Pleasure in the City

(Source: Flickr/Nathan Rupert.)

The sliding doors opened and I took a deep breath as I stepped inside. The familiar scent of a steaming hot bar, combined with freshly baked bread and flowers, greeted me along with a waft of cool air. My eyes took in the multitude of earthy colors and textures, delivered by gentle amber lighting from overhead. I strolled around the hot bar, reminding myself, despite the sight of trays full of saucy chicken, roasted vegetables, and fluffy rice, that this was not the point of my visit. My friend and I were here, at the downtown Charlotte location of Whole Foods, looking for snacks and vitamin C, not spiced olives, not flowers, not chocolate.

Whole Foods has been part of my life since my early teen years when my mother became more aware of our family’s health needs and the value of organic foods. Despite living on a tight budget, we would somehow manage to find affordable ways to shop there for a few items each week. It became kind of a tradition whenever we traveled to a new city to find a Whole Foods, even if it was just to hit the bulk aisle for a few dollars’ worth of trail mix and an apple.  

Eventually it became clear that slipping through those front doors under the iconic green letters was about more than just buying healthy food—it was a sensory experience, too. Even as a cash-strapped college student in New York City, I somehow managed to find a few extra dollars here and there for slightly fancy lamb sausage at the meat counter, rustic boules of sourdough, and sunflowers. It was an easy way to upgrade my usual Trader Joe’s haul of pre-cut vegetables and frozen chicken breast. But it was also a stimulating detour in itself, even if I didn’t buy anything. 

So perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised at the number of times I found myself inventing reasons to visit Whole Foods during the Strong Towns National Gathering in Charlotte earlier this month. Maybe I’m bougie, or maybe I’m just human and, like the rest of us, really enjoy pleasurable experiences, especially when they’re woven into the fabric of ordinary life. I appreciate how a few simple design principles (textures, lighting, scent) can elevate the mundane events of daily life into something special.

Our Need for Pleasure

Our basic human need and desire for aesthetic pleasure is so obvious it almost feels silly to point out. Yet, given the lack of beauty, coherence, and harmony in many of our urban landscapes, you might be forgiven for thinking that this basic fact is categorically equivalent, in depth of intellectual insight, to Einstein’s theory of relativity.  

So many of our cities have an imbalanced proportion of greenery to cement. Highways are lined with obnoxious billboards and monotonous signs. Chain stores and restaurants are increasingly designed according to the most banal aesthetic requirements. Getting around town on foot often requires navigating dangerous interchanges or parking lots, being exposed to the elements and negotiating with stressed-out drivers whose eyes and faces you cannot see.  

Not only is this a tragedy on its own terms—since places lacking beauty are less likely to stimulate the kind of pride that fosters stewardship and investment—but it’s also a tragedy because of the kind of attitude it reveals toward the ordinary human beings who inhabit these environments. 

Designing With the User in Mind

As a freelance writer, I’ve had my fair share of marketing projects, including writing copy for websites and apps. All of these projects succeed only to the extent that they take the user experience seriously. It’s simply impossible to design or write anything meaningful without first identifying and seeking to understand the intended user or audience for the final product. All projects begin with some kind of “profiling” process designed to identify who the intended user is: their demographics, pain points, needs, and desires. These profiles go on to shape every aspect of the product from its functional features to its packaging materials and the colors and fonts used in sales and marketing materials. 

The millions of dollars every year that go into customer research, product testing, and marketing are all driven by this basic truth: getting a product to market in a profitable way requires an intense level of customer-focused curiosity, understanding, and empathy. You can only really be successful if you provide your customer with something that makes their life better in one way or another. In other words, to be successful we have to humbly observe and serve our intended audience. We have to provide something that solves problems in a desirable way. 

