Cell Theory

Gaining the world. Losing the place.

I’ve spent most of my adult life thinking about the relationship between where we live and who we become as a result. The name of this Substack, Habitats and Humans, is one of the ways in which I bring this thinking into the world. It is a chance to express my belief that people are a product of their environment and reflect on what that means for how we all go on with our lives... but this is hobby-level thinking.

My real job often gets called ‘placemaking’ and I have spent most of my working life trying to explain to people what this means or convince them that it matters. Placemaking isn’t really an industry as much as it is some kind of ‘practice’. When people say ‘their practice’ it generally signifies that they are putting in lots of effort but don’t know what is happening. Whatever is going on, there is lots of money being spent in placemaking but most placemakers can’t even describe what placemaking is, how they do it and why it’s worth it. That’s nuts.

Understandably, there is a lot of cynicism about placemaking. People hate placemakers… especially architects who see the practice as a kind of conspiracy to defraud real designers of their fees. The contempt runs so deep that I’ve even spent time trying to rebrand myself as an urban strategist, but it’s like changing your name at the age of 20 and continuing to live in the same small village – ‘placemaker’ is a cross I bear. Shame! Shame! Shame!

There’s nothing more boring than arguing with an architect about what is important, but it’s still satisfying when they realise there is a primal logic joining the efforts of the placemaker with their rarified discipline. Even the staunchest architect recognises that humans are animals and the most profound research on how foundational a place is to animals was conducted on rats by American-British neuroscientist John O’Keefe in the 70s. O’Keefe was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (2014) as a result of this work.

O’Keefe’s research involved tracking brain activity as rats negotiated a maze. He identified that certain neurons in the hippocampus fire when an animal moves through space – he called these place cells. Each of these place cells has a place field which is a specific region of space where it preferentially fires, so as the rat traverses across the maze and across different place fields, its place cells activate in sequence, creating a kind of neural map and encoding the animal’s current position.

O’Keefe’s research has a few wild dimensions. He discovered that the mental map is allocentric — meaning it’s anchored to the environment, not to the rat’s body orientation. So, if the rat turns around, the place cells don’t reorganise; they still represent the same external locations – this is how Google Maps works but in a rat’s brain. When a rat is introduced to a new environment, place cells rapidly form a new, distinct map — a process called “remapping.” The same neurons can participate in completely different maps for different environments and my personal favourite insight; these place cells fire in reverse order when the rat is sleeping, suggesting that it is having some kind of dream of all the places it has been. Cute.

Having a cognitive map that can both orientate and locate you is a massive evolutionary advantage. It proves that at the level of survival of the species having a sense of place really matters, so much so we are born with sophisticated onboard mental and cellular capability giving us the best chance of knowing where we are. It follows that providing a sense of place to people (and rats if that’s your vibe) is very important. Urban designers do that with entire cities using the logic of layout, architects do that with the distinctiveness of design, placemakers do that by organising activity and other smaller place elements – but we are all in the business of stimulating place cells because knowing where you are is objectively helpful.

Rats are not online… at least not yet… and I don’t want to be around if that happens. A rat’s sense of place, generated by their place cells, represents a physical space only. Things are more complicated for humans. In No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior (1985), Joshua Meyrowitz advances a sophisticated theory of how electronic media has broken the bonds between where we are and what we know and experience. Even though he was writing about television and radio, the principles still apply today. We may exist in a physical space and have place cells firing off in our brain, but electronic media has created new social situations that are no longer shaped by where we are or who is physically “with” us in a physical space. In a world with electronic media, our information systems are rearranged around “who knows what about whom” and “who knows what compared to whom”. This social place really needs some better placemakers.