“Little boxes on the hillside
Little boxes made of ticky tacky
Little boxes on the hillside
Little boxes all the same”—Little Boxes, Malvina Reynolds (1963)
Malvina Reynolds’ song about the sameness of a burgeoning suburbia in California is now more than 60 years old. What she decried as “ticky tacky” we might now call “cookie cutters” and it seems that over time architecture has not strayed from a kind of design sameness. Trends and materials may change somewhat with the vicissitudes of fads, but the practice of erecting whole neighborhoods with little to distinguish one house from another goes on unabated.
And what might this sameness do to our mental well-being?
Reynolds’ may have been focused on critiquing middle-class conformity, but there are other potential challenges that a uniformity of design might pose for human flourishing.
Boredom is likely one of them.
This is not merely about how our houses and our shopping and leisure districts look, but more about what kinds of opportunities they afford us. And it all begins with the car.
By building car-centric neighborhoods we privilege travel away from and not around your own area. By centralizing shopping in either strip or big box outdoor malls, we force people to trek long distances to get what they need, blending with people from all over the city and depriving them of the chance to get to know, not just their neighbors, but their local vendors.
We do the same with leisure, recreation, dining or connection to cultural events. By disconnecting these activities from where we live, making them only accessible by car, we rob ourselves of the opportunity to connect with each other. And a life without meaningful connection is a boring life.
Hannah Kosoff and colleagues explored the relationship between urban design and boredom in a recent paper that outlines how impactful – for boredom – our design choices can be.
Strip mall in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada
Source: Photo by author JD
When it comes to strip malls, Kosoff and colleagues make the point that these, like our surburban houses, look and feel “all the same”. Without a distinct identity, they offer us little to connect with. I would suggest that such places are also characterized by visual clutter – ads jostling for prime visual real estate in order to capture our attention, may instead serve to help us disengage, fleeing the visual chaos for something more meaningful.
This is Orin Klapp’s notion (almost as old as Reynolds’ song) that boredom can arise at an upper bound of complexity, where the chaos and bombardment of information prevents us from finding meaning. That competition for our attention, with its onslaught of stimulation of the senses, may work far better to make us bored.
Kosoff points out too that our suburbs lack public spaces – parks, squares and plazas that by design are where people meet. Instead, we hunker down in our ticky tacky boxes, travel from place to place in our metal boxes, and in so doing sequester ourselves off from people who live just meters away.
Failing to promote connection is a good way to promote boredom.
In a study from Kitchener-Waterloo in Canada, researchers asked people to wander around town photographing places they did and did not like. It turns out that what people liked were places that afforded opportunities for social connections. It may be true that these places that allow us to connect also allow us to slow things down a little – to disconnect from the typical rush of modern life. Rushing from one activity to the next likely makes connection more difficult and boredom more likely.
In public spaces we also open ourselves up to the possibility of the spontaneous and the serendipitous, two things sure to keep boredom at bay. Cocooning ourselves in our cars prevents the unexpected from ever intruding into the routine. By design, our car-centric neighborhoods prevent us from discovering things we never anticipated coming across our radar.
Being car-centric means that we avoid places where it is difficult to find parking spots – typically the same downtown areas that have most of the amenities and opportunities for social interaction that we crave. And the effects of this are disproportionately felt by the less advantaged.
Recent work from Carrie Anne Marshall and colleagues explored the role boredom plays in the everyday experiences of the unhoused and the recently housed. She found boredom to be a prominent part of the lives of the unhoused, one that often blurs into feelings of depression and hopelessness. The key driver was the lack of meaningful things to engage with.
What was intriguing about this work is that simply providing a roof over one’s head did not eliminate the boredom. When exploring the lives of people who had recently transitioned from being unhoused to now having some form of housing, boredom and all its attendant ills – mostly a lower sense of well-being – did not go away.
What was missing for both the unhoused and the recently housed was a strong enough sense of social connection to make life feel engaging and meaningful.
(Interestingly, Marshall recently told me that when she set up her study, advertising at a homeless shelter that they were interested in ‘boredom’, people lined up to participate. Clearly, the experience of boredom represents an understudied but vitally important part of the lived experience of unhoused people.)
When we design our cities to privilege the car we lose out on other opportunities for connection and that loss can often result in boredom.
So what can urban designers do to avoid making more boring cities? Here’s what Kosoff and colleagues suggest:
1. Avoid architectural monotony
Perhaps the apex of architectural monotony is seen in brutalist architecture, the height of which is evident in communist-era Poland with housing estates designed to fulfill predetermined functions that are themselves disconnected from our rich social lives. Avoiding this monotony and brutalism will give us a vista that invites curiosity and discovery as opposed to revulsion.
2. Promote a variety of local amenities
Our cities, towns and suburbs need a wide variety of potential for engagement. Cultural and recreational opportunities that are close to where we live. Parks (urban and otherwise) that break up the uniformity of buildings and afford a chance to engage with nature. The Japanese have a phrase for this – shinrin yoku or forest air bathing – a practice of intentionally spending time in nature that is associated with benefits to mental well-being.
3. Design cities to promote social connectivity
As Marshall’s work with the unhoused shows, it isn’t necessarily the roof over our heads that helps us stay engaged and staves off boredom. It is our connection with those around us that does that work. Our cities need to be designed with that in mind, including spaces that encourage social gatherings and connectedness when developing new neighbourhoods.
4. Promote multiple modes of transit
Being glued to our cars makes local connection more challenging. Promoting a variety of active (e.g., bike paths) and public transit options makes connecting locally easier to do.
5. Equitable distribution of amenities
Above all, our designs for cities should make opportunities for engagement equitable.
All of this raises a distinction put forth by author George Monbiot that we need to rethink how we structure public life to advance what he calls ‘public luxury and private sufficiency’. That is, we have preferenced the accumulation of personal wealth over the provision of public goods. Monbiot suggests we should reverse the trend and that in part, means better public spaces, more equitably distributed for ease of access.
Among the many potential benefits of improving urban design in these ways will likely be a reduced sense of boredom.
