Our Cork 2040: A Cork for all
Mathematical modeller Dr Stuart Neilson, diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome at 45, brings his unique perspective to the challenges of planning Cork's public spaces for all.
Welcome to the ninth instalment of Our Cork 2040.
Cork city is set to double in size by 2040 under the government’s Project Ireland 2040 plans.
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Our Cork 2040: Stuart Neilson
Stuart Neilson lectures and writes about the autism spectrum as a health statistician and from his personal perspective of an Asperger syndrome diagnosis in 2009, at the age of 45. He was a founding member of the team that developed the Diploma in Autism Studies at UCC. He has a degree in computer science and a doctorate in mathematical modelling of inherent susceptibility to fatal disease. Stuart's publications include “Living with Asperger syndrome and Autism in Ireland,” “Painted Lorries of Pakistan,” and a chapter in the anthology “Knowing Why: Adult-Diagnosed Autistic People on Life and Autism.”
He lives in Cork city centre and has work on autistic views on shared architectural spaces on display in the Venice Biennale 2021. He uses technology combined with photography to portray his distinctive Creating Autism. His blog is here.
A sense of exclusion
I have lived in Cork City centre since 1998 and have the seen the city grow in some senses bigger, cleaner and more modern, but also more crowded, harder and less welcoming.
My sense of exclusion from public space arises through social anxiety, sensory sensitivity and poor executive function or planning skills. I am autistic and the faster, stone-clad and crowded glass buildings are not autism friendly.
I don’t have a disability; disablement is a process, the consequence of choices in designing our shared environment. I am also, through age and surgery, less mobile and less active than I used to be, and more exhausted by the intensity of the city centre I live in. I have never driven a car, so walkability is essential to me.
My needs are not exceptional, and probably apply to many people who get anxious in crowds, to older people and to parents attempting to shepherd their young children through an increasingly child-hostile commercial environment.
Cork in 1998 and Cork now
When we first moved to Cork, there was a plurality in the city, with many different independent shops, run by people who were invested in their businesses. The city centre had a newspaper printing press, the Johnson & Perrott car showrooms and garage in Emmett Place, petrol stations, building and plumbing supplies, saddlers and all their employees and customers.
Over time, the range of resources has declined, and the remaining shops have become more alike. A veneer of different brand names often disguise a single chain company creating an image of diversity. Retail and hospitality interiors are dominated by hard glass and steel surfaces, harsh lighting and a lack of seating.
Most premises are now operated by uninvested employees, not proprietors and their families. The result is corporate group-think and shrinking accommodation of diverse behaviours and needs. Eccentricity is not tolerated as much as it used to be, and neither is being old, or holding up the tills, or not speaking clearly. The corporatisation of the city and what used to be public space results in an increased willingness to cast otherness out, and a judgemental assumption of negative intent. Despite new wider pavements, expansive plazas and more pedestrianisation, there seems to be less public space and more crowding.
Autistic people often speak a little too loud, or a little too bluntly. As an autistic person, I am always on my guard when out shopping. I find it hard to make small talk, and when I do, I worry that it is all wrong and that I may have offended people. I often do offend people, unintentionally, because my behaviour is sometimes not compliant with the expected social norms.
The places available to me have become more conformist, with fewer options than in the past, when proprietors and their family employees were more invested in their own business and retaining their own customers, however odd or slow.
The quiet parts of shops
I like the quiet parts of shops where I can stand for a couple of minutes and gather my thoughts. Harsh bright lighting, loud music and beeping till machines make shopping a tiring experience for me.
Yet current design ethos deems my quiet spaces financially non-productive. A few years ago Eason, for example, made their aisles a little narrower and rounded the corners out of their building, taking away my favourite quiet spaces. The new design flattens out all the gradients between soft and hard, noisy and quiet, bright and soothing, so the whole interior is equally loud, brash and discomfiting. Customers can no longer migrate across sensory gradients to suit their own comfort levels. I still shop there, but spend less time and money in the shop. Tiger and Søstrene Grene are no-stopping one-way systems, without any quiet space.
