Tag Archives: public spaces

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Tuning Out of Public Spaces

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Positive situational awareness means someone knows what is going on around them.

There is a walker in front of my house that I see almost  every day. He is clearly diligent in getting some exercise. But here’s the thing: he walks, head down, staring at his right hand. Though he passes others in neighboring yards and on the narrow sidewalk, he seems mesmerized by the screen he is holding. I expect that eventually he will fly off the edge of the curb one day when gravity reminds him that multitasking can be dangerous.  Walking and reading at the same time are not really companionable activities. This pattern repeated on most pedestrian routes everywhere is a reminder of a minor violation of the social contract. Simply put, we should first notice others and acknowledge them: not every time and not all the time, but sometimes. The norm might be a verbal greeting, or at least a friendly glance.

What have we lost when it is no longer routine to affirm someone in their presence?  It’s a signal of something bigger that has been building for several decades.

This awareness of people passing within our personal space ties into the useful idea of “situational awareness,” which applies to everyone from airline pilots to close encounters on a sidewalk. Positive situational awareness requires that a person notice what is going on in the real world around them: perhaps noticing a pedestrian about to step in front of an oncoming car, a baby verging near the edge of a swimming pool,  or even a large boat about to crash into a quay.

We were not made to be mentally immobilized by our portable devices. Such is our fractured attention that we miss experiences where we might engage. I’ve told this story before: a trip to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon through brush-covered flat prairie, suddenly coming upon the breathtaking gorges extending to valley floors too deep to see. This miraculous break in the landscape of the high desert can leave one speechless. I’ve seen first-time viewers break into tears at the awesome sight. Within a few feet of the sheer rim we noticed a family pulled over in their car.  They have apparently just arrived. The parents walk to a nearby precipice to take in the wonder of it all, but their children are still in the car watching a video.

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The relatively new social configuration of being “alone together” is one cause of missing interactions in everyday encounters.

There is a bigger point here. We are still in the first generations of a tectonic shift in how humans interact. Roughly speaking, for thousands of years communication with others in our species was direct and unmediated. Human groups lived together and constructed social selves from daily experience. But especially after the birth of commercial radio in 1920, our relationships with each other began to rapidly change.

I’ve probably buried the lede here. But in the history of the species, the advent of radio is a key thershold that has helped initiate us into what is now the norm of trucated communication. For better or worse, it put listeners on just the receiving end of mediated messages. No need to react, respond, or acknowledge. A mediated message is filtered through some mechanical-electrical tool and often stripped of the nuances of face-to-face communication. True, books, letters and newspapers existed decades earlier. But in the west radio was more revolutionary than evolutionary. It was  the first widespread medium where a family could be in the same room, but left to the stimuli of an external source that isolates the consciousness. This relatively new social configuration of being “alone together” is one cause of missing interactions in everyday encounters. In media analyst Sherry Turkle’s words, “we expect more from technology and less from each other.” And so we have a acquired a fairly recent incapacity. Media and even portable phones have retrained us to be more comfortable in our own heads. Like that walker I first mentioned, many of us seem to be more solitary souls, saving full and rich interaction only when it is necessary.

 

The Park Solution

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New York's Bryant Park Source: Bristol University Alumni
          New York City’s Bryant Park
           

We should not be just of the physical world, but in it as well.

In the last several decades cultural observers like Todd Gitlin, Robert Putnam, and Richard Sennett have offered sobering assessments of the decline of the public realm in American life. Their critiques seem as valid today as they ever did. But numerous city, state and federal parks remain as important exemptions. To be sure physical separation from a dense community can be luxurious. Few of us want to live or work on the edge of a cacophonous circus. And yet there can be something magical about the shared world of a public park.

We may still bring to it some of the electronic paraphernalia of our connected lives. But a welcoming park has a way of bending us toward the comparative riches of the direct interaction with others. There are, of course, many reasons for escaping into the stunning spaces of America’s greatest national monuments. But serendipitous contact with the physical world and the ad-hoc community that populate a public space is possible in even one city block.

Consider Bryant Park in the middle of Manhattan at 6th Avenue and 40th St. This jewel of an inviting open space shares its relatively small block with the main branch of the New York Public Library. But within its limited 2 or 3 acres it contains everything a shared environment should have. It’s cooler and more shaded than midtown’s congested sidewalks and streets. It’s also full of French-style café chairs, which can be moved to the shade or near the center green, whatever a visitor wants. And most importantly, it offers a place to linger in conversation, or to be given time to allow the kind of mental reboot the city often discourages. Tor a tourist who loves cities, Bryant Park’s benches and chairs along its leafy northern border offer views of some classic Art Deco buildings, including the Empire State. For the kids playing ping pong and chess along its edges it’s probably just a place to “be.”  What’s impressive is how easily they all mix with workers who have escaped cramped cubicles in nearby buildings.  The park shelters all on more or less equal terms.

As in every city, a public common is a wonderful machine for making members of a community visible to each other. People are simply friendlier if encountered in public areas that are off limits to automobiles. In Bryant, events include  ice-skating in the winter, with free films, concerts and literary readings at regular intervals through the rest of the year. Its bigger twin to the south in Washington Square even includes locals who post signs next to inflatable sofas offering “free conversation.” Open outdoor commons like these are essential antidotes to the American preference for spending lavishly  only on private spaces.

Denver's City Park Photo: David Herrera, Wikimedia
                   Denver’s City Park
              Photo: David Herrera, Wikimedia

To be sure, Bryant Park is the lucky recipient of the vast wealth that surrounds it. But any traveler could tick off a list of special places that exist in part because of another American imperative recognized by Theodore Roosevelt that we need to be not just of the physical world, but in it as well. We grow closer to others when we are in landscapes that have the effect of deepening sympathy for our species and our capacities to connect. Among others, Roosevelt gave us the idea of preserving great national parks. But the scale does not need to be Yellowstone-grand. My favorites are dramatically dissimilar: a mere one acre tract of gardens and ponds in a hillside in Great Malvern England, a scattering of fire pits and picnic tables under magnificent old-growth trees in New Jersey’s Bull’s Island State Park, the thunderous meeting of ocean and rock at Asilomar State Beach in Pacific Grove California, or the grass carpet of Denver’s City Park, which falls away to reveal the skyline against the incomparable backdrop of Mt. Evans.

Everyone can construct their own list, and perhaps notice that their favorite park is special because it has fostered relationships that remain central to our lives.