Emotion, Space and Society 1 (2008) 65–69

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Emotion, Space and Society

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/emospa

Short article

Who has the street-smarts? The role of emotion in co-creating the city
Janet McGaw a, *, Alasdair Vance b,1
a
Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, University of Melbourne, Royal Parade, Parkville, VIC 3052, Australia
b
Academic Child Psychiatry, Department of Paediatrics, University of Melbourne, Royal Children’s Hospital, Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, Parkville, VIC 3052, Australia

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Elizabeth Grosz argues that bodies and cities co-create one another; bodies build cities but cities in turn
Received 15 January 2008 shape bodies, physically and socially. Recent findings in neurobiological research confirm that environ-
Received in revised form 19 May 2008 mental factors can change the way DNA is folded, affecting such things as mood regulation and impulse
Accepted 3 July 2008
control. In turn, emotional factors affect our capacity to shape our environment. But is each citizen
afforded with the same opportunities and capacity to shape the city and the same susceptibility to being
Keywords:
shaped by it? This paper suggests, following Michel de Certeau, that although even the apparently
Co-creation
powerless can change cities, those who are emotionally robust are more effective. The paper presents
Bodies/cities
Mood regulation a collaborative creative installation in Melbourne between one of the authors and a group of homeless
Impulse control and socially isolated women, and contrasts it with the work of graffiti artists to demonstrate the effect
Tactics and strategies that emotion has on the capacity of the marginalised to shape the urban fabric. The second author
Homelessness provides evidence from neurobiology to support the claims.
Graffiti art Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
There are many ways to look at a city: from the distance it is
a landmark of towers built by men (and occasionally, but not
often, by women) who have power, money and land. From above,
through the windows of one of those towers, it is an ant nest of
scurrying and purposeful citizens on foot and in vehicles; but
from the street it is a visceral experience of smells, sounds and
moving bodies choreographing their own paths of meeting and
likewise non-meeting as they sidestep one another, averting their
gaze.2 From this aspect it becomes apparent that while the city
may be physical, it conjures powerful emotions as well. It also
becomes apparent that the city is made not only by the powerful
but also by the marginal through everyday acts of occupation.
And if one looks very closely, indeed not just outwardly but
inwardly, it becomes apparent the city makes us as much as we
make it. This paper will present an urban installation in Mel-
bourne by one of the authors (McGaw3, an architect and
academic) in collaboration with a group of homeless women that
explores the ways they both shape the city and are shaped by the
city. It will contrast the homeless women’s ‘tactics’4 with the
tactics of another group of marginal citizens, street (graffiti)
artists, to argue that emotions shape the capacity of the marginal
to claim space in the city. It will offer evidence from cognitive
neuroscience to provide some insights into the findings.
2. Urban threads: a praxic research project
In 2004, I began a praxic research project into the capacity of
those who have no apparent power, money or land to shape the
urban fabric.5 It began with the theory of power relations articu-
lated by Michel de Certeau.6 He observed that there are two types
of power that operate in the city. He defined ‘strategic’ power as
that which is exercised by individuals, corporations or non-human
entities that own things and can set up boundaries around
themselves. Institutions, banks, cities and those with socially
prescribed authority all have strategic power. But he also observed
that people and entities that appear marginal and powerless do
have a type of power at their disposal that he defined as ‘tactical’
power. It is the power of movement and timing to usurp the place

4
* Corresponding author. Tel.: þ61 3 8344 3038; fax: þ61 3 8344 5032. I use the definition of tactics proposed by Michel de Certeau here. In his
E-mail addresses: mcgawjk@unimelb.edu.au (J. McGaw), avance@ writings on everyday practices he observes that ‘strategies’ are those entities with
unimelb.edu.au (A. Vance). power and can own place thereby setting up a boundary between themselves and
1
Tel.: þ61 3 9345 4666. an outside (people as well as institutions, buildings, cities, etc.) while ‘tactics’ are
2
Paul Carter. ‘‘The Chi Complex: Ambiguities of Meeting’’, in submission. those entities that seize power through movement and timing.
3 5
Janet McGaw. ‘‘Urban threads’’, Journal of Architectural Education 59 (4) (May The ‘I’ referred to the first author of this paper, architect and academic.
6
2006): 12–18. Suppressed for peer review process.

