydrology. [00:09:55] The emotional ecosystem deserves that same treatment. Our design process should incorporate an opportunity to understand what people have built their sense of self and belonging around. [00:10:09] So the residents of the West End didn't need the buildings preserved in reality. They actually needed just some acknowledgement that losing them was real, that the grief was proportionate, that they had lost something beyond just the buildings. The place had mattered in ways that the city never measured. [00:10:30] But 60 years of research later, we now know that we form attachments with places in the same way we form them with humans. [00:10:46] That's episode four. The written version is in your inbox. The Research to Explore section has links to everything I mentioned today. [00:10:55] Fried, Vad, Prashansky, Scannell and Gifford. They wrote a seminal article full of Love's book, Root Shock. [00:11:04] Next week we are flipping to the light side. Place attachment isn't only grief and loss. [00:11:10] There's also the happy things. Falling in love, finding a place that fits you, the joy side of this. And that's where we're headed. If this is connecting to work that you're doing, hit reply on the newsletter or find me on LinkedIn. And if you know someone who should be listening, send it to them. [00:11:29] I'll see you next week.