Mapping the motion of the city
Some of my work examines the accessibility of shared public spaces using motion-intensity maps. I am fascinated by desire lines and the paths people occupy in shared space, often far outside the functional and architectural lines that planners intend to bound activity.
Disabled by design?
My needs are not unusual. Lots of people are visibly, or invisibly, disabled. But it is the environment, and the choices of designers, that makes us unable to meet our needs or use space on equal terms.
Disablement is the direct outcome of design choices, and the current ethos in retail outlets and the surrounding public spaces sometimes seem to almost perversely reject universal design principles for inclusion and accessibility.
Not all spaces need to be inclusive. On my part, I never liked nightclubs or noisy bars. I would not expect nightclubs to meet my need of quiet spaces, and I fully expect them to exist and thrive without my custom. But I would demand that my needs are met somewhere in the social and economic fabric of the city. The greater conformity of café, restaurant and shop spaces means that my needs and those of older people and other disabled people are not well met or accommodated.
There are now fewer spaces, indoors or outdoors, where older people are comfortable, or where families can allow their children play or eat a meal without fear of their behaviour being judged.
City spaces have become the domain of customers aged 20 to 50, of young couples and groups of young men. Young children, old people and families are increasingly absent and unwelcome. My need for a calm, quiet and secure place to shop, relax and socialise is shared by some people all the time, and probably shared by all people some of the time.
It’s worth noting that where autism and sensory friendly school spaces have been created, the response is overwhelmingly positive, from autistic and non-autistic students. People like to have the option of sensory friendly spaces, even when they are not autistic themselves.
Whilst some supermarkets and museums have adopted sensory or autism friendly design concepts, they are often limited to an “autism hour”, despite autistic people continuing to have needs for the remaining hours of every day of the week. The very notion of a sensory friendly café, restaurant or bar seems to be anathema to current thought in the hospitality industry.
The Gruen Transfer / Effect
In 1956, Victor Gruen designed the first climate-controlled all weather shopping mall in Southdale, Minnesota.
His vision was to create interlocking environments of work, retail and residence, where communities could live in an integrated, low intensity lifestyle. The climate-controlled shopping centre would enable residents to fulfil their needs all year round. Gruen’s name has unfortunately become attached to the worst excesses of shopping malls and to the Gruen effect, or Gruen transfer, in which the designers attempt to assail shoppers with smells, light, movement and noise to create a sense of discomfort and insecurity.
In many cases a dog-leg entrance ensures the shoppers cannot see the exit, their own car or any obvious escape route. Most people attempt to re-assert a feeling of control and security by making decisions, but in an environment where the only available decisions are what to buy. This effect transfers sensory discomfort into financial expenditure.
Mahon Point
Mahon Point is a fine example of lights, hard acoustic surfaces, an enclosed food court and a sound-track tempo-synced to customer activity. The typical indoor mall is the very opposite of a sensory friendly environment and disables autistic shoppers as a design choice.
A more recent development of this is the New York SoHo café ethos, which breaks down the wall separating the kitchen from the diners and uses acoustically reflective wall and ceiling materials to amplify noise and to create a sense of “buzz”. These environments, in addition to being sensory hell, make it hard for people with hearing or verbal processing impairment to hear conversations at their own table - by design, all the conversations from all the surrounding tables are equally audible, too.
We all lip read and use facial expressions and body language to some extent to understand and “hear” spoken words, and anyone who has tried to record a conversation in a noisy group will be aware of the cocktail party effect the SoHo design ethos is exploiting.
Autistic people find non-verbal cues difficult under normal circumstances, and noisy, open-plan dining environments are very abnormal environments, beyond my coping levels. The extremes of SoHo design are evidenced by the availability of acoustically reflective light fittings, ceiling tiles, electronic noise reinforcement systems and even what appear to be paintings, whose sole purpose is to add “buzz” by echoing human voices, or selectively reflect voice-like kitchen noise.
These interventions have become such embedded corporate group-think in hospitality settings that calm, quiet alternative spaces are becoming less common and less easy to find.