1755-4586/$ – see front matter Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.emospa.2008.07.002
66 J. McGaw, A. Vance / Emotion, Space and Society 1 (2008) 65–69
of the strategy. The soap box orator, the skateboarder who trans-
forms a bench seat into a stunt path, the ordinary person who
navigates an unpredictable path through the city are all tacticians.
The praxic research project that evolved was a creative collabo-
ration between the author and a group of homeless women that
used ‘tactics’ as a mechanism for ‘taking place’ in the city. The
purpose was discursive: it told individual stories of how personal
place had been staked out in the public realm and set up oppor-
tunities for the city to respond.7 What evolved was a creative
installation of domestic rooms in interstitial spaces in central
Melbourne: its back alleys, lanes, disused door alcoves and the
airspace over carparks. Our modus operandi was to take ‘place’ that
was otherwise disused or ignored, to appropriate materials that
others had discarded and to use existing systems in the city to our
advantage to effect temporary physical change to the fabric of the
city, and, perhaps, longer term change to some of its citizens. The
rooms included bedrooms, WAR(d)robes, a living room and dining
room. They were personal, moving, provocative and allegorical,
but they were also ephemeral, fragile and exposed and as such
were very receptive to the reactions of the city. Their gradual
destruction told the other half of the story.
During the course of a number of workshops over several
months, the women I worked with reflected on the following kinds
of questions: How do I make place in the city to rest for the night?
What are my daytime trajectories, my wandering lines? How can
clothes be shelter? What’s in the word WAR(d)robe? How can my
clothes and/or others communicate meaning? How do I feel about
my place in the city? My collaborators then configured allegorical
objects (chrysalis bedrooms and garments for WAR(d)robes) from
donated clothes and reclaimed rubbish (cardboard, carpet off-cuts
and plastic from rubbish skips) using only scissors and electrical
cable ties. I sited them along a route that was meaningful for the
group, provided an overlay of text that included titles, explanatory
information and evolving graffiti that I used to record the responses
of the city to the installation over the two weeks of its life. The route
connected the two agencies8 that supported our meetings and
followed the Path of Most Resistance (And Least Distance) that two
of my collaborators mapped to describe their preferred path
through the city when they were feeling good about themselves.
On a bad day, they said, they would choose a longer route down
more invisible lanes.
When I presented this project at a seminar, an academic archi-
tect interjected with the question of why I had worked on such an
impractical project. ‘Wouldn’t it have been more useful to design
shelters for the homeless?’ he asked. It was, I suppose, an obvious
question. Interestingly, however, two of my collaborators left
unhappy but warm and dry home environments for the freedom of
the street. One had been living in a rented house that she shared
with two men prior to her spell on the streets. Relations had soured
with her flatmates but rather than address the issues directly, she
had impulsively left without finding anywhere else to live first.
Once on the streets it is difficult to get off them. While none saw
cardboard boxes as an optimal living environment, what precipi-
tated their flight into the street was poor mood regulation and
impulse control and subsequently poor capacity to plan. And the
stories they wanted to tell were their desires for acceptance and
transformation.
7 sion?’’ American Journal of Medical Genetics Part C Seminars in Medical Genetics 148
Bernadette Suter and Gabrielle Bennett, both primary health nurses from Living
Room Primary Health Service and Lesley Bardsley, a social worker from Wesley
Mission Melbourne were instrumental in providing support for the group. The
collaboration began in the context an interagency weekly lunchtime support
meeting, Time Out @ the Place.
8 15
Names suppressed for purposes of peer reviewing.
What were the underlying triggers for the poor mood regula-
tion, impulse control and poor capacity to plan? In some cases the
pathological effects of eating disorders and their associated social
inscriptions of the body, and in other cases pathological depen-
dence on drugs of addiction were contributing factors. But we
would argue that these were symptomatic of a lack of emotional
robustness. Emotional robustness is defined, within the discipline
of cognitive neuroscience, as an ability to persevere, maintain hope,
problem solve, manage stress and generate new strategies when in
situations with negative emotional valence.9 Mood regulation,
impulse control, the process of choosing when to act or not act, are
contingent on a situation’s emotional valence. Those who are
emotionally robust have greater capacity to control their feelings
and impulses. While emotional robustness is to an extent geneti-
cally encoded,10 environment plays a strong role in shaping this
capacity in people. Repeated experiences of lack of acceptance and
validation, especially but not only early in life, can affect one’s
emotional robustness. Emotional phenomena are associated with
neural network development11 and gene expression.12 Specifically,
the interpersonal environment and wider environmental factors
affect how neural networks mature and which neural networks are
ultimately made.
