Ideas - “Sometimes I think this city is trying to kill me…”

Episode Date: April 19, 2024

“Sometimes I think this city is trying to kill me…” That’s what a man on the margins once told Robin Mazumder who left his healthcare career behind to become an environmental neuroscientist. He now measures stress, to advocate for wider well-being in better-designed cities.

Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood, or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Most of the world's population live in cities.

A number that's ever-growing. Urban life can offer a lot, employment opportunities, resources, culture, a diversity of people. But for many, living in cities can also be difficult, draining, overwhelming. Overwhelming. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. About a decade ago, Robin Mazumder was working in healthcare in the city of Edmonton. One day, he was running late to his job as an occupational therapist. On this particular day, Robin decided to ride his winterized bike through the icy downtown streets.

A small decision that led to a meaningful encounter. He described it during a public talk in Toronto. That day I found myself at the intersection of 109th Street near the Bissell Center, a center for homeless people in Edmonton, deeply regretting my choice to ride a bike, not because of the frigid weather, but because I kept slipping and getting stuck in the crystallized ruts made by car wheels in the evolving snowpack. While I was feeling sorry for myself, I saw a man using a shopping cart as a walker. The light wasn't changing. I looked at him. He looked at me. We locked eyes and realized that maybe we had something in common. And I felt

bad letting him walk alone. So I got off my bike, finding myself standing beside him in the middle of the road as drivers took their cue to move. My life changed when I looked at this person, this fellow urbanite, an urbanist in his own right, and allowed myself to hold his gaze long enough for him to make the following statement. Sometimes I think the city is trying to kill me. That one man's frustration sent Robin Mazumder down a new professional path. He aimed to help people in a bigger way, by getting to the root of why our cities often work against their own residents. I'm an environmental neuroscientist.

I got my PhD at the University of Waterloo. And I would define environmental neuroscience as the science of how the world outside of us affects the one inside. And I'm particularly interested in what our inner world means for the world world, how the feelings in our bodies lead to action, from smiling at a stranger to pushing someone out of the way to get on a subway train. We might think of feelings as living inside of us, but they're an interaction of the in and out.

Our environment interacts with the structures of our cells to release molecules in the form of neurotransmitters like dopamine that meet receptors also made of molecules to create a feeling. Transmitters like dopamine that meet receptors also made of molecules to create a feeling. In a city, that feeling might be positive, says Robin Mazumder. Awe at the sight of a dramatic urban waterfront or the way sunlight beams through a public room. Both responses to beauty are measurable in the size of your pupils or pupilometry, a method I use in my research in neuro-urbanism and emerging discipline. But residents also experience stress in the landscape of a city, particularly residents at the extremes of age and other vulnerable groups.

We democratically elect politicians who influence policymakers that draft bylaws that allow widening of roadways. Despite ample knowledge that children stand to suffer not only from the risk of being injured or killed by a speeding driver, but also exposure to noise and air pollution. Studies demonstrating that proximity to busy roads is linked to learning issues and cardiovascular illness in children. There's a lot more. To be both safer and more equitable, Robin Mazumder says, urban design requires a conscious change in approach and

attitude. When we start to look at who lives close to highways and who lives in areas with dense, nice, sound-muffling, landscape-architectured green space, and who gets sick and who can afford to heal. Urban planning is a political act that verifiably causes harm. Rendering bad urban design as an act of violence, like using street width as a passive-aggressive weapon in a war of cars. He thinks that change should matter to all city dwellers. Sadness, irritability, exhaustion. The effects are on display every day. You don't need neuroscience to understand that the state people meet you in can dictate the outcome of the interaction. Feeling informs how we see problems, but also their solutions. And if we use feeling as a divining rod for good urban design, design that reduces the unnecessary

waste of brain energy, what's the avenue to the shift in design? What's the laneway for the change He thinks that better design is vital, but so is the effort of everyday people. the physical structures requiring space in the heart and expanding through a desire for understanding and an aspiration to uphold the inherent social contract of a democratic and just society. Robin Mazumder is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Technical University of Berlin. As an environmental scientist, he is part of an interdisciplinary group aiming to research and measure how cities impact emotions, behavior, and mental health. Robin Mazumder visited Toronto to give the talk that you've been hearing called A City That Can Save Us. It was the Architecture of Health Zeidler-Evans Lecture for 2023, presented by the Faculty of Health Sciences, McMaster University. I also invited Robin to join me for a conversation about his work.