Before shopping malls, there were shopping streets. Redevelopments are increasingly turning streets into controlled indoor environments, where the Gruen transfer can be easily applied. The remaining outdoor retail units fail to compete with shopping malls and out-of-town car-dependent shopping centres like Mahon Point.
Anti-social and pro-social behaviour
Comfortable public spaces, welcoming and inviting for city residents to use, and not just to pass through, are important to the city. These spaces have to be fully inclusive of all residents, whatever their needs.
Access to public space must not be conditional on being able to pay, or having, or appearing to have, a social standing acceptable to businesses. It has become increasingly socially acceptable to “move on” anyone who doesn’t look, dress or behave like a potential customer.
The upright citizen who loses their driving licence for drink-driving receives greater social, public and media sympathy than loud youths with nowhere else to be, a frustrated person who damages public property out of some unknown (and we don’t want to know) distress.
Even a young couple who discard a used condom are vilified, despite showing far greater consideration and awareness than a drunk driver - they are protecting health and life, rather than endangering others. But please do put your condom, or beer can, or food wrapper in a bin.
Most “anti-social behaviour” is, in reality, pro-social behaviour involving groups. The behaviours might be outside the speaker’s or writer’s own comfort zone, or occurring in a public place because those behaving “badly” do not have the luxury and privacy of the speaker’s or writer’s comfortable home.
Above all, the harmful parts of “anti-social behaviour”, whether alcohol, drug use or crime need public health resources and social support, not exclusion. These varied forms of “anti-sociality” are often - deliberately and wrongly - bundled together as if youths, homeless people, migrants and drug-users are a uniform group of people, a group of “them”, the “others” who should be cleansed from public space.
Taking away benches and spaces where people can congregate does not minimise the behaviours or the potential harms. Adding more benches and public spaces disperses and dilutes, and minimises the potential for conflict between people wanting to use the same space for different purposes.
Planning Cork’s public spaces for 2040
What kind of city do we want?
We want a city that is not just a place to shop and pass through, but a welcoming place to linger, meet, chat and interact. Public spaces should have surfaces to sit down that are not cold, miserable and uncomfortable like the granite blocks on Patrick’s Street.
Comfortable public seating makes the difference between accessible social interaction, and staying at home, or heading out of town to a covered shopping centre.
No woman would want to breastfeed a child on one of the granite blocks next to the passing traffic on Patrick street, yet the street was designed with these blocks as the only seating places. Unfortunately, these stone blocks are also just 35cm high, far lower than a Universal Design compliant 46cm in height. This means older people may struggle to sit down or get up from them.
In contrast, the best parts of our hugely expensive new robot trees are the integrated wooden benches, which are heavily used.
These new seats are spaces sheltered from the wind where people can stop, rest and chat without feeling they are in the way of fast flowing human traffic. They make the city human, pleasant and a destination rather than something to be endured during the necessity of shopping. And their seats are in line with the Universal Design standard.
Benches, planters and trees to slow the flow
Where did all the space go over the past 20 years? Fast-moving people take up more space. It is important to intentionally obstruct free movement in pedestrian public spaces in the same way that traffic calming on residential roads makes them slower, safer and more pleasant for residents and visitors alike.
Patrick’s Street, Emmett Place and Cornmarket are flat, sterile plazas with no identifiable function other than foot traffic. Delineating the function of compartments of the streetscape with furniture and forcing walkers to meander through slow zones creates places where people can feel comfortable and secure to socialise.
Anyone in a hurry can bypass these areas in straight lines at their periphery. Cork has too much undelineated flat space, too many open paved areas with no compartmentalisation, with no shade and no shelter from the rain. Benches, preferably facing each other in social groupings, planters and trees, all make the space more usable by everyone.
This made me think about the city as a social hub rather than just somewhere to shop, like it used to be. Good ideas and necessary if the city centre is to thrive
So good to read this article I whole heartedly agree with everything in it, the city needs more soft corners and more sensitive planning we need to have varied and indigenous retail - Dare we demand our council to have the courage to exclude all franchises? - and the robo trees! expensive but lovely benches - thanks Dr Stuart Neilson <3