3. Bodies/cities: cities as physical entities
Elizabeth Grosz has spent years reflecting on the body as a socio-
cultural artefact and challenging notions of the body as a purely
physical entity and in particular the relationship between the body
and the city. Bodies, she defines, as ‘‘concrete, organic, material
organizations of flesh, organs,.and skeletal structure’’.13 They are
incomplete and undetermined without an intra-psychic and social
environment. Cities, on the other hand, are complex interactive
networks of architecture, geography and civic infrastructure that
are equally indeterminate without organising social, economic and
power relations.14 She identifies two dominant narratives about
bodies and cities that she seeks to challenge. The first is that the
relationship between bodies and cities is a causal one: cities are
designed and built in response to human need. They are simply
a physical entity comprised of buildings, roads and public spaces
built by people, for people. Implicit in this understanding is that the
mind conceives of the city and the body constructs it. It assumes
a binary separation of mind and body, and in particular, positions
the body as merely a tool in the process of city building: the rela-
tionship is one-way.15
4. Bodies/cities: cities as socio-political constructs
A second view is social. It sets up a parallel relationship between
body and city where the city is regarded in socio-political terms
(rather than material or physical) and its structure is related
9
Southwick SM, Vythilingham M, Charney DS. ‘‘The psychobiology of depression
and resilience to stress: implications for prevention and treatment’’, Annual Review
Clinical Psychology (1) 2005: 255–291.
10
Crews D. ‘‘Epigenetics and its implications for behavioural neuroendocri-
nology’’, Neuroendocrinology 29 (2008): 34–357.
11
Wagner G, Kock K, Schachtzabel C, Reichenbach J, Sauer H, Schlosser R.
‘‘Enhanced rostral anterior cingulated cortex activation during cognitive control is
related to orbitofrontal volume reduction in uniploardepression’’, Journal Psychiatry
Neuroscience 33 (2008): 199–208.
12
Hettema JM. ‘‘What is the genetic relationship between anxiety and depres-
(2008): 140–146.
13
Elizabeth Grosz. ‘‘Bodies-Cities’’ Sexuality and Space (New York: Princeton
Architectural Press, 1992) 243.
14
Grosz. ‘‘Bodies-Cities’’ 244.
Grosz. ‘‘Bodies-Cities’’ 246.
 J. McGaw, A. Vance / Emotion, Space and Society 1 (2008) 65–69
directly to the structure of the body. The social organization of the
city is an anatomical allegory. For example, the king is represented
as head of the body politic, the law as its nerves, the military as its
arms, etc. Such a reading assumes that nature precedes and
provides a model for social organization, implicitly justifying
hierarchical social structures.16
5. Bodies/cities: co-creating bodies and cities
In Grosz’s opinion there ought to be a third paradigm for
describing the relationship between bodies and cities that is neither
causal nor representational. She suggests that bodies and cities are
incomplete structures on their own: rather, they co-create one
another. While it is obvious that cities are created by people, it is less
obvious how bodies are created by cities. Grosz identifies a variety of
examples, from the physical through to the emotional. The city
orients and organises interpersonal relations into public and private
domains; there is evidence of gradual modification of the muscular
structure of a body that can be witnessed in urban dwellers who
spend their adult lives riding in elevators and sitting at desks17;the
city plays some role in the development of people’s social identity
and body image through the different representations of the body
within the city; and the city’s form and structure encourage social
conformity and can similarly create social marginalisation.18
Anthropologist, Tim Ingold, arrives at a similar point through
observations of perception in different cultures. In the past it has
been assumed that cultural differences in organising perceptual
data have been due to received, culturally specific conceptual
frameworks. A recent theory, ‘practice theory’, that has arisen out of
Bordieu’s ‘theory of practice’, argues that the environment itself
shapes perception in different cultural groups.19 Bordieu notes that
many bodily skills are acquired, not through instruction, but
through bodily ‘practice’. As this practical knowledge is developed
within different contexts, not imported into them, practice theorists
argue that the environment is a shaper of cultural practices.
