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A simple experiment turning a parking space into a parklet reveals how small changes to public spaces can spark connection, belonging, and awe.
Summary: What if even the smallest changes to our cities could transform how we feel and connect? In this episode of The Science of Happiness, we visit the site of San Francisco’s first parklet, and explore how reclaiming everyday spaces can invite people to pause, gather, and experience a sense of belonging.
Today’s Guests:
BLAINE MERKER is an urban designer and public space advocate. He leads Gehl’s Enterprise & Corporations team.
Learn more about Blaine here: https://www.gehlpeople.com/people/blaine-merker/
SETHA LOW is an anthropologist and Professor at City University of New York. She’s also the author of the book Why Public Space Matters, as well as many other books examining the social life of cities.
Learn more about Setha here: https://www.gc.cuny.edu/people/setha-low
This episode is supported by The Gambrell Foundation, who believe a great life grows from strong relationships, a sense of belonging, and moments of awe and wonder. Learn more about their work at gambrellfoundation.org
Related Science of Happiness episodes:
What Humans Can Learn From Trees: https://tinyurl.com/48te84ps
How to Do Good for the Environment (And Yourself): https://tinyurl.com/5b26zwkx
Are You Remembering the Good Times: https://tinyurl.com/483bkk2h
Related Happiness Break episodes:
How To Ground Yourself in Nature: https://tinyurl.com/25ftdxpm
Pause to Look at the Sky: https://tinyurl.com/4jttkbw3
Experience Nature Wherever You Are, with Dacher: https://tinyurl.com/mrutudeh
Follow us on Instagram: @ScienceOfHappinessPod
We’d love to hear about your experience with this practice! Share your thoughts at happinesspod@berkeley.edu or use the hashtag #happinesspod.
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Transcription:
DACHER KELTNER: This episode is supported by the Gambrell Foundation, who believe a great life grows from strong relationships, a sense of belonging and moments of awe and wonder. Learn more about their work at gambrellfoundation.org.
Music
BLAINE MERKER: I grew up in a small city called Bend in Oregon. Lived in an old logging town, 20,000 people. Kind of knew everybody. And then when I was nine years old, my family moved to Amsterdam 'cause my dad got a job as a aircraft engineer. So I lived in Amsterdam and then we moved to Zurich. And those were cities that had great public transportation systems.
Train SFX
And as a young teenager. I had a transit pass in my pocket and you know, a little bit of money and I could go anywhere I wanted. So, you know, what I noticed was just kind of this infinite. Invitation to make stops if you wanted to just kind of loiter around and sit around on a park bench if you wanted.
The streets allowed you to make choices. There wasn't just one way to do things. There was a million ways to do things. And then we moved back to Oregon and I looked around at everything in the United States and thought, why can't we have more of that?
DACHER KELTNER: This is the Science of Happiness. I'm Dacher Keltner. Welcome to the first episode of Cities of Awe, our ongoing series where we explore how moments of wonder can emerge in the midst of public life: on busy streets, in shared public spaces, inside art museums. And how those experiences can shift our perspective, deepen our connections, and enrich our wellbeing.
If we look back at the pandemic, it became clear how essential public spaces are to public health. We went on long walks and hikes, and we even met friends for coffee or dinner in parks. Moments like that remind us. The public space doesn't just happen, it's imagined and sometimes improvised. One small experiment in 2005, set in motion big changes for our cities and helped us in a crisis, even though it was legally ambiguous.
BLAINE MERKER: What are those loophole spaces in the legal and social fabric of our city where we could claim it for a little while? And kind of have it be this ephemeral thing that was spectacular and interesting and met an unmet need.
DACHER KELTNER: We also go deeper into how public space affects culture and everything from climate change to a quality of opportunity with anthropologist Setha Low.
SETHA LOW: You can't think of any revolution or even change in a country. Didn't somehow start in a public space where people could come together and hear one another.
DACHER KELTNER: That's up next on the science of Happiness.