A Posture of Humility

This attitude and its accompanying processes reveal a lot of humility. When considering the design of the average American city, it seems to me that this kind of humble customer centeredness is gravely lacking. Looking at neighborhoods close to me with missing sidewalks, abandoned and blighted real estate, dangerous intersections, and trees mutilated or moved entirely for power lines, it seems to me that pleasure and comfort have become peripheral considerations in American urban design, having been sacrificed to much more pressing concerns, such as efficiency, flow, and profit. 

It wasn't always this way. If you look at classical architecture, it’s obvious that, at one point in time, the design of buildings and cities included consideration for beauty and pleasure. “Since the dawn of construction, it was understood that the task of an architect was not only to make a building serviceable, but also to render it beautiful,” writes the content team at The School of Life in this article. “That would involve a host of manoeuvres [sic] above and beyond pure material necessity.”

Similarly, when writing about Rome in The City in Mind, James Howard Kuntzler points out that classical architecture saw part of its job as mirroring, elevating and reinforcing the human sense of place in the world:

Vitruvius established a context for understanding the classical orders that resonates to the present day. The fundamental idea is that our buildings reflect the human qualities of having a base, a middle, and a top equivalent to the feet, torso and head of a human figure. We stand erect, we address the world vertically and perceive it visually that way. Our buildings express a like verticality and reflect it back at us, completing a feedback loop that reinforces the sense of our humanity in the things we make. Everything in traditional architecture…proceeds from this idea. It also instructs the method for establishing our spiritual position in the world, our sense of place.

With modernism, came a few different ideas: that buildings and cities were here to order and organize human desires, not to serve them. That buildings needed to express authority, rationality, and order; that buildings should express primarily the architect’s unique vision and taste, not his or her attentiveness to human’s social, spiritual, nor neurological needs as it pertains to the public realm. 

Fast-forwarding to where we are now, perhaps we could call the kind of architecture and city design we have now “Efficientalism” or “Commercialism”'—the kind of design that emerges when growth, efficiency, cost-cutting, and profitable transactions are the driving values. It’s not as philosophically driven as Modernism, but it mirrors it in its disregard for our need for pleasure and beauty; in its assumption that humans ought to conform their needs and preferences to the buildings and built environments offered by experts, not the other way around. 

By disregarding and devaluing the need for pleasure, our building and architectural pursuits have declared the end user irrelevant. The community dweller is not worth understanding. Rather, they are viewed as individuals expected to conform to what the experts have decided is worth building. You can see this all over North America with its obscenely wide highways; narrow, unprotected bike lanes; discordant placement of businesses and parking lots; and lack of trees.   

So Where Does This Leave Us?

Part of building a resilient city involves challenging this kind of thinking. Resilience depends upon how well we build places worth caring about and that starts with thinking about what humans need in the built environment: safety, beauty, comfort, and pleasure. Elements as simple as shade, sidewalks, and ornamentation go a long way in shaping our sense of place and activating our potential for civic participation. 

But, practically speaking, most of us can’t drop what we’re doing to become architects and redesign our cities. But we can learn to look at our cities from the perspective of the end user and urge our city leaders to do the same. We can challenge the status quo and ask simple questions at City Council meetings or in conversations with department heads. We can ask them to think about the user experience both in terms of providing basic amenities and considering our need for beauty, with questions like: 

• Without wide, well-maintained sidewalks in neighborhoods, how should parents and children walk to the local ice cream shop, to school, or to the park? Where can children learn to ride bikes? 

• Without covered, shaded benches at bus stations, where do you want senior citizens to wait for their buses in the summer?

• What are you doing to slow traffic in busy dining and entertainment districts so that visitors don’t feel stressed by loud cars during their night out?

• Without trees lining the street, why should people spend time strolling downtown on a hot summer day, supporting local businesses?

Who knows what will come from these conversations? Maybe you’ll inspire a new way of looking at the city. Maybe you’ll challenge the city to take residents’ needs seriously. It’s highly likely the will is already there. What’s needed is a firm and consistent nudge to act.

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