Different modes of body habitus, such as ways of moving, sitting,
greeting and using tools, are evident in different cultural groups,
and in turn the background environment is perceived in different
ways.20 These speculations are supported by current findings in the
field of neuroscience that show that the expression of our most
fundamental building blocks, deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), can be
transformed by environmental factors.
Recent investigations within the field of molecular genetics have
outlined a compelling model of co-creation involving the expres-
sion of our DNA and our interpersonal environment. Epigenetics,21
as it is known, has shown that the functional activity of a gene can
change with altered external environments. While a gene’s
inherent structure does not change, the shape, the folding and the
configuration of the chromatin in which the genes are contained
alter in response to particular environmental stimuli at particular
stages of development.22 More specifically the environment can
shape one’s emotional robustness.23 For instance, studies have
16
Grosz. ‘‘Bodies-Cities’’, 247.
17
Elizabeth Grosz. ‘‘Bodies-Cities’’ in Beatrice Colomina, Sexuality and Space (New
York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992) 249.
18
Grosz. ‘‘Bodies-Cities’’, 250.
19
Ingold, T. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and
Skill (New York: Routledge, 2000) 153.
20
Ingold. The Perception of the Environment. 162.
21
Bock C, Lengauer T. ‘‘Computational Epigenetics’’, Bioinformatics 24 (2008):
1–10.
22
Holliday R. ‘‘Epigenetics: an historical overview’’, Epigenetics 1 (2006): 76–80.
23
Caspi A, McClay J, Moffitt TE, Mill J, Martin J, Craig IW, Taylor A, Poulton R. ‘‘Role
of genotype in the cycle of violence in maltreated children’’, Science 297 (2002):
851–854.
67
shown that the early interpersonal parenting environment can
cause changes to the DNA methylation of a key nerve growth factor
involved in stress regulation.24
6. Power relations between bodies and cities
The Urban Threads installation provokes a series of questions
about the complex relationship between people and their cities.
How does involvement in the co-creation vary from individual to
individual? Are some people more able to create the city and are
some more susceptible to being created by the city? Even on the
margins, are there some who are more effective at using ‘tactics’
than others to effect change? What are the factors affecting
difference? It became apparent that De Certeau’s categorical
distinction between ‘tactics’ and ‘strategies’ was more nuanced
when played out in reality. Sometimes tacticians seem strategic, at
other times strategic elements of the city operate tactically. Power
relations are very fluid.
One of my potential collaborators, ‘B’, was an intensely creative
person. Although she had experienced homelessness and social
isolation she was a published poet and had been involved in
a collaboration to create a mandala. While she was interested in our
project she chose not to participate. One of the comments she made
during our first conversation was that the city was a ‘dangerous
place’ for her. She had been an alcoholic since she was twelve and in
the city feels lured by the pubs on the street corners. Her capacity to
resist is constantly challenged.
Another collaborator, ‘Ally’, reconfigured a garment for her
WAR(d)robe that consisted of a chiffon blouse hung from the collar
by a strangulating necktie. We called it the ‘noose of expectations.’
She talked of her constant sense of the city’s surveillance and
judgement of her on the basis of what she wore. She wrote:
‘dressing 4 others expectations. Attitudes formed simply on the
type of clothes you wear. Clothes and image are so much more
important than the human BEING inside them.’ Lesley, the social
worker who supported our group, recounted the story of a client,
another homeless woman, who carried a briefcase with her
whenever she was in the city so that she would be afforded respect.
These women had suffered repeated experiences of lack of accep-
tance by strangers in the city.
‘Sophie’ found the city a cold and alienating place, and chose to
live in the inner western suburbs, although she came in to the city
regularly to access her support services. In her WAR(d)robe she
hung a garment configured from flares, the style of jeans she liked,
she said, because of the way they skirted around her, creating
distance between her and the world. Her chrysalis was swathed in
layers of cardboard, foam, carpet off-cuts and plastic. It was titled:
‘don’t slam the door on the way out’ in reference to the way her
fights with her boyfriend always ended when she retreated to the
safety of her doona (or duvet). The city exacerbated her desire for
warmth and protection; a safe haven from the wind but also from
negative emotional experiences.
