418. Urban Myths: Challenging the Green City Idea feat. Des Fitzgerald

unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc

Are there reasons to doubt the conventional wisdom of greenery as the cure-all for urban ills. What are the roots of the Garden City movement, and how has the reality of it been different than the theory?

Des Fitzgerald is a professor of medical humanities and social sciences at University College Cork Ireland, and also the author of a recent book titled, The Living City: Why Cities Don't Need to Be Green to Be Great. (released in the UK with a different title: The City of Today is a Dying Thing.

Greg and Des discuss how urban landscapes aren't just about aesthetics; they're intricately linked to our national identity and cognitive functions. Des helps us uncover how architecture influences our sense of place and impacts our brains, and explores the role of culture in shaping our environmental perceptions. The conversation spans everything from peat briquettes to Georgian-style facades. Des also guides us through an enlightening discussion on the burgeoning field of medical humanities and the innovative concept of green social prescribing within the NHS.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Episode Quotes:

The transformative shift in environmental neuroscience

39:32: Something that is becoming really interesting in this space is the emergence of environmental neuroscience, as I think a relatively new, increasingly interesting, and powerful discipline. Environmental neuroscience exists for a whole bunch of reasons, but certainly the increasing sense that we're able to take a brain measure while a person moves around the space in three dimensions. That's, I think it's something that can be done imperfectly now. It's still very much in progress, but at least we have a horizon in which that's going to become pretty possible at kind of high-resolution research grade relatively soon. And that is transformative, actually, if the three dimensions of a space become truly available as a variable for brain measurement. Then something does happen, and something does change in that moment.

What’s wrong with planting a lot of trees?

43:13: What concerns me about urban tree planting is what we're not talking about when we're talking about urban trees, right? So the amount of social and public problems that trees are meant to solve is ridiculous. It's everything from mental health to youth crime to skills in some parts of England, where they're planting trees in an English town because it's like the people of the town have low skills for some reason. It just seems to go for not tackling boring social problems, right? So, for instance, it's very real that there are major mental health problems in cities. I think there is something very serious about the way we have constructed the contemporary city—that it has bad effects for lots of people.

We need to stop centering urban discourse on charismatic megafauna of global urbanism

45:37: We need to stop centering urban discourse on the kind of charismatic megafauna of global urbanism, right? And look at the kind of, what I would genuinely call the crap cities, right? The kind of second-tier, slightly stronger places, like places like Cork, Cardiff in Wales, where I used to live. I'm not sure what your go-to North American examples would be, but I'm still in those kinds of, like, lower-tier, maybe Poughkeepsie, Peoria, these kinds of places. That's your kind of modular urban experience, I think. And those are places I think we need to take much more seriously culturally and socially.

Interdisciplinarity in medical humanities

49:09: I think what folks in the field are trying to do is do something a little bit more collaborative and a little bit more imaginative, and not just have the philosopher who will sign off your ethics forms, but try to think seriously about how philosophy can inform experimental design. How philosophical work can itself be informed by stuff that's happening in biology and the life sciences. I'm trying to really get at the kind of complex space between those things where you're doing work that is not quite humanities or science but some kind of magic third thing.

Show Links:

Recommended Resources:

• Le Corbusier
• Garden city movement
• Frederick Law Olmsted
• Ebenezer Howard
• John Muir
• Plan Voisin
• Edwin Lutyens
• Port Sunlight
• William Lever
• Samuel Smiles
• Neom
• Edward C. Tolman
• Georges-Eugène Haussmann
• Napoleon III
• Medical humanities
• Wellcome Trust

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at University College Cork

His Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• The City of Today is a Dying Thing
• The Living City: Why Cities Don't Need to Be Green to Be Great
• The Urban Brain: Mental Health in the Vital City
• Rethinking Interdisciplinarity across the Social Sciences and Neurosciences
• Google Scholar Page