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How Cities Shape Us: The Psychology of Place with Dr. Leidy Klotz · Building Better Cities

• Kate Gasparro: When I was a civil engineering student, I thought I knew what it meant to build better cities. Designing better infrastructure, building things that worked, and solving technical problems. And then I met today's guest, Dr. Lighty Klotz. As one of my university professors, he was the first person that made me question what it meant to build better cities. Lighty is a behavioral scientist and engineering professor at the University of Virginia, where he studies the connections between our inner world and our outer one. Between our minds and our built environments. In his new book, In a Good Place, he takes that idea even further. He shows us that the places that we live in aren't just passive backdrops to our lives. They actively shape us. And what makes a place good isn't simply whether it's beautiful, efficient, or comfortable. Lighty argues that our environments can help us meet three foundational psychological needs: agency, growth, and connection. And that raises some pretty big questions, like can a city give us a sense of agency? What do our public spaces and infrastructure reveal about what we value? And perhaps most importantly, what role does city building play in helping us connect with one another? So today we're gonna talk about how the places we build shape the people we become. I'm Kate Gasparo and this is Building Better Cities. Let's start at the very beginning where we sort of think about the built environment in most days as like the backdrop to life. ⁓ but there's a lot of evidence that you bring forward not just in your current book, but also in your last book, Subtract, about the relationship of the built environment shaping our behavior, relationships, and well being every day. What is the strongest piece of evidence you bring up when you hear this and as you've been studying this for the last It's been like almost fifteen years, more than that. Yeah, I mean thinking about it I guess in in one way or another. I think the the strongest piece of evidence. I think there's two. I think one is like kind of appeals to logic and that one is, you know, hey, just like watch a kid playing on the beach, right, playing with a sandcastle. Like if I watch my daughter Josephine playing with a sandcastle, sh she's like building it, right? And she's super happy to be able to build this thing and she's ⁓ and to be in control of this situation and then she's got the she's learning stuff from doing it, right? I mean she's learning about how sand, the properties of sand, but she's also learning about how her own like body movements work and her own like ability to if if the thing falls down and she's able to that's frustrating, right? And then she can respond to that frustration and like go pout or she can like build it again and Both of those make her feel different ways. So it's like she's learning from this interaction with the physical environment and then she's connecting by interacting with the physical environment. It's like she would eventually figure out, okay, how do I get more cousins to help me build this thing and how do I get my dad to go down and get water from the beach or from the ocean and bring it back so that we have like a steady supply of of wet sand. And, you know, so there's that just kind of like, Hey, if you look at how people behave, it's pretty innate, right? That's like the behavior of my daughter, but it's also people watching you know, those videos on YouTube where people are are building things in the in the jungle. I don't know if you've seen those. I haven't, but I've heard you reference them on other podcasts and like, ⁓ I should spend more time in the YouTube rabbit hole. But it's like house hunting videos on yeah or house hunting like that whole genre of of stuff and, you know, Home Depot and Lowe's. I mean, they're all like kind of appealing to this innate desire we have to like shape our surroundings, right? So there's the appeals to logic. Then I think there's the science, right? And it's like, all right, the one of the most robust ideas in psychology is like self determination theory that's been studied for decades. And it's like we have these core needs, and those are the needs that I was talking about Josie meeting on the beach, which is like agency, competence, and connection. And, you know, we can meet those needs. They're like psychological needs we have, and we can meet them in a lot of ways, but the original way that we met them is in through our built environment. And then you can like point to specific studies where ⁓ I mean there's one in the book that people find striking. I find striking. I mean they studied people in nursing homes and the people I don't think this generalizes to every single situation, but in this particular study, the people who were able to customize their their room were fifty percent more likely to be alive eighteen months later when the researchers came back, right? So it's again it's like We know intuitively that the backdrop to our lives matters, but like the degree to which it matters and how it matters, like that study is incredibly striking because it's like life or death thing, whether or not you're getting your mental needs or psychological needs met from this physical space. I think We spend a lot of time, especially in the years around COVID, thinking about like how the built environment and specifically buildings, air circulation, daylighting, egress all equate to our health. ⁓ especially in that context. I mean, I just remember talking about filters in every building. And yes, you don't see filters, but you experience fresh