DACHER KELTNER: Welcome back to The Science of Happiness. I'm Dacker Keltner. This week we're looking at ways public spaces impact our daily lives. It's the first episode in our series Cities of Awe. Well-designed public spaces invite curiosity, connection, and creativity. They give people room to slow down, notice one another, and discover that even in a busy city we're part of something larger than ourselves. At their best, they can be powerful engines of inclusiveness, creating room for people of different ages, cultures, and backgrounds to feel seen, welcome and like they belong.
DOWNTOWN SF AMBI
Recently I went to downtown San Francisco to learn more about how public spaces shape our wellbeing.
BLAINE MERKER: When I look at this intersection, I see a lot of people moving.
DACHER KELTNER: That's Blaine Merker. He's an urban designer and public space advocate, and he thinks this intersection lacks something. In his field of work, they call it stickiness.
BLAINE MERKER: It's the number of people staying divided by the number of people moving.
DACHER KELTNER: Stickiness measures how much a place makes people want to stick around instead of just pass through.
DACHER KELTNER: I look around and doing a little calculation of that ratio.. it's zero.
DACHER KELTNER: So how could we make people stick around.. maybe a place to sit?
BLAINE MERKER: If you look around, I. Don't see a single bench, a single chair, a single intentional place to sit,
DACHER KELTNER: A place to sit might make you stay and start to really notice the people and world around you.
BLAINE MERKER: When you stay. And even if you're not interacting with them, you're, you're kind of saying, I'm participating. I'm part of who's here.
DACHER KELTNER: Blaine takes me to the spot where he first tried to make public spaces stickier, encouraging people to stop, look around and become part of the space.
BLAINE MERKER: I'm gonna take you just to this across the street from this vacant lot. Still a vacant lot.
DACHER KELTNER: We arrive on a rooftop to see the spot where the first parklet in San Francisco appeared
BLAINE MERKER: when we built the first park in a parking space.It was directly across from where we're standing here and we thought it was a good spot 'cause there's so many people down here in, in their workday and, and yet it felt like this kind of forgotten space.
DACHER KELTNER: We leave the rooftop and head to the studio. Blaine tells me how it all started with a group of friends.
BLAINE MERKER: I'll take you back to 2005. I, I had just. Steady landscape architecture, we were working downtown….. Fade…. and so we would steal away from the office often during the middle of the day and we'd scout project locations. And at night, every Friday we would meet up at a bar called the Latin American Club in the Mission, and we had a table and we would sit at that same table and we'd kind of drop our plans for, you know, the latest guerilla art project that we would do in San Francisco.
And we'd been having this conversation for a while that we'd talk about what are those loophole spaces in the legal and social fabric of our city where we could claim it for a little while, and not have to invest in something permanent or get permission for something permanent, but kind of have it be this ephemeral thing that was spectacular and interesting and met an unmet need.
So JB and I, we did some analysis of where the city was underserved by public open space, and Matt, who was trained as a lawyer, he looked at the code and Matt determined that there was no law against putting something other than a car in a parking space as long as you paid the meter. And JB and I determined that one of the spaces that was least served by open space was First and Mission in downtown San Francisco.
And we kind of talked about it for a while and we said it's $2 an hour to rent that space. 200 square feet. What does that work out to? That is the cheapest Financial District real estate you can possibly rent. We are gonna rent that real estate, and we made a plan to install a temporary public park as quickly as we could with all the constituent elements of a park, a tree, a bench, beautiful sod, fresh green sod,
DACHER KELTNER: Really, fresh sod?
BLAINE MERKER: Yeah, it was all real stuff. And we drove downtown and fortunately, a parking spot was available. At first emissions, we'd hope. And we pulled up and we unloaded the sod. We unloaded this big 24 inch box trees about 20 feet high and put out the park bench and kind of retreated across Mission Street, up to a roof deck.
DACHER KELTNER: Wow.
BLAINE MERKER: And just kind of watched and waited to see what would happen
DACHER KELTNER: And what happened?
BLAINE MERKER: Nothing. At first, everybody walked by it. So all these people dressed in business costumes walking by. And then after about 10 minutes, a fellow came over with a pizza on a paper plate and he sat down on the bench and then he took off his shoes like five minutes later.