My collaborators all joined with me in creating new vistas in the
city, storyboards of their experiences that invited response, but
many of the stories they told were of experiences of the city
shaping them. The socio-cultural context of the city challenged
their self-esteem, devalued their contributions and alienated them.
But the physical context shaped them too. Ready access to alcohol
challenged their self-control in the face of addictions and hard cold
24
Szyf M, McGowan P, Meaney MJ. ‘‘The social environment and the epigenome’’,
Environmental and Molecular Mutagenesis (2007) December 19 (EPub), and Meaney
MJ, Syzf M. ‘‘Environmental programming of stress responses through DNA meth-
ylation: life at the interface between a dynamic environment and a fixed genome’’,
Dialogues Clinical Neuroscience 7 (2005): 103–123.
68 J. McGaw, A. Vance / Emotion, Space and Society 1 (2008) 65–69
pavements and windswept streets made them physically cold,
increasing a need for containment, and the inscriptions of images of
perfect women on the city’s walls and billboards challenged their
self-esteem. It seemed that while my collaborators exhibited
emotional deficits that affected their capacity to shape the city, the
city, in turn, was complicit in shaping their emotional states.
There are other marginal players in the city that have a different
impact, and are, in turn, shaped differently by the city. Buskers,
chalk artists and speakers on soap boxes all offer a momentary layer
of cultural enrichment to the city that often entertains and some-
times provokes. Some of the more provocative tactics are those of
the street (graffiti) artist. By some they are considered antisocial
acts of destruction, by others an important and poetic inscription
on the surface of the city. In the context of our installation, their
work was extremely important as it created a backdrop for
a number of our installations. Their practice offers an interesting
counterpoint for this paper. Unlike my collaborators, street artists,
‘take place’ in the city with sheer bravura.
The week before I was to install our metaphorical house in the
city, I was tipped off by one of the building owners that there was to
be a ‘make-over’ by street artists and it would be wise to contact the
organiser, whose mobile phone number was passed on. It was
curious that I was encouraged to seek approval for our installation
from this ‘tactician’ who had no legal rights over the lane. Informal
power plays are as important to the operation of the city as the
formal ones. ‘Aloha’, as he called himself, approved. But his work
along with that of others in the ‘graf crew’ transformed the reading
of our installations profoundly. They painted bold, colourful, and
provocative pieces that upstaged our fragile and tentative work to
the point that it became almost invisible. What was it that made
their work so dramatic and ours so timid?
Some may imagine it is a gendered hierarchy in operation, the
bold, male outlaw in contrast to the passive homeless woman.
However, a number of the street artists who work in Melbourne are
women, including ‘Vexta’ who had applied stencils to one of our
sites, Hosier Lane.25 Women are in the minority of homeless people,
and they are by no means passive. ‘Joan’s’ chrysalis, her ‘box room’,
was an exercise in expediency: ‘when I’m sleeping rough, speed
and expediency shape my architecture. I choose a quiet place while
its still light where I’m not likely to be noticed and I make my
concrete bed as comfortable as possible.’ Her days were always full
planning the next meal, sleeping spot, and accessing other support
services she needed. This paper contends that the difference
between the work is primarily to do with differing capacities to
exercise the power in the urban terrain and that much of the
capacity is shaped by emotional robustness.
Street artist, ‘Aloha’, asserts that it is through understanding the
strategies of the city intimately and behaving tactically, that they
are able to appropriate the city’s surfaces for their own political and
aesthetic ends.26 He has lived in the city for a decade or so and
believes that successful street art (that is, working without getting
caught) involves an intimate understanding of patterns of move-
ment in the city, including loopholes in surveillance. He has
observed that people assume that you have approval to do a range
of illegal things in the city if you act as if you are supposed to be
there. ‘If you dress in white overalls and carry ladders, no one will
ask questions. In some instances it is not even necessary to carry
the charade that far,’ ‘Aloha’ asserts. He has had police walk past
him while applying graffiti to walls and comment admiringly,
adding ‘I hope you are getting paid well for that, mate.’ At first,
Aloha worked cautiously, at night and always mindful of being
25
Gabriella Coslovich. ‘‘Our Colourful Underbelly’’, The Age Newspaper (Mel-
bourne: Fairfax Media), 4 Dec 2005.