air that's flowing through and how that ⁓ feels in the moment good, but also like over a period of time leads to less ⁓ I don't I wanna say vacancy. Yeah, sickness or like down days for businesses and that equates to value. but I was interested more so in the side of the book where you talk about agency growth and connection. And that's very different than a building standard a wellness building standard or a green building standard that I assume is trying to get to the same types of elements and agency growth and connection. But was curious like why you're gravitating towards that framework versus a a more technical, actionable framework of how we build space. My day job is being a professor and I'm always looking for like what's what are the new ideas, right? But they're also like what supported by research. They're true and ⁓ and also hopefully important to people's daily lives. I l I I don't know how you th think about this, but one way that I've thought about it is kind of like I mean, I know Maslow's hierarchy of needs isn't perfect and it's not perfect to transfer it over to this either, but like a lot of the times what we focus on are like, okay, sh the shelter needs, right? Okay, is we're not getting rained on, but then like are we getting our physiological needs met? And I think like, okay, we're not breathing in air that's going to give us, you know, COVID or we are the right temperature or there's the right amount of daylight for what humans need to be able to see and do work. and so there's this level of like, okay, our physiological needs and then there is this other kind of level of like aesthetic stuff, right? Where it's like, okay, how does a pink wall make you feel versus a green wall? And, you know, there's that you know, they make us feel different ways and but, you know, everybody's a little different, but the science can show us something about that too. But then These psychological needs in terms of like what matters to people on a day to day level are are arguably more important. I mean, they're more important than some of the physiological needs that we deal with, right? I mean, I would say that like somebody having agency and competence, I don't know, may probably not more important than like not getting a virus, but it's probably more important than like somebody I don't know how it would stack up against having a view. For example, which is one of these ones that we always say is important. And maybe the view is important because it gives us a little bit of agency and competence. So I think a lot of what I was trying to do in the book is say, like, look, here are these three things that are really important that our built environment and physical environment is either feeding or starving. And we need to pay more attention to them because of this. And here's here's how we can do it. ⁓ and then I would add One small thing is like I think the nice thing about focusing on these psychological needs is that well, I don't know if it's any more or less true than it is with those other needs, but I think there are more opportunities to actually do something about it, ⁓ for people, right? It doesn't necessarily require a full renovation of your office, right? Or like moving your whole company to another building or even, you know, moving your house. It like you can just move to a different space that you already have access to, or you can think differently about your space, or you can, you know, kind of if you're constrained in one place, have you know, exercise control in another. So yeah. I'm curious, since you've sort of split your time between the United States and Sweden, you spend your summers in Sweden ⁓ doing research and teaching. I'm curious if these three elements, this framework around agency connection and growth are transcendent of culture. And as you travel, not just between these two places, but other places, if you find that these are the three things that help people, going back to Maslow, like self-actualize in place and help communities grow and and build upon each other. What I think is interesting traveling there or traveling anywhere is you just see, ⁓ wait, it can be different, right? It's like these some of these things that we bake in as like, ⁓ a fundamental assumption about how society has to be organized. It's like, ⁓ wait, no. There can actually be like working public transportation in a very rural area because like the part of Sweden that we go to is very similar to where I am in Virginia in terms of like the population density in the towns. And then I'll see things like, okay, well, this is making it so that now I see like eleven year olds on the train and I'm there with my eleven year old who is like, This is the first time riding a train and he's with parents, and these eleven year olds are like, No, I want to go to the next town with my buddy. and like go to soccer practice together without and it's like this is imagin like think of the life experience that they're getting, right? And and that's just normal. And so that to me is like one of the things that I notice when I go to go there and go to different places is how that's a totally different level of agency that those kids have. It's directly related to the built environment. And it's something that we don't even think of as a possibility here, at least I didn't, until I could see it there, right? the other I mean I I think also just like the connection piece where I mean the level of public parks or, you know Parks that are they wouldn't even like use the word public. They would just say parks, because why wouldn't a park be public? Right. Whereas here That's such a fair point. Yes. Like when I'm in Charlottesville, it's like, ⁓ can we go there? Or is like