Journal of Urban Design and Mental Health 2018;4:11
PERSONAL VIEW
My Journey from Psychology to Urban Design
Rhiannon Corcoran (1, 2)
(1) Professor of Psychology and Public Mental Health, University of Liverpool
(2) Co-Director (research,) Prosocial Place.Programme
(1) Professor of Psychology and Public Mental Health, University of Liverpool
(2) Co-Director (research,) Prosocial Place.Programme
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From understanding this:
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To improving this:
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How can we know what other people are thinking, what they intend to do and what they really believe? How do we understand that others might be joking, dropping a hint, being ironic or sarcastic? What do we make of a person who speaks in metaphors? Why are some people thick skinned and others tactless? How do our beliefs about other people's thoughts get turned into behaviour? How can our behaviour reflect that we can never really be sure what other people are thinking? What does it mean to share and act towards an aim, a goal or some common wisdom? I now recognise these questions as matters of huge cultural and societal significance upon which individual, groups, communities and places might succeed or fail.
I did not see it this way when I was a new postdoctoral researcher in 1992, which was when I began grappling with this question of ‘theory of mind’. I was tasked with understanding the symptoms of the mysterious and misunderstood condition called schizophrenia, a radically disruptive diagnosis and state of mind that turns worlds upside down. It is characterised by a gradual or seemingly dramatic loss of self that alienates and frightens the emerging adult, their family and friends, often just at the time when they ‘should’ be confidently striding into an independent, bright future. A future they fear is now lost or at best, temporarily misplaced. With my then-supervisor and now long-term mentor, Chris Frith, I was to explore the extent to which a difficulty with this essential social-cognitive skill, variously called theory of mind, mentalising or mind-reading, might lay at the core of feelings of paranoia of unusual beliefs and of ‘disordered’ thoughts.
This question took me into schools, workplaces, job centres, acute psychiatric wards, day clinics and brain imaging labs. It set me reading the poems of Dylan Thomas and the writings of Seneca. I learned about the medial prefrontal cortex and the theory of relevance. I designed experimental tasks that made me acutely aware of minds at work in everyday situations. I was struck deeply that without this ability and drive to meet other minds, we had nothing of much quality. I learned that difficulty with these acquired skills was a presentation that was recognisably shared by many ‘clinical’ conditions across mental health, and neurodevelopmental spectra. I came to believe that wherever there was a dwindling of the human condition, there was a loss of this capacity or a loss of the opportunity to use and benefit from this capacity. I saw that this skill developed in context and that it was possible to live a life that deprived you of the refinement of the skill. That it is a skill that can be added to, nuanced or diminished. I became interested in forms of ‘psychological therapy’ or ‘social prescription’ that might act on the fundamentals of this skill to improve life satisfaction and experiences.
When it fully dawned on me that this skill encapsulates our communications and our culture, I returned to my early interest of evolutionary psychology and to the question of group versus individual selection. I learned, again, about the eusocial insects and about the force of human co-operation and the evolution of behaviours. Finally, this meandering path all around prosociality brought me to places, via David Sloan Wilson, back to the urbanicity effect – that robust epidemiological finding that mental distress and low wellbeing tend to be more prevalent in our inner cities.
The narrative so far reflects my academic journey. But, a fuller, more balanced story is centred outside my ivory tower. This proper story features, in equal measure to my place within it, a man - a landscape architect and urban designer by training and a surrealist romantic by disposition. This man is gripped by an aboriginal sense of place. He asks how place can diminish or fulfil people’s lives. He sees how places both ‘earth’ and catalyse human experiences. Mostly, he finds himself saddened by how our places have been abused by authorities via the dominant ideologies of the day. He has spent a frustratingly, brick-wall career trying to reconnect the purpose of places to the people they belong to. I sometimes call this man ‘my husband’ and I sometimes call him ‘my knowledge exchange partner’. Over the years our minds have worked together to develop the thinking, the implications and the implementation of prosocial places- in research and in practice.
In our work the strands of geography, human ecology, culture and society are balanced with psychology, community, mental health and wellbeing. Each are paramount. But we believe that it is the ecology and the infrastructure of places that enable mental health and wellbeing to greater or lesser extent. As such, our work together is to seek out the theories, models and evidence that inform better place-making practice. For example, from evolutionary psychology the theory that we come to value our futures less in the context of cues that tell us our thrival is insecure. Future discounting is a facet of human ecology as much as an implicit psychological response and a recognisable pattern of behavioural life choices the define today’s society. At once politically frowned upon and entirely adaptive. From public health, the importance of heath inequality and the belief that the drivers of it are upstream and largely beyond the control of individuals – existing in the life chances that society sets up for us from before birth. From geography, the drivers of social fragmentation and social cohesion within communities –urban morphology. From landscape architecture the work of David Halprin and his Ecology of Form. And from psychology, an understanding that those social-cognitive skills (where I started) are acquired in context.
Our mission is to re-think space. To re-join people with place in a way that provides power and energy to build co-operation and community. To deconstruct the economic city and rebuild a city of wellbeing where thrival choices are supported by an environment that primes successful trajectories. Addressing ‘the how’ of place stewardship through a lens of wellbeing evidence provides a more applied route to changing practice, aligning the skill of the planner with the knowledge of wellbeing promotion is as much key to making change as understanding ‘the why’ through theory.