DACHER KELTNER: Wow.
BLAINE MERKER: And I was like, okay, it's happening.
DACHER KELTNER: Yeah.
BLAINE MERKER: He got his toes in the grass and then a couple minutes later, another fella came over and he kind of sat down on the box of the box tree. You know, like, uh, five feet from him and we were like, oh, we should have put in two benches. And after that for two hours, people just cycled in and out. And there was a little crowd of people that kind of gathered around like a bunch of people from an office. Just had a conversation there. It was really cool. So this event only lasted two hours and we packed everything up afterwards, but we took a photograph from that roof deck and Matt's wife, Andrea put it on her blog. And her blog actually had a lot of subscribers, and so, people kind of started sending this around, this photograph of a park in a parking space, and folks started reaching out to us.
We got calls from Australia and Italy and people would say, can you come to our city and put one of these in? So we created a manual that we put up online as a how to, sort of the instruction code for how to do this. We were inspired by open source software and we thought, let's not own this thing. Let’s create the platform for other people to keep building this because it's gonna evolve and it's gonna get better if other people do it. And I think that idea and the kind of values of it, we said be generous, be safe, be inclusive, be respectful. You know, clean up after yourself and be collaborative, you know, work with other people. Do it as a group activity. It became this kind of template for folks and later that year, someone from the mayor's office talked to us in San Francisco and said, we do have this idea about creating a permit pathway to actually do this more permanently.
DACHER KELTNER: Wow.
BLAINE MERKER: And would you help us think about that? And so we helped the city, the planning department, the mayor's office, we offered some advice about how to create an initial permit pilot, and that became the parklet program.
DACHER KELTNER: Wow, that's incredible. The presence of green spaces is, I mean, there's a lot of great data. London is greening, and rewilding of Singapore and all these examples, and you've probably been part of that work. Access to green spaces is good for depression levels and anxiety and physical health and longevity.
It's just one of these magical qualities. What are the kinds of greening of urban spaces that you see growing and are excited about and are encouraging?
BLAINE MERKER: It's true. The more green that you see, it just visually is in your field of view, makes a difference to health statistics. There's also lots of benefits to cleaning the air, public health, and things like reducing vehicle speeds.
So cars drive slower when there's more trees on the street.
DACHER KELTNER: Wow.
BLAINE MERKER: Yeah. We all slow down. Right? The sort of American approach to health is so puritanical and individualistic. Yeah, right. It's sort of like, are you optimizing? Have you got a wearable on so that you can take control of your health and your statistics, and can you manage your machine well?
DACHER KELTNER: Yeah. Well put.
BLAINE MERKER: And there's something to that, but really it ignores the fact that we're like fish swimming in a current, and it's harder to swim upstream if the current is pushing you in a direction. You have to work twice as hard, you know, to go the other way. And I think that's what our urban environment has created for us is an environment where it's just hard to be healthy.
'Cause you get, statistically, more than half of the weekly exercise you need, as defined by the WHO, can just come from the number of walkable intersections in your neighborhood.
DACHER KELTNER: Wow.
BLAINE MERKER: The density of those intersections, right. So half of your exercise is determined by actually something that is outside of your personal control. So I don't think we nearly appreciate enough how our urban environment shapes the kinds of choices we're even presented with. But we have many other things like that, that the urban environment defines for us: who we're gonna talk to, how long we can sit in a space, whether the space is comfortable and is gonna, you know, allow us to sit there and read a book.
Do you walk around and see elders? Do you walk around and see kids?
DACHER KELTNER: Yeah.
BLAINE MERKER: It's really important actually for everybody to make eye contact with elders and kids every day. It reminds us of. The social fabric that we live in. We're not isolated people just going to work. So I think about that kind of like the diversity of the human tapestry that you encounter sort of by default without effort is super important.
DACHER KELTNER: Thank you so much, Blaine. We, in the world of happiness, need to be thinking about space and our relationship to context. We don't do a good enough job, and I think you've opened our eyes in many ways. Thanks for being here.