26
Interview, 2005.
seen, but now he often works in broad daylight. He sometimes
invests in the hire of some expensive machinery, such as a scissor
lift or cherry picker, and works confidently. No one has ever
checked for road-closing-permits, out-of-hours permits or licences
to consume alcohol on the streets at their unofficial opening
parties. Although the city has a wide range of prohibited practices
and an equally wide range of practices requiring prior approval and
permits, they are, in ‘Aloha’s’ experience, rarely ever enforced.
While there may be perceived to be structural differences at play
here (the street artists can afford to hire a scissor lift, while
a homeless woman cannot, for example), they were minimal. Our
project had the support of strategic bodies such as the University of
Melbourne, key welfare agencies in the city and some benevolent
landowners. We also had funding to hire a cherry picker to install
one of our WAR(d)robes. Because of our allegiances to such strat-
egies, we did all the structural things well, such as applying for
permits, consulting neighbours and landowners.
Our collaboration was constrained by the social inscriptions and
legal prescriptions of the city while the street artists make literal
inscriptions on the city’s walls. Why was the outcome of our actions
so different? I suggest that it was twofold. Firstly, our tactics were
compromised at every turn by strategies because of my association
with institutional bodies and their need to manage risks and my
ethical commitment to comply with the law. But secondly, and I
argue that this had a significant impact, the street artists’ capacity
to effect spatial and physical change is enabled by emotional skills
we did not possess.
Street artists function optimally in high pressure and high
stimulus environments. They maintain very active and precise
monitoring of potential artistic opportunities and potential threats
such as the police. From a neurobiological perspective, the
successful ones manifest excellent mood and arousal regulation,
and superior levels of impulse control. They also receive affirmation
through a range of discursive processes that are both intrinsic to
graffiti culture and part of the strategic systems of the city. Graffiti
artists use coded text on and adjacent to street art to affirm great
work (and to denigrate inferior work). Superior artwork is also
protected, while inferior work is ‘slashed’ (painted out).27 There is
a process of peer review that is acted out amongst artists that
enables good artists to experience the emotional rewards of vali-
dation and acceptance.28 Street art has been appropriated by the
fashion industry and is now part of popular culture to the extent
that Tourism Victoria has as its top billing destination on their
website the back lanes of the city that have been revitalised with
‘opulent bars, eclectic boutiques and fashionable restaurants’ all
decorated with ‘amazing graffiti and stencil art’.29
The participants involved in the architectural installation, in
contrast, manifested a number of symptoms that impaired their
functioning. The symptoms included disturbances of eating and
substance misuse that were played out in different kinds of func-
tional impairments. They were less flexible and adaptive when
sudden, unexpected complications arose and more rigid and con-
stricted in their responses. These impairing symptoms could be
traced back to particular coping styles and belief systems from
within the participants’ family of origin or peer group or be learned
behaviours through the same set of earlier relationships. But from
a biological perspective they could be conceptualised as manifes-
tations of poor impulse control, with or without poor mood and/or
arousal regulation, all associated with emotional robustness.
Both of these impaired and optimal functioning states are illu-
minated by recent cognitive neuroscience studies of impulse
27
Dew, Uncommissioned Art, p. 245.
28
Dew, Uncommissioned Art, pp. 225–231 and pp. 244–248.
29
http://www.visitvictoria.com.
 J. McGaw, A. Vance / Emotion, Space and Society 1 (2008) 65–69
control and its interdependent links with emotion, in particular,
mood and arousal regulation.30 This work has shown that impulse
control comprises the ability to selectively attend to one stimulus
while simultaneously inhibiting our response to others. Further,
cognitive neuroscience and structural31 and functional32 neuro-
imaging studies have demonstrated that impulse control involves
three key regions of the brain; the prefrontal cortex, basal ganglia
(primarily the striatum) and the inferior parietal lobe. These
regions form the foundation for our functional impulse control
while also playing a role in the regulation of our mood and arousal:
in other words, the same brain regions underpin these three
regulatory functions. In particular, with respect to impulse control,
the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex33 is mainly associated with the
reproduction phase of the key stimuli that form part of a particular
impulse control event while the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex34
subserves the ‘holding’ of information ‘on line’ as a particular
impulse control strategy is generated and executed. Neural
networks that span these key foundational brain regions form the
scaffolding for functional impulse control through underpinning
these events as they occur. These neural networks modulate the
degree of their activity depending on the amount of impulse
control required in a given situation.35 This property enables them
to be reactive in a moment-to-moment way to both external stimuli
in our environment and internal stimuli in our bodies, such as our
mood and/or arousal regulation state, so that a given impulse
control event is appropriate. In this way, the above key founda-
tional brain regions and their neural network scaffolds co-create
our impulse control responses in concert with our surrounding
environment.
