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A Canadian scheme for decreasing sprawl is the much-lauded Places to Grow Act that was passed into law in 2005 and has been
awarded prizes by planning institutes in both Canada and the United States for its vision and leadership.
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Among other things, the act sets density targets for combinations of jobs and residents in designated urban regions within the most densely populated part of Ontario. The act leaves it largely to the affected municipalities, along with developers, to work out how the density targets will be achieved. This approach, not an uncommon one in many similar acts in North America, has some risks. Past experience suggests that, other things being equal, people have a strong preference for expansive space. Average house sizes have ballooned from about 900 square feet in 1950 to more than 2,400 square feet in the early part of this century. At the same time, family size has decreased. In a way, this is a self-perpetuating trend. The spatial design of the suburbs discourages pedestrian activity and shared public spaces, so, for the resident of the suburbs, the interior private space of the home and the manicured fenced-in yard can become the entire world.

If intensified urban spaces are to be successful and not just enforced sardine cans full of human beings, like failed housing projects in the United States in past decades, then these intensified areas must be designed to encourage their residents to expand their spatial range. People must be encouraged to walk, not only by providing them with attractive nearby destinations such as pedestrian malls and public gathering places but by the very shape of the streets. A good urban vista can pull people out of their residences and into shared space. Street plans with legible space syntax can enhance wayfinding, promote rapid and accurate mental mapping, and so contribute to the pleasure and ease of the wandering crowds. Judicious planning of visual contours using building facades, and the manipulation of visible street and sidewalk width using trees or other adornments, can lead the eye in desired directions. The eye being lured, the feet will follow.

The dimensions of public spaces and thoroughfares can influence where we go. Likewise, the sizes and shapes of spaces can influence how we feel while we are walking. Not enough is known of the science underlying the experiences of the early psychogeographers or Christian Nold’s modern wired equivalents to understand what properties of space contribute to the emotional experiences of the street, but some basic principles are clear enough. Few very large public spaces are successful, perhaps because they are all prospect without refuge. Large setbacks between facades and sidewalks do not work well. Not only does such an arrangement make the pedestrian feel exposed but the potential for rich visual detail as one walks past facades, shop windows, and other resting places is wasted. Buildings that are too high, closing in streets like narrow canyons, have a negative effect on pedestrian experience. The best street vistas contain some enclosure, street width and building heights conform nicely to human proportions, and interesting landmarks help to enclose views of the ends of streets.

Though much could be done to improve the human condition by rearranging bricks and mortar in city spaces, the simple truth is that our fantastically versatile brains have given us entirely new spatial vistas to play with. Most urban dwellers are likely to spend at least a part of each day sitting in front of glowing screens that provide them with portals into spaces that could not have been imagined when the grids of cities in North America, Europe, or Asia were being laid down. Our ability to design machines that can transport us instantly from one place to another using nothing more than beams of electrons has further revolutionized the human relationship with physical space.

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here’s something about my face today that doesn’t seem quite right. It may be a little too thin, or it could be that I’ve trimmed my beard too closely. My white T-shirt is form fitting—an unusual choice for me as I usually prefer to wear looser clothing to hide some of the extra pounds. Walking down a wide thoroughfare, I notice a large green box squatting low in the grass beside the road. It looks like one of those giant utility boxes found in some suburbs, but it is emitting a strange whooshing noise. For some reason, I decide to sit on it.

I don’t think there is any risk here that I can come to much harm. I notice a woman wearing a long white flowing dress. She
is sitting on a bench nearby. I wander over, wanting to engage her in conversation but wary of too close an approach. I don’t want to frighten her or have her misunderstand my intentions. I know from some previous visits to this part of town that there are all types of characters around, not all with noble intentions. I ask her if she minds if I sit down and she mumbles a word or two of assent. The bench was a little farther from me than it looked, so I fumble awkwardly as I sit. When I try to engage her in some small talk she tells me that her English is poor. I hadn’t noticed that she was Japanese. Two young men walk past us, staring in our direction. One of them mentions, with something like a chuckle, that we look as though we are waiting for a bus. He wonders whether to tell us that no such conveyance will be arriving. Some distance down the road, the two men pause and then come back to address the woman, asking her if she would like to accompany them to “go have some fun.” They have bad intention written all over them, so I’m surprised when she gets up from the bench and wanders away with them, laughing. I wonder whether she has understood them. I’m even more surprised by a little pang of what feels like rejection and jealousy as I realize she’s passed up a chance for a friendly chat with me on a peaceful bench in favor of an invitation to cavort with these bad boys. I watch the trio shrink in size and fade into the distance, and then I take flight, zooming straight upward to about 200 meters so that I can watch them from above. I don’t think they notice me as they run from place to place in wild zigzags. There’s not much else going on in this sector, so I teleport home and log off. It’s time for bed.