I'm really curious about your own journey when it comes to thinking scientifically about cities. So you were an occupational therapist. What is it that got you into that field to begin with? Occupational therapy, if I was to boil it, the biggest lesson from the profession to me, and what I think distinguishes it from other healthcare professions, is the focus on the environment. And the belief that illness or disability can be a product of an environment that is not facilitating of empowerment or freedom, and that can manifest an illness. And so I saw that as an OT when I was working at CAMH in Edmonton. And then in my neuroscience research now, I'm trying to connect

those dots. So it sounds like you really enjoyed that work and that it appealed to you. I'm curious what took you in this new direction into environmental neuroscience. Curiosity, you know, and I think a frustration with seeing a solution that wasn't one to mental illness or loneliness or sadness. And, you know, it's hard. Healthcare professionals put a lot of energy and heart into their work. healthcare professionals put a lot of energy and heart into their work. But for me, I just hit a point where I couldn't keep the narrative up for myself and integrity is important to me and I'm an idealist. So I was almost forced to pursue another level of something that just came from a place of being, understanding what mental health meant and what mental illness meant and trying to

help people with that, the city could be a medical intervention. The city is a medical intervention. Wow. Yeah. How? If our health is contingent on our environment, which it certainly is, then I think that once we figure out

how to not stress people out with cities, maybe we can use that technology of the city to enhance human potential and enhance cognition. Do you think, this is a very wide open question, but do you think given where cities are at that that's doable? Okay, I think there's two answers to that. Yes, it's doable in current cities that are existent.

It's a lot easier in new built cities, which I'm learning more about through my research and people reaching out and telling me about the cities that they're building from scratch. So you think they're like a smart city type idea? If we screw that up with what we know, if you can build something perfectly with all the lessons that we've learned over the entirety of human civilization. We can solve the problems that we're dealing with in cities like Toronto or Edmonton or Montreal and maybe offset. I'm aware of the limitations of science and also in the role it plays in service to the public, but it's about information and knowledge being communicated and applied. And if people are so sad or frustrated or irritated or tired, it's harder to have those conversations. And as I'd

mentioned in my talk, while I think that architecture and urban design can play very powerful roles, we need an attitude shift. And you can see that in bike lane debates and transit debates and highway widening debates. It's all about what we're used to and what we think we need. But to me, the problem with cities is that the resources are so finite. They don't have a lot to work with. And I have a few mayor friends. And when I was in Edmonton, I was the co-chair of the community wellbeing working group of this task force. While I was in Edmonton, I was the co-chair of the community well-being working group of this task force. While I was working with very lonely people who were disconnected from society and then developing addictions to cope or mental illness becoming more exacerbated. And I'm seeing a city and I'm like, wow, you guys have so much power. But then I hear from these politician friends of mine that they have a budget that has turned into a health care budget and the police being a huge source of that. And we're setting cities up to fail.

the connection between feeling and cities, you know, and working towards community, a shared understanding of a singular organism is the way you put it. How do you define urban community? People fundamentally. And the urban element, I think, can either be a facilitator of connection or an impediment to it. And you can see that in various forms in high-rise buildings where they're trying to figure out how to develop social spaces to community gardens where people grow food and eating from the land that they live on. And I think that those are two, maybe not extremes, but two polarities or contrasts of that urban community. But it's, in my opinion, from not just as a former healthcare professional, as an occupational therapist, but now in my neuroscience work, it's all about the feeling and feeling connected. And home is important. And to me, community is an abstraction or an extension of home in its best expression. Where do you think things go wrong in people feeling like they live in a

community in a city? I think safety is probably the number one thing if I was to look at that from like a physiological perspective and what I'd measure. I think community goes wrong when people don't feel safe and then when people don't feel safe they might be more likely to be irritated and argue and you know it starts with the body. How are our brains changing because we live in cities? One thing I can say is that based on the research, a study done in 2011 by someone named Florian Lederbogen, he used functional magnetic resonance imaging to look at stress reactivity in people's brains, people who grew up in cities and people who grew up in rural areas. And what he found in his study where he was measuring brain activity in areas of the brain that were involved with stress, like the amygdala, people who grew up in cities, not necessarily

actively living in cities that the brain development may be, right? They had higher rates of reactivity of stress. Could you give an example of what kind of technology you use as a neuroscientist to measure how people feel in an urban environment? Yeah. So for my doctoral dissertation, I used something that is referred to as electrodermal activity or the galvanic skin response. Basically, it's primarily measured on the palms. And if you're doing a talk or an interview or whatever, and you're stressed, you're going to sweat on your palms, right? And that is a direct connection, literally,

to the part of your brain that involves stress. And so what we use is it's a lie detector test of sorts, but it's measuring the speed of electricity as it passes over your palms, which says that's how much salt there is, right? But really it's a measure of how much sweat there is. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so what's interesting about why that even exists and why we think that's connected to stress is because evolutionary psychologists speculate that we need moisture on our hands to climb trees if we're escaping an attack, or we need moisture to avoid abrasion or cutting of our hands if we're trying to defend ourselves. Fascinating. Never heard that. Yeah. It's a theory.