BLAINE MERKER: Thanks. It's a lot of fun.
DACHER KELTNER: It is clear that public space, or the lack of it can have a real impact on our health, and few places shape that more quietly or more powerfully than parks. When older adults have access to parks, research shows the risk of cardiovascular disease drops. And living near green spaces is linked to lower levels of stress, anxiety, and depression, and more movement and social connection.
STEPHANIE LAW: If you don't have those spaces, then there's no real place to be around with your neighbors. Be around the people that are a part of your city and to feel a part of that whole.
DACHER KELTNER: That's Oakland resident Stephanie Law. She's sitting in Diamond Park playing the hand pan.
STEPHANIE LAW: It's just nice being out in the open, having some fresh air, and frequently people seem to enjoy when I'm playing, so I feel like if I'm practicing, I might as well do it outside.
DACHER KELTNER: The music invites people in.
STEPHANIE LAW: I made a few friends over the couple of years that I've been doing this. Every once in a while people stop to talk to me and we just have a nice conversation.
SETHA LOW: What if we designed our cities around public space? What if we imagined the city as a network of public spaces that we know produce health, both physical health and mental health? And one would argue, dare I say, social health
DACHER KELTNER: Anthropologist, Setha Low has spent decades studying how public spaces influence who feels welcome, who feels excluded, and how communities connect. We'll hear more from Setha about the science behind why public spaces matter after this break.
Welcome back to The Science of Happiness. I'm Dacher Keltner. You are listening to Cities of Awe, our series exploring how public spaces shape wellbeing. With us is Setha Low, an anthropologist and professor at City University of New York. She's also the author of an amazing book called Why Public Space Matters, as well as many other books examining the social life of cities. Setha, welcome to the show and thanks for joining us.
SETHA LOW: I'm absolutely delighted to be here.
DACHER KELTNER: Take us back to the beginning of your career devoted to the study of public spaces. What inspired you to think as a social scientist about the meaning of public spaces?
SETHA LOW: I was a medical anthropologist and I went off to Costa Rica and I studied the healthcare system of San José. And on my way back there were very few jobs and I was offered a job in the Department of Landscape Architecture and regional planning at the University of Pennsylvania with Ian McHarg, who believed that healthy environments would create healthy people. One could argue even happy environments would create happy people, and Ian was quite unusual to hire a medical anthropologist into a design school. So I went and I kept teaching about health and wellbeing. But little by little I became more and more really intrigued with space itself and how it works to really change people's lives.
And then I found out we really didn't know that much actually, about public space, not from a social scientific point of view. So I went back to Costa Rica and decided to look at plazas because plazas were incredible centers of social interaction where everybody was there every day and you could really see it in action.
DACHER KELTNER: Yeah, reading about your work on plazas was a revelation for me. I've always felt like Mexican zócalos are some of the most dense places of healthy humanity you can find, and you were one of the first to really bring our attention to that.
So let's get to happiness Setha. You write beautifully about how even small moments in parks and public spaces help us connect just these moments of connection, even small ones, making eye contact, striking up a conversation they make people feel a sense of happiness and connection. Tell us about that.
SETHA LOW: Yeah. We know that contact has these enduring effects. Contact really is the basis of a human’s psychology. We have really not been thinking about the environment and about the contact people have with strangers and all of these things that make us so very human.
It's not just at the neighborhood level. The outcomes for an individual, which include health, wellbeing, mental health, proper socialization of your kids, on and on and on. I mean, just the goods of what you get are so rich,
DACHER KELTNER: And this one really shook me. What about fear?
SETHA LOW: Right
DACHER KELTNER: Public spaces are often fearful, and you write about how that is in some sense, a basis or a source of authoritarianism or sort of a predilection toward different kinds of social structures. So tell us about that.
SETHA LOW: Yeah. Well, the fear of the other can be of anyone or anything, right? That's what I learned in studying gated communities. They can get in and out. It's always imagined.