the fence gonna be, you know, or are we gonna have to like jump over the fence to get in and play soccer on the field that nobody else is using, right? And whereas there it's like everything is open, that's the point, which brings more people, which brings the connection, which also I think. you know, advertises that connection matters, right? It's like the it it brings this idea to p the forefront of people's mind. They realize that it's nice and then they want more of it in their spaces. So well, I've heard you say before that and I think you're quoting somebody else, so please help me fill in the the gaps here. But societies advertise their values through their investments in space. And investments more generally too. That's all you national. I'm sure somebody has said that before me. But so yeah, we advertise our if you look around at the spaces, that's like a reflection of society's values. I mean, it's like in bad ways too. I mean, when I was doing the research for that, it's like, you know, Hitler with the Autobahn is like advertising German nationalism and efficiency and you know, whatever else, and then Mussolini like intentionally carving these like grand boulevards to like hearken back to Imperial Rome. And I don't know, you can see it now is like the gold plated buildings, you know, saying that this is, you know, a desirable thing or this is the way that the United States is, and, you know, corporate towers that are like glass clad and glistening or like stately government buildings signaling law and order. So it totally happens. ⁓ I think, you know And some people use it deliberately or some cultures use it and or societies use it deliberately, but ⁓ and you know, the other side of that, I mean, Sweden obviously has big government buildings and big glass towers too, but the the playground is also advertising values, right? I mean that's saying something about what matters here. Well, ⁓ I was wondering 'cause that sort of reminds me of Josie's way. And sort of like finding the ways to move around an environment. ⁓ I was wondering if you could sort of like speak to that story that becomes such like a through line throughout throughout the book. Yeah. I mean my daughter, ⁓ when I was writing the book just she was between kind of, I don't know, like really zero and, you know, four and a half. And ⁓ so I was spending a lot of time like seeing the world through our eyes and it I when she's such a like precocious little explorer kid. I mean, she as soon as she could walk, she was just like out the door and and she's like didn't care if anybody was following her. And we were like always just tagging along behind Josie, seeing where the day would take her. ⁓ and we would walk between the ⁓ between our house and there's a pond on campus that she would always kind of like find her way to. And ⁓ one time we were walking and we were walking through a house, the property that like a university now owns, but it was just like a standard house and the person who had owned the house in the past had engraved their name in marble on the path. And so we're walking down this path and Josie goes, That says Josie's way And I'm like, okay. And it's like that was she's like not only like naming the path after herself bec but she's also like I think she knew the double meaning where that was like her way of living life was like doing whatever the heck she wanted do and like everybody else could like work around it. And so yeah, I think and just like that's the that's the agency in growth, right? It's like you're you're able to, hey, I can do this and it feels good to be able to do it. And I now that I've taken this path, that's another like credential I have, another badge, right? It's like I have done this. I've done this thing. I'm amazing. ⁓ and now it's on to the next thing. that I'm going to explore. So like that growth and connection totally there in the Josie's way. And again, it wasn't like not necessarily like by building something new, but by experiencing something new. That and that idea of like not building new to unlock that competency and that agency is also like a through line to your past book on subtract. So it's and I'm curious to what extent that influenced this book. And instead of adding more things in our environment to help people achieve competency, growth and agency, what does it look like to take the idea of like can we subtract can we think about the space in a different way as opposed to requiring heavy resources or investment to get us to that next step? Yeah, there's certainly a common theme there where like I love these kind of I mean I engineering I think they're they're totally engineering solutions, but you know sometimes we don't associate them with engineering that are ⁓ maybe that are easy to overlook but also easy to easier to implement or like cost take less resources maybe is a better way to say that to implement. I mean if you look at and so like the whole idea of the last book is that we just psychologically we systematically overlook opportunities to take things away, to make situations better. Right. So if you say, hey Kate, how would you make this city better, like ever people's first instinct is like, okay, we could put this thing in, this thing, we could add this, we could add that. And yet there are all these opportunities to make cities better, which is like, ⁓ well what if we got a got rid of the the two lane road that's like keeping these two neighborhoods separate, right? ⁓ and I know people are getting more into like the highway removals and obviously there are once you get from like thinking about the idea to actually executing it, there become more challenges, right? 