It's an interesting theory. Yeah. Okay, it's an interesting theory. Yeah, yeah. You know, you've heard anecdotal evidence out there in your previous work about people's reaction to the environment that they live in, the urban environment that they live in. Why do we need data to back that up? Because it can tell us more about assumptions that we make. That can be from the design of street width, to the design of building height, to the density of green space. If we think those are valuable, then obviously we don't want to use the reductionistic lens of science to say this is the only thing that matters.

But this is one verifiable way that's reproducible, that labs all over the world can do, and citizen science, and the more data that we have. We've worked very closely on a study with the city of Vancouver, actually, a published study a few years ago. And what I loved about that was it was about, A, it was about community interventions like community gardens, rainbow crosswalks, little free libraries, and what that can do for well-being. And the city was directly involved. They saw the value of maybe starting a place making fun for the community. Who do you think benefits?

Like who are the people who would be kind of first in line in getting benefit out of that? Kids. Because here's the thing, you know, and I think we can see this, and I saw this as a therapist. Feelings can be tough for anybody, but kids literally are developing the infrastructure to regulate that. If it's a safe place for kids, and it's a place where their brains can develop properly, it's good for you and

me. Yep. This is a really massive question, but if I asked, I'm curious what you would say to this. Where do you think cities went wrong? Cars. It was a necessity. That's where they went right for a certain bit. But if you look at images of cities like Toronto and Edmonton, there was streetcars and streets are packed with people. And you're like, when was this? Like, I missed that party. And then they built the West Edmonton Mall and parking lots. You have to drive to that, didn't you?

Yeah, it killed the downtown. And there are numbers for the number of people that you need to live in a place for it to have street life. And I think the mall and the cars in Edmonton is one concrete example. Have you ever lived in a city where it isn't like that? Yeah. Well, I mean, I've been to a city. Where is that? I was in Barcelona in 2018. I was on fellowship in London. And so I wanted to see Spain.

And I had a friend there that was Alvaro Nicolas. He was the deputy urban design. He was basically supporting the mayor of urban design. And he took me on a tour of these amazing, it just blew my mind. I almost thought I was dreaming of the super blocks. Have you heard of these? No. So they basically, in a number of areas where the roads were fairly wide, I would say, and used as thoroughfares and shortcuts for people, they shut the streets down.

And they put like playground equipment on it. And it's beautiful. It's bright. And you see kids running around in the middle of the street. It's safe for kids. It's safe for kids. And it's quiet, you know. And all they had to do was shut the street and throw some paint on the ground.

Colorful paint. It's not a lot of effort. Oh, you know. For the payoff. No, I don't think so. You don't seem to be neutrally producing data and kind of leaving it

for others to interpret. You take a political stance. Like you have a position, a social justice stance. Why is that central for you? I was raised that way. My mom and my dad put me on like Malcolm X,

Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Nelson Mandela posters in my room. I was just raised in an environment of justice. And my dad was a freedom fighter as a 16 year old in the genocide in Bangladesh in 1971. So those are my literal roots. And my mom came to Canada as a kid to Revelstoke, BC in the seventies. And it wasn't easy for them either. They're one of two families of color. And I think for me that the thing that has always driven my justice is dignity. You just know what it means and you know when someone else doesn't have it. And there's many ways to get at it. And I think design might be the first step in a dignified experience as a human being. And that comes from the justice

lens of everyone is entitled to life and freedom. It's incredibly personal. Oh, super. I feel I have a responsibility to the Canadian public because they paid for my PhD. But I also have a responsibility to shed light on stories that people don't talk about. When I see what my parents did with their suffering and their challenges, the resilience that they developed was instilled in me through the virtue of their behavior. Money's nice and obviously you want to be comfortable, but I don't think I'd be happy if I didn't see myself as helping. Yeah. Going on with this idea of the political, you even said in your talk that urban planning is a political act that verifiably causes harm.

It's a political act? to housing guidelines to all sorts of things that if the system is working as I understand it I'm not a political scientist but I'm just someone who's voted and someone who's seen the process if it's done effectively and it's done equitably which means everyone's voice is involved city councillors and politicians are there if if they're going to be good at anything it's it's about representation and it's hard to have to represent really opposing views. And it's even more difficult when if you're, I don't want to say the word career politician as a bad thing, but you have to be conscious of optics and who you're bothering and what change means.

