Justice
How Memory Alters Our Perception of Place
The curious results of walking tours in New York, Berlin and Mumbai.
As part of a research project with the BMW Guggenheim Lab, environmental psychologist Colin Ellard and colleagues led 134 people on walking tours in 2011 through the streets of New York City, at one point passing by a public housing project. The long red-brick row of apartments was classic public housing design: nondescript, homogenous, a little drab to the eyes of an outsider.
How did this place, Ellard wanted to know, impact the pedestrians' mood? The research subjects were outfitted with a smart phone polling their qualitative responses, as well as a bracelet measuring their skin conductivity.