'Cause now you've got to figure out, okay, well, where does the traffic go and who's going to complain about this and like cost benefits? but the general idea of like, okay, is there like a way to do this that we aren't thinking of and that is like within our grasp? And like the Josie's Way thing, I mean this is I live five minutes away from like one of the most beautiful campuses in the United States and these are all parts of the campus that I had never set foot on because I was just taking my same normal way, right? So how many of us are like experiencing our cities or our neighborhoods that way where it's like, hey, there could be something you really love or just something that you want to add into your routine if you just went a hundred yards in the in the different direction. It's something that that is there that we're not seeing kind of like subtract. ⁓ I think You know, removing barriers, for example, right? That's like a really easy thing to think about with city design, but it's again it's it's removing and sometimes that can be like the most most beneficial thing. Like removing barriers to the behavior that you want, right? So it's like, okay, people aren't biking enough. Okay, w what do we need to do? We need to add bike lanes. Well, we c what are the barriers? It's like, well, cars are speeding down the road at like a million miles an hour. It's like, ⁓ well, we could remove the cars from the roads too, right? That's like another barrier ⁓ that you could get rid of. that's a super simple one, but it's you get the idea. Yeah. And it it's interesting because a lot of the topics within the book, a lot of the conversation today is about your individual experience with your built environment. And we spend a lot of time on this podcast talking about the institutional, structural, political components that make this so difficult for us to adjust. I gonna keep on referring to this, like achieve self-actualization in our cities. Yeah, that's a good way of saying it. I mean that's yeah. And I just I'm curious, like sometimes I listen to this podcast as I'm editing it and realize that yes, I would love to enact the policy that we're talking about. I would love to see this enacted, but the steps to get there are so arduous that it makes me at times feel more apathetic towards changing my built environment. How does this book sort of like shift the focus to the individual in a way that actually gives us more agency in our in our spaces? Yeah, I mean and again, I don't think it's wrong to pursue those other kind of leverage points, right? I think part of it is like a book is geared towards individual readers or, you know, it's gonna have a bigger audience if it's geared towards what individuals can do. I think all of these things work together, right? We think about, okay, like how do you, you know, change political things? How do you change like cultural things? How do you change individual behavior? ⁓ and I certainly don't want to pass the buck to individuals, right? I think this is something that, you know, governments and big institutions and organizations and corporations have a responsibility to deal with. But I do think it's it's nice to see how those thing things work together and reinforce each other. And I actually think that like the bus the the physical environment is a great way for individuals to like expand their voice, right? In fact, I would, you know we think about voting. Okay. That's a way to exercise your your voice and then, you know, the larger culture kind of goes in the direction of the vote. But the sometimes. And but the but if you you can also vote with your physical environment, right? If you're like, I'm taking down the fence between my house and the neighbors, or I'm putting up solar panels, it's like what's happening there is not only are you doing the behavior, but you're sending a signal about the behavior. There's a story in the book that I love about curb cuts. ⁓ so these are like basically where sidewalks go down to go down at the curb, right? So that like you're not having to go over a curb to go into the street and it like originated for people in wheelchairs, but it's also makes it better for people walking and it makes it better for kids on bikes and moms pushing strollers or dads pushing strollers. ⁓ and the way the curb cuts started was, you know, the people in there there's a gentleman, Ed Roberts, who ⁓ he was he had got polio and so then he was confined to a wheelchair and he was like, I can't get around the city. I think it was Oakland or San Francisco and I can't get around. And so I'm gonna ask people to ask the city to make these ramps. If they don't make the ramps, we're gonna like smash the curb so that it's like level to get down to there. And then this is spread around to be something that's like everywhere, right? And it's so this this change that, you know, started with an individual or a group of individuals and then people could see it and then they realized that it was good and they wanted it and it shows this value of like we care about people who are moving around the city. N not just walking and it spreads quickly. So I teach the sustainability in the built environment class. And one thing I do is let students do a project of like on something that they want. And like way back when before the Highline was the Highline, some students were like, ⁓ there's this like elevated trail in in New York that they're gonna restore and make make it so people can walk on it. I'm like, Yeah, sure, like do your project on that. And it was like two years later when this thing like actually existed and then another student is doing a project on how this is like the most visit visited place in New York City. I mean it's more than two years, but you get the idea and and it was like