Environmentalizing the city: Urban Life and the Biophilic Brain

• In Event: Neurosocieties: Interdisciplinary Explorations of the Brain, Culture and Ethics 3

Abstract

What does it mean to imagine a city as a particular kind of psychological and neurobiological environment? What happens when we re-think the politics of the city through ecological and environmental tropes – tropes that figure urban citizens as the bearers of a very specific neuropsychological inheritance, torqued by the psychogenic exposures that compose city life.

In this paper, I address these questions by reporting from the early stages of a project on environmentalizing the city. This wider project focuses on how a range of actors, across a diverse set of sites in policy, research, commerce, and design, are coming to understand the problems of city life as the problems of a particular organisms, with particular brains, in particular environments.

The paper reports from one part of this landscape –its relationship to an emergent language and practice of ‘biophilia.’ Rooted in EO Wilson’s idea that human being have an innate affinity to be surrounded by other living things, biophilic design and planning practices are involved in a project of environmentalizing the city by situating ‘nature’ as the cure for the multiple ills of city living.

Drawing on early stage empirical work, and rooted in recent work in the environmental humanities, urban theory, and feminist STS, the paper asks: what might it mean to reposition the ‘right to the city’ as a kind of biophilic desire? What happens – neurobiological and politically – when ‘nature’ becomes the key site of intervention for the stressed brain of the urban citizen?

Author

• Des Fitzgerald, Cardiff University