Malthus, Calhoun, and the Technology of Urban Design

I was thinking this week about condos, I was showing off my own and pointing out the design elements relative to the majority of condos that are being built in my city right now, which are largely all glass and have as a key design element that they are long and narrow, somewhat like bowling alleys and in the main have only one bedroom, perhaps with a closet masquerading as a den.  Now I am not an architect or a designer, but I have an eye for good design and what particularly interests me is the impact of design on human life and interaction. One of the many quotes that I have often admired from Winston Churchill is, “we shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us”. Churchill recognizes how the design of our buildings impacts our social and political culture and how they shape us into who we are for good or for ill. What culture then do I live in where the buildings we are shaping are ones where people want to live in isolation and what future are we shaping where our primary choice of residence is alone narrow and exposed to the world through floor to ceiling glass? 

All this isolation got me thinking about my grade 10 biology class and a video they showed us when we were studying Malthus, the great granddaddy of population and demographic thought. The video concerned the Rodent experiments by John Calhoun, where he created an fixed space environment with ample food, water, nesting and protection from predators for as many mice as they could reproduce. There were some shocking findings; firstly the rodents never actually reached the capacity that had been provided and once overcrowding set in massive psychological disruption and significant socially deviant behavior occurred and rather than retreating to a place of greater equilibrium, the entire population died off They were not able to recover from the psychological damage. 

In the later stages of the experiment before annihilation of the population there was always something that struck me about the behavior of the rodents, there were some that became very aggressive, sexual deviancy became the norm and the majority of the rodents withdrew psychologically and lived highly isolated lives in the midst of massive population. (I am summarizing significantly the findings of the study, but I think the point is made). This brings me back to one bedroom bowling alleys in the sky, and the not insignificant statistic that single resident dwellings are the fastest growing dwellings in Canada and most of the western world. Part of me has always wondered if we aren’t entering the later stages of of Calhoun world.  

Now if I was a hippy and an “end of the worlder” I would latch on to this study as proof that world is coming to an end in our time, we need only look at the warnings of Calhoun. But I am neither, so I did some further research on Calhoun and found that he felt that his research was misunderstood, in fact most of his research was in the design of better systems to enable healthy population growth in situations of overcrowding. His objective was to demonstrate how over population would destroy the world but rather to show how design can actually make living in overcrowded populations not only possible, but possibly pleasant. What his research highlights is not the end of the world but one that is actively designed. 

For Calhoun there is no “invisible hand” that will always ensure that the world is hovering around an equilibrium, that markets will always be in perfect balance and distribute the goods of the world, both material and psychologically in a perfectly rational way. He is far from a socialist of government control, for it is through the elements of design and systems design that we must regulate our behavior, not through government ownership. But what I think he would argue is that through the design of our living spaces, our urban spaces we shape our future just as Churchill suggested, and to take an active role in such is not a question of ideology but of survival and if we don’t want to be as dramatic as to suggest survival let us say at least a pleasant existence. 

When we decide what condos to build, how to design our cities, our transportation, all of these are decisions about who we want to be as a culture, as a people, we can not leave these decisions to the developers alone to do so is to abdicate our moral responsibility for our role in the human development, for we are not independent of our structures, and human life exists in cities and buildings. The Chinese call it Feng Shui, we call it urban design but whatever you want to call it, it will determine our future