#constructed environment

Are white kids less racist than their grandparents? My research with kids doesn’t give us any reason to believe that each new generation of white people will naturally or inevitably hold more open-minded and tolerant viewpoints on race than previous generations.Dismantling racism in the United States will require more than just passive hope.One 11-year-old named Natalie told me:

“Racism was a problem when all those slaves were around and that, like, bus thing and the water fountain. I mean, everything was crazy back in the olden days. … But now, I mean, since Martin Luther King and, like, Eleanor Roosevelt, and how she went on the bus. And she was African-American and sat on the white part. … After the 1920s and all that, things changed.”

When it came to the understandings of privilege and inequality, some kids made comments like, “There’s no such thing [as privilege]. Everyone gets what they deserve in life, if they work for it.”

Other kids disagreed, like 11-year-old Aaron:

“I think [whites] just kind of have the upside. … And since much of society is run by white people anyway, which is an upside, more white people are, you know, accepted into jobs, so they get the upside. So, yeah, I do think they have the upside.”

I also found that many of the children expressed forms of racial apathy. When a black teenager was shot and killed by a police officer in the community, 16-year-old Jessica told me that she “did not care” about black people being killed because they “obviously did something to deserve it.”

But some kids, like 16-year-old Charlotte, had a very different reaction:

“It should all be stopped. There is actually a problem and a system that allowed this to happen. … Technically, legally, what that officer did was ‘okay’? It’s like, well, maybe that’s the problem. Maybe killing black people shouldn’t be legally ‘okay,’ you know?”

Are white kids less racist than their grandparents? My research with kids doesn’t give us any reason to believe that each new generation of white people will naturally or inevitably hold more open-minded and tolerant viewpoints on race than previous generations.

For a long time, biologists thought evolution was a very, very slow process, too tardy to be observed in a human lifetime. But recently, we have come to understand that evolution can happen very quickly, as long as natural selection — the relative benefit that a particular characteristic bestows on its bearer — is strong.

And where else to find such strong natural selection than in the heart of a big city? The urban environment is about as extreme as it gets. Temperatures in the city center can be more than 10 degrees higher than in the surrounding countryside. Traffic causes continuous background noise, a mist of fine dust particles and barriers to movement for any animal that cannot fly or burrow. Much of the city is clad in impervious surfaces of stone, glass, steel and tarmac. There is pollution of soil, water and air, mainly human-derived food sources, and an especially motley crew of local and invasive flora and fauna.

With urban environments expanding all over the world, wildlife and biologists alike are starting to treat the city as a true ecosystem. Many species’ original habitats are being squeezed into annihilation. For them, it’s adapt or die. And field biologists like me are following suit. As we have to travel ever farther to find untouched wilderness, we are beginning to realize that the expanding urban sprawl is perhaps not something to be depressed about, but rather something very exciting, as entirely novel forms of life are evolving right under our noses.

The most exciting projects are perhaps no longer in faraway forests and canyons, but just there on our doorstep. We evolutionary biologists are trading our expedition gear for subway tickets and studying street grass and house mosquitoes instead of jungle orchids and mountain birds.

And we have millions of city dwellers to help us. Citizen science projects on urban ecology and evolution are springing up everywhere. This year, my students and I will introduce a smartphone app to measure how snail shells in hot inner cities in Europe and North America are evolving lighter colors to shield against overheating. Adeline Murthy of the University of New Mexico used the Christmas Bird Count, an annual census conducted by volunteers, to show that North American cities harbor an avifauna that is pretty much homogenized across the continent. At least 18 bird species are shared by all of them — something not the case in non-urban areas.

In fact, that Christmas data highlights one feature of urban nature that sets it apart from all other ecosystems: globalization. City-adapted wildlife is likely to hitch rides on human transportation and colonize other cities — at least within the same climate zone.

I have recently acquired a number of books to aid in my research surrounding the topics of psychology and the constructed environment. However, I have chosen to begin with a book that I have had for quite some time and neglected to read. In “The Thinking Hand,” Juhani Pallasmaa argues against the “Cartesian duality of body and mind,” exploring the crucial role the hand plays not only in our construction of the world around us, but in our perception of it as well.

His introduction, “Embodied Existence and Sensory Thought,” has put me in a place of contemplation about the many tangents I might explore. I feel drawn to take up and pursue his argument that the “fundamental, unconscious, situational and tacit understanding of the body in the making of architecture is grossly undervalued.” There is also evidence in this essay to support the same being said of elements down to the least significant products around us. We are not only things made up of our thoughts and the resultant conceptual understandings encased in the body as a vessel. We are a direct result of our physical experiences. The world exists around us as a product of our many senses, without which our capacity for thought would either be greatly reduced or nonexistent. And so if I were to begin a list of bullet points to keep in mind here and now, the first would be,

• Stress the importance of experiencing a physical world. It is this physical experience that defines our understanding of our many environments. We use those physical experiences as subconscious thought processes, automatically responding to sensory information.

But I should take my own words up to this point with a grain of salt. I am still in shallow water.

I have fewer thoughts on his first formal essay in the book, “The Mysterious Hand.” But that doesn’t devalue the writing. He lays out very clearly the importance and complex context of the hand throughout history. He notes its significant role in our evolution, attributing the roots of our brain growth and expansion to the hand and development of tools. And although recent research may reveal that cooked food could be the true root of our brain’s evolution, there is nothing to say to remove the hand or tools as a responsible party in that development. Anyway, the point is that the hand has always had a hand in things. 

Yayoi Kusama | Fireflies on the water

Susan Falls and Julie Rogers Varland, Designing Relationships: Investigating Community and Constructing Environments