Community and place are the most natural routes through which to reconnect culture with science, human purpose with human place and, most pragmatically, public health with urban planning.
I did not see it this way when I was a new postdoctoral researcher in 1992, which was when I began grappling with this question of ‘theory of mind’. I was tasked with understanding the symptoms of the mysterious and misunderstood condition called schizophrenia, a radically disruptive diagnosis and state of mind that turns worlds upside down. It is characterised by a gradual or seemingly dramatic loss of self that alienates and frightens the emerging adult, their family and friends, often just at the time when they ‘should’ be confidently striding into an independent, bright future. A future they fear is now lost or at best, temporarily misplaced. With my then-supervisor and now long-term mentor, Chris Frith, I was to explore the extent to which a difficulty with this essential social-cognitive skill, variously called theory of mind, mentalising or mind-reading, might lay at the core of feelings of paranoia of unusual beliefs and of ‘disordered’ thoughts.
This question took me into schools, workplaces, job centres, acute psychiatric wards, day clinics and brain imaging labs. It set me reading the poems of Dylan Thomas and the writings of Seneca. I learned about the medial prefrontal cortex and the theory of relevance. I designed experimental tasks that made me acutely aware of minds at work in everyday situations. I was struck deeply that without this ability and drive to meet other minds, we had nothing of much quality. I learned that difficulty with these acquired skills was a presentation that was recognisably shared by many ‘clinical’ conditions across mental health, and neurodevelopmental spectra. I came to believe that wherever there was a dwindling of the human condition, there was a loss of this capacity or a loss of the opportunity to use and benefit from this capacity. I saw that this skill developed in context and that it was possible to live a life that deprived you of the refinement of the skill. That it is a skill that can be added to, nuanced or diminished. I became interested in forms of ‘psychological therapy’ or ‘social prescription’ that might act on the fundamentals of this skill to improve life satisfaction and experiences.
When it fully dawned on me that this skill encapsulates our communications and our culture, I returned to my early interest of evolutionary psychology and to the question of group versus individual selection. I learned, again, about the eusocial insects and about the force of human co-operation and the evolution of behaviours. Finally, this meandering path all around prosociality brought me to places, via David Sloan Wilson, back to the urbanicity effect – that robust epidemiological finding that mental distress and low wellbeing tend to be more prevalent in our inner cities.
The narrative so far reflects my academic journey. But, a fuller, more balanced story is centred outside my ivory tower. This proper story features, in equal measure to my place within it, a man - a landscape architect and urban designer by training and a surrealist romantic by disposition. This man is gripped by an aboriginal sense of place. He asks how place can diminish or fulfil people’s lives. He sees how places both ‘earth’ and catalyse human experiences. Mostly, he finds himself saddened by how our places have been abused by authorities via the dominant ideologies of the day. He has spent a frustratingly, brick-wall career trying to reconnect the purpose of places to the people they belong to. I sometimes call this man ‘my husband’ and I sometimes call him ‘my knowledge exchange partner’. Over the years our minds have worked together to develop the thinking, the implications and the implementation of prosocial places- in research and in practice.
In our work the strands of geography, human ecology, culture and society are balanced with psychology, community, mental health and wellbeing. Each are paramount. But we believe that it is the ecology and the infrastructure of places that enable mental health and wellbeing to greater or lesser extent. As such, our work together is to seek out the theories, models and evidence that inform better place-making practice. For example, from evolutionary psychology the theory that we come to value our futures less in the context of cues that tell us our thrival is insecure. Future discounting is a facet of human ecology as much as an implicit psychological response and a recognisable pattern of behavioural life choices the define today’s society. At once politically frowned upon and entirely adaptive. From public health, the importance of heath inequality and the belief that the drivers of it are upstream and largely beyond the control of individuals – existing in the life chances that society sets up for us from before birth. From geography, the drivers of social fragmentation and social cohesion within communities –urban morphology. From landscape architecture the work of David Halprin and his Ecology of Form. And from psychology, an understanding that those social-cognitive skills (where I started) are acquired in context.
Our mission is to re-think space. To re-join people with place in a way that provides power and energy to build co-operation and community. To deconstruct the economic city and rebuild a city of wellbeing where thrival choices are supported by an environment that primes successful trajectories. Addressing ‘the how’ of place stewardship through a lens of wellbeing evidence provides a more applied route to changing practice, aligning the skill of the planner with the knowledge of wellbeing promotion is as much key to making change as understanding ‘the why’ through theory.
Community and place are the most natural routes through which to reconnect culture with science, human purpose with human place and, most pragmatically, public health with urban planning.
About the Author
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Rhiannon Corcoran is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Liverpool. Her scholarly record into the psychological and social determinants of mental health and wellbeing is internationally recognised. With her partner, Graham Marshall, she founded the Prosocial Place Programme in 2012, aiming to understand and address the pernicious impacts of low-resource urban environments on health and wellbeing. Together with other colleagues, their ambition is to provide the mental health and wellbeing evidence that can underpin urban design practice and place stewardship. Rhiannon also overseas the Community Wellbeing evidence programme of the UK's What Works Centre for Wellbeing which will identify and disseminate the highest quality evidence about factors that are most important to the creation of good community well-being. She is a Fellow at the Centre for Urban Design and Mental Health.
@rhiannoncor |