Because if you make too many changes, you might not have a job. And that's a problem in our society. And I think that's one thing people are trying to figure out, you know, representation and other forms of government. And I think we have a lot to learn from Indigenous peoples in Canada and Indigenous communities worldwide about what it means, what leadership means and what community means. Models exist and for people who influence policies that create roads that numerous studies show cause illness in children. We regulate guns in Canada relatively well, I would say, to other countries around us. But cars, I think, are more damaging to the extent of their presence, because both can do harm based on the volition, the attention, the awareness of the person operating it. We often talk about how on the national level, you know, the fact that politicians are always

worried about the next election is partly why there's no continuity. How much do you think that contributes on the municipal level to the state of cities? That's a significant contributor because, again, I don't want to minimize the efforts and make it seem simple. But if someone hasn't left the job that involves representation, inherent in their position, that's the first point of representation. Someone has to be changing their mind somehow. of representation. Someone has to be changing their mind somehow. So you either listen well and you adapt or you do what's easy and you toe the line and then you get cities that are in disrepair because of political laziness or fear. And the consequences are massive because these decisions last like centuries. Like you go to, you know, old places have old buildings, right?

You make these decisions now for profit motives or to appease some corporation or politician, and then you build something that doesn't look nice or causes a significant block to the flow of the community. Tremendous implications of their decisions. So you talk about politicians, but at the same time, your lectures seem to imply that all people in the city, not just academics or politicians, have a role in improving it. Definitely. That we are the environment for others. I really, that was a great line. What do you mean by that? You know, our environments affect us. Our environments are physical and social. And the social, if you would ask most people, is probably more impactful on their well-being. And the intersection of those two is what I try to study using science. But you are someone else's environment. You are someone

else's world. And if we're going to start anywhere with trying to use that thinking about what we can do for cities is just be nice to people if you can. You know, kindness, like it spreads. But aggression does too. You can see that in road rage and traffic aggression and all sorts of things. So I like this picture that you painted of a social layer that's kind of superimposed on a physical layer in the city, which is more important. Social racism, misogyny, all these things are causing fear. And, you know, from the neuroscience perspective, there is a term that was coined by the late Dr. Rodney Clark, who's a Black psychologist from the United States, and he did work on racism-related vigilance. And he showed that the experience and the anticipation of racism has been shown to disrupt sleep in Black and Hispanic peoples in

the U.S. I mean, it's a quote-unquote different country, but we can use those insights. different country, but we can use those insights. Arteriosclerosis, your heart muscles are affected by these things. What I think is that we'll have to work on both and that's the complexity of it. Our environment guides our behavior. It influences how we feel. But if you're feeling not safe or good because of another person. Yeah. We decide together and things are not okay until we all are. I do not pretend to have the answer to social progress, but rather access to vital signs like our physiology that might help us find the way to find answers. The environment impacts everyone differently, often based on how someone looks, who they love, or where they're from. And at the exact same time, everyone, capital E, us, those who are not you, are invariably part of

the environment that we live in, with different intensities of impact, closeness that can be kind or killer depending on the context. You are the environment for others. You are someone else's world, whether or not you want to believe it. What we do with our feelings, our minds, bodies, and words, our power, invariably affects everyone else, but perhaps in some ways is still immeasurable. measurable. Robin Muzumder. He's an environmental neuroscientist, and he gave the Architecture of Health Zeidler-Evans Lecture for 2023. It's an annual talk presented by the Faculty of Health Sciences at McMaster University. It took place in the Daniels Building at the University of Toronto in October.

You're listening to Ideas. We're a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, Aurelia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. Find us on the CBC Listen app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayyad. Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goldtar, and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and, most of all, true crime podcasts.

But sometimes, I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast, Crime Story, comes in. Every week, I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. Cars are a big part of almost every city's streets. No matter how you feel about that, scientist Robin Mazumder notes, the choice has consequences for all residents. Cars are also the source of actual pollution.

In London, a death certificate was overturned for a young girl whose mother wanted the cause of her death to be changed from asthma to air pollution. Cars were also at the centre of a pivotal moment for Robin Mazumder, a chance encounter on an icy Edmonton street. Rushing to his healthcare job at the time, he caught sight of a man shakily using a shopping cart as a walker. They crossed the wide street together, but were caught in traffic as the light went green in the other direction and cars surged forward.

When they reached the other side, the man turned and spoke the words that came to change the course of Robin's professional life. Sometimes I think the city is trying to kill me. That was all I needed to hear to cultivate the curiosity that led me out of my career as a therapist to pursuing a science that would allow policymakers to consider dignity as a standard for urban design. The feeling of ostracization a metric for bad urban planning. Robin Mazumder is now an environmental neuroscientist based at the Technical University of Berlin.

