After our visit to Inspiration Kitchens – Garfield Park in Chicago, our Bruner Foundation team headed south to Kentucky to Louisville Waterfront Park. Submitted by Waterfront Development Corporation Inc. (WDC), the 85-acre riverfront park, which was developed over more than two decades, reconnects the city of Louisville with the Ohio River.

Waterfront Wednesday evening concerts draw crowds to the waterfront park.  Photograph: Wales Hunter, Nfocus Images

We arrived in Louisville to spring-like weather in time to join the city in cheering on the University of Louisville Cardinals men’s and women’s basketball teams in their national championship games. Louisville Waterfront Park is the largest and most established project among the 2013 Rudy Bruner Award for Urban Excellence finalists we’ve visited to date, including Congo Street Initiative, Via Verde and Inspiration Kitchens. We spent two and a half days on site, touring the park and meeting with WDC staff, board members, and consultants, as well as event sponsors and representatives from the design community and mayor’s office.

Festival Plaza and the Great Lawn offer spaces for large events and connect downtown Louisville with the river.  Photograph: Bruner Foundation

Louisville Waterfront Park has transformed industrial land along the Ohio River occupied by an elevated highway, sand and gravel companies, and scrap yards into a new riverside park and gateway to the city. Planning for the park began in 1986 with the creation of the WDC, a quasi-public agency that was incorporated to oversee the development of Louisville’s riverfront. WDC held a series of ten public meetings soliciting input on proposed development of the site that yielded a strong desire for green space. Subsequently, they initiated an international search for a design firm beginning with a Request for Qualifications to which 85 firms responded. Hargreaves Associates, one of four firms invited to Louisville to meet with WDC and city representatives to present its ideas, was ultimately selected to create the master plan and design for the $95 million park. Read more…

While evolution’s natural selection is about competing individuals, a broader perspective on our response to built environments, another set of genetic preparations for survival – another set of innate pleasures – is seen in the ways we mate and settle in communities.  Both the biology and practical survival benefits are compelling – cohesive family groups, strength-in-numbers, extended expertise gained by learning from each other, trading, collaborating and specializing – and we are powerfully motivated to merge our competitive interests into a cooperating population when we can find like-minded people.

Look again at the choice of a “good home.”  For those who can choose, it may well be on high ground, overlooking water and set in parkland.  But making choices based on limited resources, we most often live in clusters – compounds, hamlets, villages, towns, gated or not – where the comfort of refuge is in the presence of neighbors, and security is found behind a protective “wall” of social contracts – customs, laws, and patrols.

It’s a way we’ve been prepared to transcend the in-born human limitations that frustrate competitive success.  We volunteer to compromise our hard-earned independence of action – often enthusiastically – as we join in larger and more powerful alliances – friendships, a team, a community, a culture or ideology.  And those connections, like our connections to nature, tend to draw their power from the spiritual experience – the sense of entering into, belonging to – something larger than our own day-to-day material world.  We sense ourselves joining in time cycles that exceed our life, and the ultimate reward comes from surrendering to a super-natural ally and feeling our living essence achieve a form of immortality.

The significance of the commitment, submerging our own identity, what we are, into a group, can be read in the quick, often violent emotions evoked by – and the willingness to die for – such concepts as turf, ghetto, comrades, and fatherland and by the anxiety of personal separation or exclusion from the “refuge” of a group. These can be – they have been – life-or-death issues.  And forms of hospitality – of sharing food and warmth – are one of the defining customs of a family or a culture. Further, the most admired virtues in many societies are self-sacrifice, loyalty, and courage – deciding to overrule our other survival instincts on behalf of justice, fairness, “duty” owed to others – or instantaneously, without thinking, responding to people in distress.

The underlying biology is in the mix of hormones stirred first by an initial encounter and then validated by repetition. Natural selection has made us a gregarious species, and while we respond to a threat with the well-known “fight-or-flight” impulses – aggression or fear – we may instead, in the same instant, detect a level of warmth or welcome. We’re prepared for the nuanced, often involuntary messages we receive from faces, body language, words, and voices to trigger a different body chemistry, one that induces a “tend-and-befriend” openness, curiosity, empathy and, ultimately, altruism.

We are quick to search out and detect capabilities and competence in potential allies and mates; we want to experience the pleasures of trust, of aligning our feelings and beliefs with theirs, and the sense of bonding outside ourselves.  And while the ease and intensity of person-to-person connections – the chemistry – varies from gene pool to gene pool, introverts and extroverts, and with gender and age, we all tend to mirror – to attune ourselves to – each other’s feelings and behavior. The result is the kind of emotional contagion that underlies both person-to-person empathy and the behavior of crowds or mobs. In other words, our brain networks – its structure – can be shaped by what other people do around us.

“Water, food, and spiritual security – the working and symbolic
crossroads for a cluster of alliances.”

Relationships

In practice, social relationships are our primary “environment.”  We are born into them.  They are part of our identity and shape an experience of the places we build in two important ways.  First, in the constant overload of received information we tend to single out and give first priority to social information. And the resulting pleasure or anxiety of person-to-person connections is often the strongest emotion feeding our responses.  It may be an ephemeral interaction between people and a place – in rituals, trade, sports, or public promenading – or more permanent, like selecting the refuge of a home in a neighborhood of allies and the prospect out onto a reassuring village street.

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