Empathy isn’t a word we hear in citymaking, but it should be.
Why empathic places are more resilient, just and ultimately successful
City planners tend to be so focused on building buildings, that it’s easy to forget that a place should, above all, build relationships. And yet that’s why metropolises grow and blossom over time — to draw people together to exchange, combine cultures, trade ideas, and create stronger networks. Cities that do so light up with life, spark up smiles, make us feel good. The world’ great places, like the best hosts, make us feel that we belong even if we’ve just arrived. These cities do so because their spaces and neighbourhoods communicate with the people that are drawn there, offering up some of the places character and encouraging people to share theirs. These streets create relationships with give and take, and bonds that are reciprocal. In short, they empathise. In good times, we come to love those places. In tough times, we stay loyal to them.
So can you design an empathic place?
For the last 15 years, myself and my colleague Marcus Willcocks (a senior research fellow at Central Saint Martins and collaborative designer) have been working on active research to do just that, through a design philosophy called Urban Lexicons. At its core it's about building better relationships with places, exploring how a city speaks to us and how we can speak back through design that responds to how people feel about a place.
At its very heart, empathy is about communication, understanding and language — and in an urban setting that ‘vocabulary’ is made up of thousands of signs and symbols that make us feel welcome, or not. Every time you take a walk down the street, you have a conversation with a place, as it offers you clues to its character. Just like good and bad relationships, there are places that say ‘yes’, inviting us in, enabling us to ‘speak back’ and get involved in that conversation. And places that immediately say ‘no’, remain tightly controlled and shut down any form of individual expression (Shout out to champion of urban imagination Charles Landry for putting us onto that). Something as simple as a lowered curb says ‘we’re not just thinking about cars’ but those with wheelchairs, buggies or children. The hallmark of any good relationship is to create trust, agency, reciprocity, and to embrace the soul and character of others to be themselves in a place.
Where do we look for inspiration?
First stop is storytelling, because the narratives we build about a city and our place in it influence the way we behave and feel about them. Ira Glass, the legendary storyteller and host of radio show This American Life puts it beautifully: ‘The story is a machine for empathy. In contrast to logic or reason, a story is about emotion that gets staged over a sequence of dramatic moments, so you empathise with the characters without really thinking about it too much. It is a really powerful tool for imagining yourself in other people's situations.’ Seeing a place as a stage for dramatic moments enables a narrative-driven approach to making a place, there’s always a new twist or characters to discover. Equally, listen to the stories people tell about their space and you’ll gain a richer understanding of its character. So we draw storytellers of all forms into our approach to getting to know a place and what it means.
In Bristol, in the West of England The Place Bureau team has worked with the city government for the last few years. First alongside the studio Turner Works to help understand what the spaces of Western Harbour meant to people and inform the future vision for the neighbourhood, a project called Harbour Hopes. Then helping the city’s team set up a diverse citizen’s advisory group who bring lots of different perspectives and lived experiences to this amazing part of Bristol.
This is a place that is hard to define in its mix of maritime heritage, pockets of green, fragments of industry, and soaring highways. But beyond the physical spaces, we had a hunch that there were many intangible elements that people valued, things that attracted the gardeners, skaters, boat lovers and musicians among many others.
We put together a cohort of storytellers to listen in different ways — commissioning the then City Poet Caleb Parkin, local photographers, a filmmaker and an illustrator to venture out, meet people, and bring a fresh vocabulary to understand the soul of a place. They met musicians rehearsing under the flyovers perfect for their acoustic qualities; boatbuilders taking time to pass on skills; bmx riders enjoying the freedom , and elderly walkers taking time out of their day for a jaunt. Their photos, videos, interviews and poems also describe the fundamental spirit of the area — above all, the sense of freedom that people valued, finding the space and time to express themselves here. As Caleb drew out in the poem he wrote for the place: ‘… these horizons dream of a slowness which gives time to look up…’ However the place evolves, there is a desire for that spirit to remain.
So a story can help you understand what a place means to people. But how do you design with that, and shape a new meaning with them?
In the rising role of equitable design for places, there’s a call to widen design vocabularies and draw in more voices. On Liverpool Waterfront, The Place Bureau has partnered with a host of groups to reimagine and reinterpret the city’s Canning Dock on, including curators from the National Museums Liverpool; artists and activists from local creative community partners Writing on the Wall, Squash Liverpool, and youth theatre company Twenty Stories High; all led by architects Asif Khan. This public space sits between museums — a site where thousands of vessels, including slave ships, were repaired in the city’s maritime industry. A foundational place in the city, but also in defining England’s role in the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Through defining the brief with this wide group of voices, the team are exploring how a place can hold people, the importance of creating welcome in a space, especially when a story stretches from triggering to celebratory moments. To inform the design, the team have together been trying out new experiences on the dock as a means of seeing how simple moves might make us feel differently on the dockside — what if we danced here? What if we have a candlelit vigil? Wave flags to catch the wind? Or make a space to read a poem and leave a story? Alongside the museum, the community partners explored these and many more experiences in a day to night takeover from Sunrise to Sunset to welcome in new ideas with the public and get people talking from across the city.
Just like language, it's not always what you say, but how you say it that counts.
Gestures of welcome are so important in inviting people in. But like language, we all read signs differently, and that depends on our background and lived experience. A sign that that is acceptable in one culture or to one group can be offensive in another. So the more voices we have in making places, the more universal those signs can be, as well as celebrating difference. Putting yourself in someone else's shoes, looking through their eyes, is the key to empathy.
When these gestures stack up they move beyond the idea of welcome to become a genuine invitation.
As urbanist Jan Gehl points out : ‘A good city is like a good party - people stay longer than really necessary, because they are enjoying themselves.’ Great relationships are based not only on need, but desire. To get to that great relationship you can read all the self help books you like, but you also need to put that into practice and go with the messy flow of real life. Just as we shouldn’t control others in a long-lasting relationship, we need to set ego aside in placemaking — not always easy in the realm of architecture! Great citymakers leave space for the unexpected to happen and other people to express themselves and their character in a space. We call it ‘civic magic’ — that spark and warm rush of good vibes that you simply can’t explain but you know it when you feel it. The most wonderful things about love, whether among people or in place, remain full of wonder because they’re simply unexplained.
More at Urbanlexicons.org and theplacebureau.com
This is a reprint of an article originally written for the wonderful Backstage Talks magazine.
We want to know : what are the most empathic cities or places you know of?
Which spaces in your streets and neighbourhoods speak to you, and help you to speak back?