And it's always imagined by that person, and you must understand the context of what they were talking about. Yeah, whether it's China or South Africa, you know, I went and looked at gated communities all around the world, but the problem is here. For me at least in looking at all the fear and the securitization and what makes middle class, I would say in New York, mostly white people feel safe is more policing, more cameras. Those very same apparatuses, those very, the cameras and the police and the guards and the gates and all of it. Just make young people of color in New York City feel even more excluded, less like they belong and less part of society.
So in fact, fear and the physical manifestations of it through securitization or security practices, whatever word you want to use for that infrastructure, really then separates everyone and doesn't allow that kind of contact, which is necessary. And if we don't know each other. And we don't ever talk to one another and we don't ever feel safe around one another, whoever we might be.
How do we, again, not end up in the situation we're in right now with a highly polarized society? The fact is, remember, as we create our environments in our public spaces, anything you do to make one group feel safer, excludes another. We need to be thinking about how to create environments for people to flourish in multiple senses and public spaces really do that, but only if they're not full of fear and securitization.
DACHER KELTNER: We're in a time where democracy is deeply under threat in the United States and elsewhere, and you write that public spaces are essential to democracy. How is it that if I can walk through Sproul Plaza or Washington Square, New York, or a zócalo in Mexico, that I am stronger in my democratic participation?
SETHA LOW: We need open spaces where everyone can be to have demonstrations. I mean, look at Tahrir Square, you can't think of any revolution or even change in a country that didn't somehow start in a public space where people could come together and hear one another. Public spaces are places where, where we see the public sphere, that's the communication, the ideas, the ideologies kind of in play communicated out more broadly, and that's something we're really missing now. We don't have open public spaces where people are coming together, you know, maybe in conflict, maybe in cooperating, maybe in a little of everything.
DACHER KELTNER: This has been so fascinating, Setha, and so important for the science of happiness. You know, we're taking stock of how public spaces of different kinds help us with health and democracy and a sense of social connection, even economic benefits, and I wanted to end with just your work on a toolkit. You know, you've worked with different communities, you have advised people on the nature of public spaces and moving them more towards inclusive, vibrant, and healthy places that we all share. Tell us about your toolkit and what an ordinary citizen can do for their own wellbeing and that of their neighbors.
SETHA LOW: I'm a great believer that we all have responsibilities for our own public spaces. I do. And so I've created this toolkit that's at the end of the book in the last chapter.
It's also on the Public Space Research Group, which is my research group at the Graduate Center of CUNY on our website. It's free. It's right there, and it shows you how to map in your community, how to take notes on what's going on, how to interview people, what questions to ask, and then it shows you how to put some of that material together to get an assessment.
You know, there isn't one way to do it. What it requires is a neighborhood or a group of people to be interested in first looking at the spaces that they live in and work and assessing, having the tools to be able to see what's working or not, and then you know what to do. You can go to your community counts board, or you can go to your city, or you can do it yourself.
You will begin to see how you could intervene to make things different.
DACHER KELTNER: Setha Low, I wanna thank you for all of the wisdom that you've been gathering over these years about the power of public spaces, and I think you've opened up a lot of lines of inquiry for scientists and for our audience just to be thinking about this new facet of happiness. So thanks for being on our show. It's been wonderful.
SETHA LOW: Thank you for having me.
DACHER KELTNER: We will journey from San Francisco to the streets of Harlem in New York City, continuing our cities of awe exploration and uncovering how architecture and history can inspire moments of awe.
BOB MCKINNON: I was walking around the corner and I was like, oh my gosh. I had no idea that Alexander Hamilton's house was around the corner from campus. I remember the feeling when I saw it. It literally was a feeling of awe. I'm like, it is here.
CURATOR: Ashes of Langston Hughes are interred directly beneath. Right here in a stainless steel firm.
DACHER KELTNER: That's next time on the Science of Happiness. Thank you for listening to The Science of Happiness. Our associate producers are Emily Brower, Tarini Kakkar, and Anna Zou. Our producer is Truc Nguyen. Our sound designer is Jenny Cataldo of Accompany Studios, our executive producer is Shuka Kalantari. I'm Dacher Keltner. Have a great day.
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