One of my collaborators, ‘Joan’, wrote to me throughout the
months we were collaborating. The letters and notes that arrived in
my letterbox demonstrated the depths of her insight into the city
and her place in it. The first to arrive was a short story about
Harlequin that she had re-titled ‘Architecture for Harlequin.’ It is
a story about a boy who is too poor to buy a new costume for the
carnival, so his mother makes a patchwork one from snippets of his
friends’ costumes. He is blessed by the love of his friends, which is
materialised in a reconfigured garment. The second was a letter and
press cuttings of an artwork by Peter Burke called Shelly Innocence,
a billboard ostensibly advertising trust as a commodity that can be
bought. She was captured by the connections between these bill-
boards and the project we were working on together. We met up
a year later and she revealed that she hadn’t bothered to look at the
installation when it was up in the city. Why? ‘I’m not creative’, she
said. Sadly, she was quick to assume that her contributions lacked
value. While she was able to expediently fashion a bed, her right to
30
Castellanos FX, Tannock R. ‘‘Neuroscience of ADHD: the search for endophe-
notypes’’, Nat Rev Neurosci 3 (2002): 617–628 and Bellgrove, MA, O’Connell RG,
Vance A. ‘‘Genetics of cognitive deficits in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder
(ADHD): clues for novel treatment methods’’, Expert Review of Neurotherapeutics (in
press).
31
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69
claim space in the city for dialogue had never been validated. But
interestingly she also talked about how important the process had
been for her at an emotional level. ‘It was the relationship that was
important; the fact that you had given up time to work with me.’36
7. Conclusion
Thus, for my collaborators, a reciprocal relationship between
emotion and action in the space of the city is evident. Feelings of
lack of acceptance and self-worth limited my collaborators’ desire
to effect change in the urban context while at the same time the
environment contributed to their feelings of self-worth: bodies and
cities co-creating one another. By contrast, street artists, who are
also marginal players in the city, exhibit great self-belief and
consequently have considerable capacity to effect change in the city
despite their status. Why does the city not shape them in the same
way? While their emotional capacity to exhibit superior impulse
control and mood and arousal regulation is influenced by other
environmental and biological factors that constitute their total
make-up, the city also encourages a sense of entitlement in them.
Even law enforcement officers can affirm their work. Thus, the
capacity of marginal citizens to create the city is influenced by their
emotional strengths. And similarly the city positively reinforces
those that are already confident and self-assured and further
diminishes those who are not.
Further, this co-creation principle is echoed at a neurobiological
level in fronto-parietal neural networks that subsume our impulse
control, mood and arousal regulation abilities and gene functional
ability modulated by epigenetic mechanisms. This creative collab-
oration showed that cities and bodies do co-create one another. It
affirms De Certeau’s observation that even the apparently power-
less can change cities. But it demonstrates too, that even on the
margins, different groups are afforded with different skills and
opportunities to shape the city and different susceptibilities to
being shaped by it. Emotional robustness has a significant role to
play.
Acknowledgments
I would like to acknowledge my collaborators: Kylie O’Brien,
‘‘Sophie’’, ‘‘Ally’’, ‘‘Joan’’ and Joeline. Some chose anonymity while
others wanted recognition for their work. Two agencies provided
practical and emotional support for these women and were closely
involved in the process: Lesley Bardsley from Wesley Mission
Melbourne and Bernadette Suter and Gabrielle Bennett from Living
Room Primary Health Service. Together they ran a lunchtime
support meeting, ‘‘Time Out @ the Place’’ that was the context in
which the creative works were made. The project was conceived
and carried out by author 1 as part of a PhD by Creative Works in
the Faculty of Architecture Building and Planning, the University of
Melbourne under the supervision of Ass. Prof. Paul Walker.
36
Interview, 2006.