He thinks about urban safety, dignity, and inclusion as the goal of his research, which uses wearable technology and virtual reality simulations to measure people's physiological responses to everything from skyscrapers to city streets. There are other factors that affect people's minds and bodies too. Poverty, isolation, racism. So I asked Robin whether those 10 words on that Edmonton street might apply more widely. You talked about, you know, I think the city's trying to kill me. Is that the daily reality, do you think, in most big cities? Or is that overstating things? It is the reality. It's reality. Maybe it's not trying to kill us.

I mean, that'd be pretty terrifying if people were intentionally designing places to make us sick, but they are. They're killing us slowly. They're killing us quickly if you get hit by a car. They're killing you through surveillance and police and all these pressures that put pressure on our veins and our blood that they've

done research on. You know, you don't need a neuroscientist to tell you that. Just ask someone how they feel and why, and someone will say something where, yeah, during my day, it's my commute, it's riding my bike on a street that's without infrastructure, it's driving a car in traffic for two hours, which has also been shown to kill people based on the studies. So that's, I think that's how it's working, you know. It also has the capacity to heal us. That's the beauty of that bi-directional spectrum. Home as a place of healing. Cities where everyone can thrive. That was the focus of Robin Mazumder's 2023 Architecture of Health Zeidler-Evans Lecture,

presented by the Faculty of Health Sciences at McMaster University. Cities are collections of knowledge, libraries of people, museums of conflict, places of burial and birth, the glue that binds the both and perhaps from a

distance, are seen as letters of the language of the human civilization in the Book of Eternity. In my own personal studies of the religion my family has practiced for centuries and generations, Hinduism, I've learned more about the ancient language used to document its wisdom, known as Sanskrit. Kala is the word that refers to both time and space because the two require each other to exist. So perhaps in our modern, ever-evolving English language, we refer to that amorphous synchrony of time and space as place. Space is where things happen, but place is where memory lives. Memory also lives in your hippocampus, and perhaps the original feeling of home. Stress perhaps is a measure of the mismatch between where

you are and where you want to be, a physiological consequence of unmet needs and expectations. And many of us live our lives holding the tension of an instinctual idealism that dictates what home should have been and suffering for what it wasn't and the science demonstrates that can be damaging to our brains. In the midst of the journey of my PhD I was concurrently on a spiritual one trying to reconcile science with the concept of the soul. Science is a house where spirit sees a home and I prefer the language of the soul to understand the latter. Aware that sensation and feeling can tell us more than intellect can and choosing to view thinking and serve as a feeling. My fascination with the science of sensation really began at a 10-day silent meditation retreat referred to as a Vipassana in 2018 where I had the rare and profound

experience of feeling my feelings. The greatest lesson from my retreat was that sensation was central to my salvation, that focusing on how I felt in my body for 10 days allowed me to feel everything, including how tense I was in my shoulders and how hard it felt to let go and how good it felt to cry. I became more attuned to how my body felt. I did my retreat at Dama Tirana in Valle de Bravo, about an hour from Mexico City. And the day I left my retreat, I very hesitantly, with trepidation, went straight to Mexico City to meet my new friends who I could finally talk to

over lunch before flying to another place. I was in a very peaceful state, perhaps the most peaceful I've ever consciously been in my waking adult life, and hypersensitive and aware of what returning to the city meant for both my senses of peace and the senses that constructed its perception and concept. It turned out to be the most profound experience of a city thus far in my life. Our brains are always processing information, and the dominant theories of why green space or parks is good for you suggest that part of the reason nature is medicine is because it involves considerably less, as per the neuroscience talk, task demands. No worrying about getting hit by a car or bumping into a stranger or being stopped

by the police. This break from the city is implicated in the mysterious healing potential of nature. We need to build more parks, but we also need to do something about what we need a break from. Following my retreat, where I spent 10 days meditating in silence from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., I returned to Mexico City on Cinco de Mayo. At that point, I was not educated on its relevance as a holiday to Mexican people. Given the extent of its celebration in Canada, I expected a more than usual level of vibrancy and life on the streets, possibly overwhelming to my sensitive mind, but was surprised to experience the exact opposite. Mexico City was a ghost town, eerily quiet and eerie because the silence seemed contrary to the city's

personality that I learned to love. I was informed that the city dies on the holiday weekend with everyone leaving the city to see family and friends in neighboring towns. It was very surreal to be at my calmest in a city's quietest state and to consider the probability of being able to even have an experience like that again. It was an experiment of urban life I always wanted to do but felt was impossible. Well, until now, where we can build virtual cities and run simulations and then see what their virtual experiences do to our brains, which is what I do for my job. These lessons on