Ten years ago, the story of my evening in an alternative universe where I could walk, sit, and talk but also fly and teleport myself to new locations instantaneously would have been taken as science fiction, but many readers of this story will recognize that I was describing something that can now be experienced by anyone with a connection
to the Internet. Second Life, a commercial venture spearheaded by the company Linden Labs, was begun in 1999 by Philip Rosedale, a San Francisco entrepreneur who had grown up with a fascination for computers, electronics, and virtual reality. In technological terms, Second Life consists of a large bank of servers that are used to house simulations of a huge tract of virtual space. Individual users can obtain free accounts and, by installing some client software on their own computers, they can visit many of the areas of the large matrix of spaces offered up by Second Life. Though multiplayer games (sometimes called MMORPGs, for massively multiplayer online role-playing games) have been around for some time, Second Life is different. Its directors insist that Second Life is not a game but in almost every imaginable respect is as real as physical space. Second Life’s many millions of users participate in a genuine economy in which millions of Linden dollars change hands every month. Linden dollars can be exchanged for real “out of world” hard currency. What do the residents of Second Life do? Pretty much anything they want. I’ve seen residents chat, dance, and gamble, shop, prance about on nude beaches, fondle, and fornicate. Serious users of Second Life hold seminars, business meetings, classes, and open houses. Large companies such as IBM, Intel, Dell, Microsoft, and Toyota maintain business offices in Second Life. The government of Sweden maintains a virtual Second Life embassy. The news agency Reuters, having successfully managed the transition from propagating information via homing pigeon to sending the news through fiber-optic cables, also disseminates Second Life news stories from a virtual office.

Rosedale attributes much of the phenomenal success of Second Life to a key decision undertaken in 2003, when prospects for the fledgling company looked bleak and layoffs of an already small workforce had begun. In keeping with the underlying philosophy that Second Life should be made to simulate a real world with a
real economy, people were not only allowed to purchase and own virtual land but they were able to build, design, and invent virtual structures and machines in Second Life that could be offered for sale with all of the protections in place offered to those who vend goods in a bricks-and-mortar building in a physical marketplace.
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What is revolutionary about Second Life is that, compared with popular games held in virtual spaces such as World of Warcraft, the company that offers the grid of spaces is not at all involved in the production of content. The entire digital planet, or metaverse as it is sometimes called, is designed and built by users themselves, sometimes with the assistance of entrepreneurial “in-world” professional designers who create entire complexes of buildings for payment in Linden dollars.

The universe offered up by Second Life might seem like the normal digital content that is provided by the Internet but in a new and spiffy guise. Rather than cascading through pages of Web content with fancy graphics, flashy animations, and little talking heads, Second Life offers the same kind of content but from inside a metaphor that pretends to mimic a few more features of real life.

Users are able to design their own avatars, collections of animated pixels that can be tailor-made to suit an individual’s taste. Body size and shape, hair color, facial features, and clothing can be changed easily. Normally, a user’s view of the virtual world is centered on a position just behind their avatar, so it is possible to observe one’s own actions from a position slightly above and behind the center of one’s locus of embodiment, but it is easy to manipulate the “camera” for a different point of view. Simple keyboard and mouse commands control movement, and avatars can communicate with one another either by typing on a keyboard so that text messages appear at the bottom of the screen or in some cases directly by voice.

It’s a little too soon to assess the extent to which users of Second Life and other similar realms feel themselves to be immersed in a completely new metaphysic outside of reality, but there are some early signs that the virtual spaces of Second Life are more psychologically compelling than would be expected from a jazzed-up Web browser. Nick Yee, in work carried out for his Ph.D. thesis at Stanford University, conducted a novel study of the influence of what psychologists call proxemics. Edward Hall, an anthropologist, documented in the 1960s the manner in which we regulate the spaces between ourselves and other people as we go about the tasks of everyday life, including different kinds of social interactions.
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Hall distinguished between personal and social distances, for example, meaning by the former the interpersonal distances enjoyed by close friends as opposed to those physical spaces we maintain between ourselves and our casual acquaintances. Since Hall’s early work, many psychologists have studied the influence of other variables, including gender, on interpersonal distance. Yee’s approach was to carry out the same kinds of measurements between conversing pairs of avatars in Second Life. He discovered that interpersonal distances were influenced by gender in much the same way as happens when individuals converse in real life. Men stand farther apart and engage in less eye contact than women when they talk, even in virtual space. (Although the simple graphics employed in Second Life rule out genuine eye contact, it is possible to manipulate your orientation so that you are either standing squarely facing another person or “glancing” off to the side.) When men do find themselves standing close together in a way that violates the rules of proxemics, they compensate by decreasing the frequency of eye contact even further. The importance of this finding is that it suggests that even in a virtual space, where there is no possibility we could ever mistakenly believe ourselves to reside in that space, we comport our
digital selves in a manner befitting a belief that we really embody our avatars.
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Findings such as these will probably come as no surprise to those legions of fans of role-playing games such as Guild Wars or World of Warcraft. Though some of us reminisce about the early days of computer gaming, in which text-based adventure games and simple arcade games like Pong and Space Invaders were able to hold our attention until the wee hours, there can be little doubt that modern games with their elaborate scenery, beautifully rendered graphics, and engaging animated characters generate a genuine feeling of personal embodiment within the play of images on the computer’s screen. Indeed, many have expressed serious concern about the addictive potential of computer games, and many gamers have reported disruptions to family and work life produced by an inability to turn away from the computer or the gaming console, or even a failure to properly distinguish between their real and virtual existences.

Much of the immersive nature of modern and sophisticated games has as much to do with the engaging narrative structure of the game as it does with the visual effects, but there is little doubt that the careful rendering of an artificial version of real space, complete with complex and believable scenery and objects that behave in ways similar to real life, also contributes to the game-playing experience. In some games, such as Guild Wars, the natural scenery, including mountains, forests, and water features, is so realistic that it would not be surprising if immersion in such virtual settings produced some of the same pleasant effects as a walk in the woods. In one study completed in my own laboratory, we found that exposure to virtual environments simulating natural settings produced convincing decreases in physiological measurements of stress using GSR (the same measure employed by Christian Nold in his bio-mapping initiative).