September 28 2011

How do cities and city systems make or break the psychological well-being of their residents? New York Lab Team member and journalist Charles Montgomery has been investigating the link between urban design, emotions, and human behavior for his forthcoming book Happy City. His conclusion? The world-saving city and the happy city are the same place. Join Charles as he explains the urban adventures behind the book and the science the Lab will explore in its final weeks. Find out how you can join the experiments that will be taking place.

Photo: courtesy Deltree

What effect does the city have on your brain and body? In a series of weekly tours developed with Lab Team member Charles Montgomery, Dr. Colin Ellard, author of You Are Here: Why We Can Find Our Way to the Moon, but Get Lost in the Mall, has begun to gather evidence about the psychological effects of public spaces near the Lab. This week, join Dr. Ellard on this tour and measure the effects of the city on your own brain and body.

Videos from the Event:

Testing, Testing, Tested: Esther M. Sternberg, M.D.

Testing, Testing, Tested: Colin Ellard 

Photo used by permission under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) License from Eric Fischer.

Can paying attention to our moods help us rethink the self? Can we develop a different view of the self—a self that extends beyond our skin, out into the surrounding environment? One that is distributed and woven into the environment? In this workshop, led by creative consulting and design collaborative spurse, participants will use wayfinding and psychogeographic exercises to evolve a model of the self as a combination of mind, body, and environment.

Photo: used by permission under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 License from josef.stuefer

Destroyed in a dramatic and highly publicized implosion, the Pruitt-Igoe public housing complex in St. Louis has become a widespread symbol of failure among architects, politicians, and policy makers. Created in the postwar housing boom, Pruitt-Igoe was to be a symbol of renewal, prosperity, and democracy. It appeared to offer a largely African American community the chance to leave tenements behind for a clean, modern lifestyle. But as Chad Freidrich’s documentary shows, the American city was also changing in ways that made it unrecognizable from a generation earlier, privileging some and leaving others in its wake.

Q&A with Producer Paul Fehler and New School Professor Joseph Heathcott will follow screening

6 pm open seating
6:15 pm screening

Image courtesy of St. Louis Post-Dispatch