sensation transform my perspective on my doctoral research at the University of Waterloo by experientially demonstrating how physiological feeling which you can measure can be a central factor in modern urban design. Depending on our priorities with health and the economy often competing in drag races in our city streets that drag us all down. Part of the reason my light experience of the barrio of Condesa in Mexico City was profound beyond its novelty is that following 10 days of no eye contact or listening to anything beyond breathing, birds, meditation bells, chewing, sometimes annoyinglyly loud and the occasional crying

in this state of appropriate whelm i could feel the slight perturbations of my levels of my anxiety which is an outcome of stress to the extent that i could catch the flutters as they move my senses to my heart caused by unexpected sounds or the threat of an oddly, in that scenario, odd speeding car. It's easier to feel feelings and healthily deal when we aren't bombarded by them from every angle like we are in the city. And I don't see myself as special. It's just what's possible when cars and their chaos are removed, where the starting point is a peaceful state. People heard birdsong for the first time in a long time during the pandemic when the commute traffic subsided with the lockdowns.

For me, having experience that was almost out of a simulation allowed me to appreciate the subtlety of sensations and the implications of their accumulation on the bursting of the seams of our emotional hearts, an overflow of pressure which at a certain point can be what kicks the door in on mental illness. Stress agreed upon to be the primary precipitating factor in the expression of what psychiatry would classify as disorder in its following episodes. When we consider the implications of the latest research on urbanicity, that is to live in a city, and illnesses like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, we need to ask ourselves where the

disorder lies, in the city or the person, or rather where it sleeps. As someone who lives with bipolar disorder, I can confidently say that the city is one of the greatest risk factors that triggers an episode for me, still learning about it, It's been a couple of years. In the sense that I find it very difficult to sleep in cities. Having lived on a busy road that required earplugs, noise machines, and eventually even psychiatric medication, nothing can do what silence and darkness can do for the quality of my sleep. Research on racism-related vigilance, a concept proposed by the late Dr. Rodney Clark, a psychologist from the United States, demonstrated that racism, but also importantly, its anticipation, is a significant source of deep destruction for racialized peoples. And sleep isn't just an issue for my health, it's one for everybody.

It plays an important part in our well-being. And you cannot dream when you cannot sleep. Robin Mazumder from his Zeidler-Ebbins lecture. The environmental neuroscientist is interested in what experts call the social determinants of health, including mental health. We talked about that in both the wider and more personal sense. And in case it affects you in your own life, I should let you know that we directly discuss mental illness and suicide. You talked in your lecture, Robin, about how your own senses get overwhelmed and some serious conditions that you are contending with. How would you say that your

personal experience of mental illness and a neurological disorder informs your work? Well, I was only diagnosed with bipolar disorder two years ago um and it's something i've lived with my whole life you know and and i guess miraculously i was able to manage before requiring a medical intervention or medical support but i was a sad kid you know and and i think my biology was was oriented to a constitution of sensitivity people who with bipolar disorder consider themselves as neurodivergent. I also have ADHD. So two things that may shape your brain to see the world differently. But I just had a tough time. That's why I went to be a therapist, working with people, seeing something I had in common. But what's interesting for me now that I processed it and

processing it and the diagnosis and what it means and living with it is that the beauty of it for me and what life makes my life exciting and things happen, you say, wow. After I got diagnosed, it was pretty tough for me. Like I had to, I was looking, I was reading papers like every day. I was like, I have to cure myself. That's how I felt. I was like, if I get there's got to be something out there and then I found first of all I was contending with feeling responsible for my illness it's like it's what comes up people ask you oh did you do this did that happen did you cause it you know and there's shame in that stigma and I mean part of me sharing it in the lecture and talking about here is because I don't think they're necessary elements they don't serve any purpose other than hurting people and keeping people away from their supports.

So in the following months, I'm trying to process all these things. And I find this paper about urbanicity and bipolar disorder. Did it resonate with you? Oh my goodness. Yeah. Because to me, what was mind boggling is now I'm in Berlin working with the research platform neuro urbanism. is now I'm in Berlin working with the research platform Neuro-Urbanism. That was a term coined by a psychiatrist who's now a friend and a colleague on the project named Dr. Mazda Adli, and he works with people with bipolar disorder. Now I'm working with geneticists and psychiatrists and sociologists and urban planners who are looking at this complex interaction of our environment and our genes. I'll stay in my lane. I think it's interesting. It's way more complicated, but there certainly is a connection between stress, the environment, and then your genetic constitution, which some people could say is a

vulnerability. Yeah. The confluence of motivations is pretty unique. Yeah. I feel super lucky in a weird way. You know, it's, I think I have to, to understand the feeling, you know, like bipolar disorder is not an easy illness, you know, and I have type one, which is like the severe one, as some people might say. And so, A, I am grateful for being able

