Variety and Vitality

Spaces with variety and vitality offer a range of experiences and a sense of discovery. They stimulate positive emotions and subconscious bodily feelings of seeking, curiosity, a sense of freshness, and energy that moves us into action through both motor and metaphoric affordances.

Many buildings are directional, with linear wayfinding that offers limited choice for where to go. Other buildings encourage people to stroll, wander, and discover instead of simply getting from point A to point B. One could even say these buildings seduce users with a variety and vitality of multidimensional and multi-sensorial experiences, even as they create a sense of coherence.

American architect Steve Mouzon observes how variety within limits makes for great places:

The most-loved places are comprised of buildings with an endless variety of details within a limited range of architecture, giving distinct and recognizable character. … People judge the vitality of a place by the amount of variety. Create everything out of five standard models, and it will appear dead. Allow things to vary slightly from one building to the next, and the place starts to live. So the narrow range is necessary to define the character of a place, while the wide variety is necessary to make it live. Combine both, and you have a chance of creating what Christopher Alexander calls “the quality without a name.” Or put another way, a narrow range without great variety creates mechanical objects; great variety without a narrow range creates disconnected randomness. Combine the two, and you have a chance of creating a living thing.

Tokyo, for example, hasn’t developed in the image of what we might view as a typical, orderly, Western city with a rational street grid and associated architectural styles. Instead, it consists of meandering streets and loosely connected neighborhoods based on topography and waves of bottom-up rebuilding after numerous human-made and natural disasters.

Teeming yokocho alleyways and varied facades are not a symbol of a disregard for the public realm but result from building by-laws addressing each site individually. This is a different approach from attempting to make every building contextual – that is, blending it in with the others around it – which is often the norm in Western urban design circles.

In Tokyo: A Spatial Anthropology, Japanese architectural historian Jinnai Hidenobu describes the rhythms, variety, and vitality of the city that result in “no clear logical system in Edo [former name of Tokyo] that would bring a variety of elements together into a single whole as in a European city.” Rather, “like a mosaic or a kaleidoscope,” the metropolis “sparkled with myriad different images created by the particularity of individual locales, their terrain and their histories.”

Spanish architect Jorge Almazán further develops this idea in Emergent Tokyo when he describes how the city has “emerged” organically instead of having had a pattern imposed on it by authorities. The resultant vitality and richness of the city texture is a consequence of property owners and architects responding to their changing surroundings, much as a flock of birds naturally finds its shape, which is why Tokyo feels idiosyncratic, human, familiar, and fresh.

Variety and vitality are also good for the brain. Recent neuroimaging research has revealed that people who spend time exploring and discovering new neighborhoods experience persistent positive emotions that last beyond the initial experience. Wandering stimulates both the hippocampus and the ventral striatum regions of the brain, the places associated with memory, learning, decision-making, and reward processing. As we will see in later chapters, places without characteristics such as variety and vitality, known as impoverished spaces, lack appropriate sensory stimulation, intensify brain atrophy, and slow down the recovery process of brain lesions in stroke victims. They are the equivalent to fast food, which is transactional, leaving you feeling hungry. Simply put, wandering in areas that have qualities of variety and vitality makes us happier and more mentally resilient.