At its best, we generally regard our built environment as a source of comfort, protection, and inspiration. But at its worst, can it also foster destructive habits? Manhattan-based urbanism thinktank The Van Alen Institute, wondering just that, plans to launch “Ecologies of Addiction,” an interdisciplinary investigation on the impact of our surroundings on our impulsive behaviors, including drug, alcohol, and internet abuse.
In collaboration with Imperial College London’s Sustainable Society Network (SSN+), the institute’s research will begin in London at the end of March, when it plans to hand 50 ordinary citizens a smartphone app developed by a King’s College London-based research team headed by neuroscientist Dr. Andrea Mechelli, landscape architect Johanna Gibbons, and artist Michael Smythe. Over the course of the week, the app tracks changes in the user’s mood as well as location, yielding two sets of data that the researchers will analyze with the help of an advisory group. Truly interdisciplinary in its approach, advisors span the fields of neuroscience, public health, urban planning, substance-abuse treatment, and technology.
The Van Alen Institute’s hope is that the resulting data can reveal correlations between environment and behavior, which can ultimately lead to cities designed towards greater well-being for its citizens. Architizer spoke to Van Alen director of research Anne Guiney and executive director David van der Leer to get a better understanding of their research methods, and to find out what they hope this project can achieve.
© Paul Dopson-APG Photography
London by Daniel Chapman
How exactly will people use the app, and for what period of time?
Anne Guiney: Right now it is using this thing called Ecological Momentary Assessment, which is a new research tool. Basically, it pings you at certain points throughout the day and asks you a series of short questions that you swipe through “yes” or “no” about how you’re feeling, five times a day, for one week. We are still developing those questions, but they are all designed to get at a person’s feelings of impulsivity, safety, wellbeing, dare-devilishness. It then looks at all the geospatial data, which our phones track pretty completely throughout the day, and we can look on our map where people have been. Of course, privacy is a huge concern for all of us, and so when people sign up we ask for only basic demographic information and not even their name. You can delete your data at the end of it or further anonymize it.
The idea behind using EMA is that it helps get around the problem of people reporting their behaviors [after the fact]; research subjects are notorious for being inaccurate. For example, if you were in a study asking you how much you drink, most people dramatically lower that number of they have per week and raise the number of times that they went to the gym. It is perfectly innocent, but when people are keeping diaries and turning it in at the end of the week, the data gets pretty sketchy. By EMA asking in the moment, people tend to be more honest and sometimes people find it easier to be honest with their phones than a doctor or an interviewer.
In the press release, you mention both chemical and behavioral addictions, from drugs to shopping. These days, phone use is definitely its own type of addictive behavior. Do you take that into account in you study?
AG: One of the things that we have had a bit of chuckle about is if we are actually fostering impulsive and addictive behavior. At this point, that is definitely on the table. Since we are really trying to understand impulsivity, the questions are geared towards Internet usage and alcohol, but we still want to have a number of more broad questions so that we can that we can look at it from a number of different behaviors. We aren’t asking about things like shopping at this phase, but we could. The idea is to build the tool in such a way that by changing the questions and refocusing them, you can look at different specific behaviors. If you really do want to look at shopping, then you can rewrite it accordingly.
So you have this technology to track where people go, but what kind of criteria you are using to analyze these environments? What kind of qualitative factors are you looking for to build patterns?
AG: That is a really good question, and that is something we are actively discussing with the research team, which includes a neuroscientist, a landscape architect, and artist who has done a lot of engagement work. We are also looking at the research literature that is out there about how one does this type of analysis. For example, we can look at a map and say this person is spending a lot of time in the Shoreditch neighborhood. Let’s look at Shoreditch and take our knowledge of it.
Most architects would say, “Absolutely, our environments shape us… We believe we can improve cities and lives by making better spaces and buildings.”
Or, we can look at things which are much more broad-based, like average building height and other sort of “big data indicators,” like socioeconomic status and things that are part of regular censuses that they have in the UK. That is an active conversation because there are active flaws in both approaches. We are trying to figure out what the best of way trying to figure out the kind of data that is going to help us. So at this point we are gathering that data, and we are going to give ourselves the spring and the summer to really do that analysis.
We have this terrific advisory group — a formal one and a much larger informal one — that includes epidemiologists, mapping software people, and community activists. What will be really exciting is to get them all in a room again and say, “Here is our data, what are the questions that you want to ask? What are the metrics that you want us to line up? What are the stories?”
Shoreditch, London via Airbnb
Did you enter this project with any specific hypotheses?
David van der Leer: The whole project started from a hypothesis. We were wondering, how is our behavior impacted by the environment? We are looking for a way into this narrative that is not sweet, but actually a topic that makes people slightly uncomfortable. Addiction isn’t an easy topic. So we asked, “Is there a relationship between addiction and spaces we inhabit?” We believe there is, but there is very little research on the topic. It’s interesting because if you look at addiction, there is a lot of research on the social aspects, the financial aspects, the political aspects, but there is very little research on how space potentially impacts addiction. We want to know more about one, What do spaces do for us? And two, could we actually help the discussion around addiction over the coming years?
AG: To add to that, most architects would say, “Absolutely, our environments shape us. That’s why we are in architecture. That’s why we are in urbanism — because we believe we can improve cities and lives by making better spaces and making better buildings.” But there is so little data to back that up. It’s an anecdotal, gut-level belief. One of our goals in this project is to dig in; let’s find some data. If that is true, what are the mechanics of it? How do the various factors interplay?
This is a slight side note, but it’s always gives me a chuckle that one of our advisors is the former head of the Association for Neuroscience in Architecture, based at the Salk Institute, one of the most beautiful buildings. I think if I were there, my well-being would be dramatically increased.
When can we expect the results to come in? And how will you share them? As an exhibition? Or a book?
AG: Right now we don’t have a firm date, but we are looking at September because we will have the analysis done by then. We will organize a series of public events both geared towards the scientific and the wonky, and a much broader public. We want to start a public conversation about this. We are going to have a range of events in London because the research team and data collection are happening there. We are really trying to put together a broad range, from scientists to the kid on the street. We want to engage everyone along that spectrum about addictive behaviors and environments and how they interact. We are going to come back to New York to develop relationships with organizations here, in both the public and private sector, to expand the size of the study and focus on specific neighborhoods and other cities.
DVDL: We are very interested in taking this study to places we wouldn’t think of initially. What is really interesting about that is you’re starting to talk about the different city types and neighborhood types and scales by diversifying your locations.
In the best possible outcome of this experiment, what applications do you hope will ultimately emerge from your findings?
DVDL: It is actually really interesting to know what will happen to the design field in the coming years as we know more about how we are impacted by the environment, in both our minds and our bodies. If we knew more about it, perhaps the discussion about what good design is would become a very different discussion, perhaps less about theory and style, and much more about what we actually know for a fact works and what doesn’t work. With more data and research in other cities, we can start to work on design recommendations and city policy guidelines around the world. It’s a longer process. It could be really fascinating over the coming decades.