that was started by I think one of the guys had some like some professional experience in this area, but it wasn't in that capacity that he started it. And the other person was something totally different. And they were just like, This would be cool. Let's do it. And they you know and they made it happen with the help of a lot of other people. And again, like most visited place in New York City, that's pretty good. Well, I mean, full disclosure to the audience, I was Lighty's student, which seems like forever ago. It was, yeah. ⁓ before Lighty became famous, famous. So, ⁓ it's been a pleasure to sort of ride the sustainability in the built environment space with him over his career. Well, you've shaped my thinking. I mean, all students do in some way, but you've done way more than pretty much any other student. I mean, we've talked about some of the kinda early iterations of the subtraction stuff and the and just like this you know, this whole concept of like, okay, the built the built environment and people, right? And it's like we're obviously there's an intersection here. How do we like make some progress on it? Yeah. Yeah. I think it's interesting because we both got into civil engineering 'cause we thought that was the most effective way to in our communities and like the most direct way to actually change the built environment, but the more that we worked in that space, the more we realized that the barriers to change were not technical as much as they were social and psychological. ⁓ and so before we get back into talking about agency growth and connection, but I just want to like better understand, do you feel that that is even more ⁓ striking these days as it was when you first started your career at the intersection of psychology and the built environment? Yeah, I think so. I mean it's not like it's not like there's any like lack of technical fixes for like meeting our basic needs at this point. and I think the thing maybe that's different too is like this whole I mean it's not I'm not that old. It's not like there wasn't like the digital world, but like the amount of li the amount of our lives that there wasn't Twitter and social media when I first started and there wasn't you know, people weren't connecting on Zoom, right? It creates a new challenge of like, okay, we're out of this physical environment, so we're not getting these needs met, but it's also people think a lot about like how our psychological needs are getting met in the digital world or not getting met, right? And I'm sure that there's not that much of a difference between trying to achieve growth, agency, and connection in physical versus virtual space. Except for the fact that like physical is the original way that we've done it, right? And so, you know, virtual space I think is always going to be at a tremendous disadvantage in meeting those things. I think the the notion that we can just like live our lives in these two dimensional worlds that don't meet that aren't going to meet our agency growth and connection nearly to the same degree that the physical environments can, you know, they're just fundamentally incapable of doing that. And it's foolish for us to I don't think people are sitting there thinking that it can, but it it's not it shouldn't be surprising that you're feeling like a little hollow staring at the screen all day. Yeah. No, ⁓ that's totally fair. I i you know, as I was thinking through this book and sort of the agency side and the individual nature in which we try to influence our our personal and collective spaces, I I I kept on coming back to your idea of like bike shedding. And I want you to dive into that a little bit, but I also sort of want to tee this up as it seems like in our built environment it we get told no a lot. Like there are just some inherent ways that new projects are presented to us, that public meetings are set up to exclude a large portion of the community in which projects are being enacted. ⁓ in terms of laws saying, ⁓ no, you can't go here or curfews at this time. And I'm curious to what extent have we been trained out of agency in American cities as opposed to maybe other cities around the world and wha how that has resulted in our apathy around community building and city building. ⁓ and maybe like alternative ways in which we're shaping communities. I think of like graffiti as like a way to act out and seek agency in our spaces that that people are not feeling in other ways. Yeah. I think ⁓ I think there's two levels. I mean, I think I'll start with just general and then go to like the American versus other cultures. ⁓ there's like maybe things that are unique to American. But I think there's just this general tendency to like assume rules, right? You had a different you had a one podcast episode on like removing friction, right? And like sometimes this friction is just like Either somebody's putting it there and it doesn't even belong there, right? Where it's like, no, you can't possibly do that. It's like, no, yeah, yeah, actually I can. And you aren't like the police of telling me I can put a speed bump in the alley behind my house or like whatever. and the ⁓ or it's like you're imposing the limits on yourself, right? It's like, ⁓ there must be some like big approval process, or like if Nobody's gonna listen to me at the community meeting, so I'm not even gonna go. It's like, well, actually, no, if you went, you could just say the thing and it might actually happen or it might take, you know, three steps, but it does happen. so I think there's just like this we it's kind of easy to assume that there's going to be these barriers there. ⁓ and it's it's a messy process, right? So like this is like where the bike shedding comes in. So like the