to be part of what I'm studying. I think we need that more in general in healthcare and health sciences and research. But this has given me a power from a place I did not know exist for someone who struggles with energy. Just a quick comment from you on this. You know, we talk about mental health and illnesses related to mental health as being kind of these anomalies. And yet it seems so many people are struggling with situations like that. I think spending time with my niece and just seeing,

she's two years old and she's curious about the world and she's built for love. We all are and we forget about that. And I think mental illness is a medicalization of, to sometimes terrifying experience of being a human being. I've had three friends take their lives in the last 10 years, like two in the last three, and they were very privileged as far as I could observe it, and they had all the resources.

One of them had bipolar disorder that I was aware of, right? The other one maybe. They had everything. I was calling them, and it still happened to them, and that's what scares me. I'm so one, maybe. They had everything. I was calling them and it still happened to them. And that's what scares me. I'm so sorry, Robin. Thanks. That's a, it's a cautionary tale. It is. And, you know, and I, and it's, I just think people are lonely. They're not connected to each other in a way they feel, feel safe enough to ask for help and vulnerability and all these things

are the necessary elements you know and you want to talk about male mental health the toxic masculine vulnerability and suicide and middle-aged men and you've said that medication is not the cure it's addressing a symptom so what is is the cure? A stressless society. Yeah. And where people can sleep at night. Yeah, you're an advocate for a lot more than happy cities. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

So when you say that you want a city, I think the title of the lecture was A City That Can Save Us. Yeah. What's it saving us from? Ourselves. can save us yeah what's it saving us from ourselves and i think that for me at least as a scientist and as someone who might have had a history of being a stubborn person in the past and in a lot of that for me is when you admit fallibility through what you perceive as a mistake it puts you in a position for scrutiny and i think that scares people and that's what cities why cities are the way they are no one wants to take responsibility and everyone gets their feelings hurt and people are offended and they're proud we need to do

something about that too is there a city in the world anywhere where you feel mentally healthy it's fascinating to me that's a great question i love london and the uk something something changes for me you know do you know what it is there's an aesthetic there's something to like the softness of the streets and the most people i find there in my experience i will say are friendly there's parks the green the green spaces oh my goodness you know and the streets are quaint and I don't feel like the whole, all of that together and, and breaks from the traffic. And, you know, one of my favorite things about London is people spilling out of pubs into the streets, like drinking beer and laughing and cars are driving around them. Even in cold temperatures. Yeah. And, and no one, that's

normalized there. I love London and I was back there in August visiting family in East London. And I just, yeah, it's a question I might actually try to write a chapter on my book because I don't know the answer. I just know I like it and it makes me feel in a really good place and it makes me feel what my quote unquote best self would be, I think. Skyscrapers are capital made durable, said Parker Malloy, a sociologist at Sheffield University in the United Kingdom. Maloy is a sociologist at Sheffield University in the United Kingdom. What Maloy is saying is that skyscrapers are a wealthy store of their money, symbolic piles of cash in the midst of an almost global housing crisis, and certainly a national one. The private corporation that owned these buildings apparently also owned the sidewalks in front

of them, as I learned when I was nearby on King Street in the barren landscape of Toronto's financial district, eerily empty and populated by many tall buildings, but very few with ways for the people on the nearby sidewalk to engage with. No porosity for connection to the street. I learned of this invisible line on the sidewalk when I was told to stop using my 360-degree video camera to capture footage for the final study of my doctoral dissertation. Two years earlier in the City of London, the British one, I was taking similar footage of the Leidenhall building skyscraper that is contributing to the expansion and the domination of the London skyline, one that was once characterized for the cathedral and perhaps now the Gherkin, a pickle-shaped skyscraper with

great views that paradoxically contribute to the blocking of them themselves. The paradox being that both structures, the Gherkin and the church, manipulate the feeling of awe. According to environmental psychologist Yannick Joy, seeing things from the skyscraper may make the world below and the problems that it contains a reasonable solution to the inability to acclimatize to the daily reality of human beings living by the heat vent next to the building. I don't think we are insensitive. It's something that we become, and it involves the nervous system and a healthy coping mechanism that at its extreme expression is an emotional numbness that allows us to hold back tears on the sidewalks that we share,

aware of the social connotation of the nearby gutter, a notion of class invented to keep people in their places. You talk in your lecture about the scale of cities and skyscrapers. You know, the way these kind of tall buildings affect how people feel, what can we realistically do about that? The city of Toronto actually has tall building policy guidelines. Obviously, there's building height requirements and density of building heights and, you know, placement. But what I thought was fascinating, which was related to my research, was the spacing in between the skyscrapers. And particularly, specifically, it was a diagram of the distance between a skyscraper and the podium and the adjacent park.

