“When I was a child, the minister in our church would frequently start his sermon by saying “reading today's passage, I was struck by three ideas.” He would then launch into a good long sermon and build it up to a resounding closing crescendo; I'd start to lean forward to grab the hymnal in anticipation of the closing hymn... but wait... no! He would proceed to start all over, and deliver a not-quite-so-strong sermon on the second idea. Just when you thought that it couldn't go on any longer, our minister would launch into a sermon on the same general theme based on his third idea. We used to joke that his sermons inspired a profound, spiritual feeling of gratitude: you thanked God they were over. Why am I reminiscing about that dear man from long-ago? Well, reading “You Are Here” made me speculate that my former minister must have a long-lost twin, the spatial psychologist and author Colin Ellard.
“You Are Here” starts out strong. Part I “Why Ants Don't Get Lost at the Mall” offers a series of fascinating experiments that uncover how humans and other creatures navigate through space. Sadly, for those of us prone to getting lost at the mall, despite blurb on the jacket (“if you, or your keys, have ever gotten lost, Ellard can tell you how it happened – and how to stop it happening again”) this book does not offer any specific science-based insights to improve our navigation skills -- unless you are planning to become a Bedouin tracker, in which case there are some fine tips about camel dung that you will no doubt enjoy even more than I did.
In Part II, the books starts to lose its way. Taken on their own, the chapters on “House Space,” “Working Space,” and “City Space” offer nice overviews of architectural theory and urban planning, but taken together they draw on redundant material. The book would be stronger if these three chapters were condensed and restructured. The connection to 'spatial navigation' grows even looser when the book moves to the chapter on “Cyberspace.” The chapter starts off well enough with the theory that the human brain is uniquely capable of navigating virtual worlds, but after briefly presenting the result of one study on the topic of social distance in “Second Life” the rest of the chapter devolves into random musings on the powers and perils of virtual technology.
When the topic turns to “Greenspace” the book seems to wander off the path entirely. Ellard's promising hypothesis - that the way the human brain is wired to think about 'inside' and 'outside' space leads us to devalue our impact on natural spaces - is never substantiated. He vaguely refers to Jane Jacobs' theory that the Romantic movement isolated us from nature, and extends that idea to conclude that all urbanized humans feel that nature is inherently 'outside' of our day-to-day space. From the first part of the book, I was expecting new insights into the relations between human beings and their natural environment based on brain science and psychology, not a tenuous connection based on Jacobs' iconoclastic interpretation of Romantic poetry. Ironically, the author's proposed antidote to 'nature deficit disorder' is the encouragement of exactly the type of post-industrial biophilia that was attempted by the the Romantic movement and, presumably, failed (?) There seems to be little science to go on here, so we are instead presented with a loosely-linked series of ideas on how to improve engagement with urban and suburban greenspaces. For example, from the author's own experience the environment would benefit if everyone took down their fences and let their children play together in a kind of collective backyard. This is a very nice image, but it's not exactly a scientifically-validated psychological insight nor a tested ecological approach (not to joke about anyone's kids, but surely our ecological footprint is smaller if we have fewer children, rather than letting hordes of urchins loose to play a giant game of hide and seek?)
I don't mean to sound harsh, as I enjoyed the bulk of the book. Perhaps I would have gotten more out of Part II if I read it in a separate sitting and took it on it's own terms. After reading Part I, I was expecting a scientific approach and became, well, disoriented when Part II swerved into more speculative areas. Or perhaps, like my childhood minister, Ellard would have been better served by saving some of his material for a later sermon.”