bike shedding is this tendency to focus on the trivial and certain at the expense of the like important and like slightly uncertain, right? So then you're like, well, I don't know what's gonna happen if I go to the community meeting and ask for a new playground, right? It's probably it's they're probably not gonna say yes, here's a playground. They're going to ask why, and then I'm going to have to like get a petition and then I'm it might not be the exact playground that I want, but it might actually be better because you get like community input and other people figure out how to build the playground. So you're like putting yourself into this messy process And that, you know, it it it can be it it's just like not our it's that feels less comfortable intellectually than just being like, All right, well, instead of doing that, I'm going to, you know, move the furniture in my living room again. Right. Which is like this this small thing, but you know what it's going to look like when it's done, right? ⁓ and like the original illustration of bike shedding is just it's a parable, but it's like something that's been shown in psychology is that or I don't know. Parable is the right word. It's like That's right. Is it right? Yeah. So it's like the okay, people are convened to like discuss a nuclear power plant. And ⁓ you know, everybody comes together, the engineers, the designers, the owners, the community members, the people who are gonna work there. They're like, Here are the plans and everybody's like, All right, sounds good. There's like a two few softball questions, like, Where's the reactor or whatever? And and then there's you know, it takes like fifteen minutes and then there's more time left in the meeting, so they're like, Well, here's the bike shed that's going to go next to the nuclear power plant and then the whole meeting like springs to life and everybody has their opinions on like what color the bike shed should be and like the right the racking system and, you know, who gets to use it and so on and so forth because it's a much more like understandable system, right? And it's it it's like, ⁓ I I get what a green bike shed would look like versus a purple bike shed and I can I can opine on that. And I mean, I saw that I worked in construction management before I went back to graduate school. And it's like we'd have that a version of that meeting for schools, for example, and and the things would veer towards like fixtures, right? It's like, ⁓ what are the fixtures on the bathroom? Or like what again, paint colors. And again, like it was my fault as the person managing the process, not the people who were saying it. But these are like really well-meaning teachers. And it's like we that we should have been like, all right, how do we What do you guys think about like traffic flow safety around the front of the building for school drop off and pickup? That's an important thing. We know we're not gonna solve it perfectly, but we need to like talk about it, right? And so bike shedding is this tendency to focus on the the trivial at the expense of the important. and I think in the as far as the US, I mean maybe just the like we go a little overboard on like the trying to control things with like rules. I think. I don't think what like having too many rules is like as insidious as that. I just think it's something that can be toggled that would make you feel more or less agency, right? I know we're a little bit over time, but I was hoping we could sort of land on this last question and translate everything we've discussed today to the listener. and how they can think about their built environment if they were to walk outside later today or tomorrow and just do one thing that would help create a good place. What would you hope that they do? I really think noticing, you know, like the second chapter of the book after the intro is like engage, right? And like pay attention. And I think there's so many Yeah, there's all these things that we've talked about that you could fix about it or or ways to engage with it, but they're also like just these beautiful things that are there. It could be like a brick pattern that you notice and that's like as beautiful as, you know, a piece of nature or a sculpture, right? And it's not something that your screen can give you because it's again three dimensional and you can touch it. so I think th the one thing would just be noticing and paying attention. Using the tools that we've talked about today and but also the other ideas that you talk about on your podcast. I mean it's like fun to be able to to be engaged in this world. And again, that goes back to the very I talked about one of the one of the strongest arguments for these being our basic needs is that this is what our ancestors had to do, or at least this is what the kid on the beach had to do. And like being engaged is part of that. Like noticing our surroundings, noticing how they're helping our lives, noticing how they're not helping our lives and then trying to do something about it. The places we build don't just shape what we can do in our cities. They shape how we feel, how much agency we have, and how we grow, and ultimately how we connect with one another. And maybe building better cities isn't only about changing the systems around us. It's also about recognizing that we have more agency to shape the places we inhabit more than we think. If you enjoyed this conversation, check out Lydie's book, In a Good Place, and share this episode with someone you think would also enjoy it. And if you haven't already subscribed to Building Better Cities, leave us a review because it truly helps others find the show. So until next time, let's keep building better cities together.