But I think that's a really interesting kind of example of a practical approach that acknowledges that there is something that happens when we build skyscrapers. And the City of London is contending with that as well. They have their tall building, you know, the city con and everyone was getting really stressed out and i wouldn't say him but the community was getting seemed to be getting stressed out about the skyscrapers and and understandably so changing the not just the architecture of the city but its personality by virtue of the blocking of views with tall buildings like st james cathedral i would just say views space, you know, and one of the things I said in my dissertation

was that we need to see green space as open space, sadly. Openness is something that's looked in environmental psychology and is good generally, the horizon. And so biophilic design, which means incorporating greenery into building design from plants to the patterns found in nature that are pleasing to the eye. There are things we can do to make these things,

these big behemoths of concrete, a bit more appealing. And yeah. You're political about cities, as we've discussed, but in another direction, You're political about cities, as we've discussed, but in another direction, so are others. Some people 15 minutes. What do you think all of this, these sort of contentious discussions and debates, says about how people see cities and change? I think that we are more conservative when we're scared our resources are going to be taken from us. That could be time with your children.

That could be money. That could be your perceived comfort. That could be the ease it offers you. Like me, you have a physical disability where sometimes walking can be difficult. You know, there's not a war on cars. It's a war on transportation that we're fighting in cars and bikes and on sidewalks that aren't plowed where people break their legs. And I've seen elderly people when I was an OT in the hospital, break their hip.

They slip on a sidewalk, they break a hip, they go to the hospital, they get exposed to bacteria that kills them. What are our standards if people can't walk, people can't leave their house and if they try, they can hurt themselves. That's the war. That's where the injuries are. The war might be on our perception of what we think we need. And we

always have to evolve. If we don't, we're not, we've hit a, I think a bit of a, a holding pattern because of our perception of resources. If we had all of the money in the world, hey, let's just try and experiment, right? But we're tightly managing budgets that are barely existent. And so whether that's families trying to put food on our table or cities trying to build bike lanes.

So if we give people in cities, which are people, resources, where they don't feel like they're going to be snatched away from them, or if they don't feel like they're going to be homeless because they can't pay rent. Yeah, investment. So you talked about what we can do to make cities better. What can the average person do to make their city better? First and foremost, vote.

You know, if you have the privilege to attend consultations, go. foremost, vote. You know, if you have the privilege to attend consultations, go. I'm always amazed when I hear my politician friends or politicians I meet that they're like, yeah, no one shows up to these things. Let me make decisions. And sometimes that's by virtue of the accessibility. If you have to go to a meeting at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday and you're working a 10-hour shift, it's not going to happen. And you're the one who probably needs it the most, right? To get an easier transit connection so you can see your kid before they go to bed. What gives you the most hope about the future of cities? Strangers saying hello, holding doors open, you know, like whatever you can do to communicate that you have not just an awareness of your neighbors that you're living around,

but you have a reference for human dignity. What gives me hope is my niece. It's amazing. And kids these days, I meet them, they're saying things to me, I'm like, you're 12 years old. Like, you know, you're, it's brilliant. And it is for as so many reasons, you know, it's a sadness, but kids are literally the future. many reasons, you know, to sadden us, but kids are literally the future. And if we don't mess this up too much for them, our cities will be profoundly different, but they just need to be included and involved and listened to maybe measuring what's happening in their bodies. That's where it lies. And it makes me happy to think about that. Thank you, Robin.

Thank you. Great to talk to you. Likewise. Somewhere there must be a space where we can meet to talk about science and how it can be used intentionally to design a sense of spirit in our cities, measurable in our physiology, in the brain and heart, and engage in a conversation about what we have in common. I want us to embody the societal ideals of caring about the wounded and the political ideology that we hear

about family-centered values in the architecture of health of our cities. I would hope that at the very absolute least that we want children to be healthy and happy. A city that can save us may just, in the eyes of a young child like my niece, be home. Environmental neuroscientist Robin Mazumder. This episode featured excerpts from his 2023 Architecture of Health Zeidler-Evans lecture, presented by the Faculty of Health Zeidler-Evans Lecture, presented by the Faculty of Health Sciences at McMaster University. Find out more on our website, cbc.ca slash ideas,

and feel free to write to us there. Special thanks to Timothy Evans for helping make this episode possible. This episode was produced by Lisa Godfrey. Web producer for Ideas is Lisa Ayuso. Technical production, Gabby Hagorilis and Danielle Duval. Ideas senior producer is Nikola Lukšić. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly, and I'm Nala Ayyad. and me. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.