The Design of Cities: Through the Lens of Dr. Iain McGilchrist

Let’s look at cities through the lens of Iain McGilchrist, a renowned British psychiatrist, philosopher, and neuroscientist. His two books, The Matter with Things and The Master and His Emissary, put forth a way of thinking that I find helpful for analyzing cities. Without being hyperbolic, I believe these are some of the most important books ever published, or at least that I have come across to date.

There are many facets to these books; he spans topics such as the science of consciousness, neuroscience, philosophy, history, psychology, culture, spirituality, and the structure of our brains. One of the common arguments he makes is about the roles of the left and right hemispheres of our brain.

Our brains are divided into two hemispheres. He believes that the left hemisphere’s purpose is to process and generate logical, rational thought. It analyzes things through a lens of optimization, efficiency, and black-and-white thinking. It is mechanistic in its approach, trying to simplify, abstract, systematize, and generalize. It seeks to apprehend, control, and obtain power to manipulate (not necessarily in a negative sense) the world for its own purposes. It builds maps and models of the world for us to refer to and apply to situations. The left-brain values obtaining things to serve one’s immediate needs. This type of thinking is necessary for us to operate in our modern world, but if not counterbalanced, it can be detrimental.

From his perspective, the left hemisphere seems to be becoming the dominant hemisphere within our culture, specifically in the West. We are becoming unbalanced, obsessed with logic, rational thinking, and detached from intuition. Our culture celebrates this imbalance, and our institutions reward those who operate under these values.

For McGilchirst, the right hemisphere of the brain is the intuitive side, capable of connecting to the wider energy flow of the cosmos. It sees reality as it is. The right hemisphere has a significantly wider field of view and processes ideas such as philosophy, psychology, spirituality, and the dimensions of our worlds that words and language cannot define. His sense is that this dimension is vast and expansive, capable of intaking massive amounts of intuition, sense, and awareness for us.

The two hemispheres see value very differently. Where the left brain sees things as objects of which each has a rational, practical value, such as economic or functional purposes, those that can often be used for individual immediate satisfaction or gratification. The right brain sees value as inherent in the world. Beauty, purpose, meaning, and love exist everywhere around us, and although they don’t serve a “functional” purpose to serve the individual, there is inherent value in them for humanity and our souls.

How has this played out in our cities? As I travel all over the world, I can see McGilchrist’s argument manifested in physical form. Our cities are petri dishes that illustrate the tension between left- and right-hemisphere thinking.

Our buildings crystallize moments in time and reveal hints of the balance between the left- and right-hemispheres at the moment when they were created. Our environments are constantly in flux, prioritizing beauty, meaning, and humanity while skewing towards utilitarian functionality, rationalism, efficiency, and mechanical prototypes in others. This is why we get Cathedrals and Highways in one city.

As I explore cities, the imbalance becomes clearer. Many neighborhoods and infrastructure seem to be created entirely in the left hemisphere. Their buildings and infrastructure seem to be completely detached from local geography, climate, culture, beauty, and humanity. They are ruthless, not just in their visual aesthetic, prioritizing function over everything, economy, and are clearly viewed as objects to perform in the service of the values of the left hemisphere.

Paradoxically, people often do not intuitively want to be in these hyper-functional, left-brained environments. While they may not be aware of why, I believe it reflects a level of sickness and a lack of homeostasis within our culture. In environments like this, people are confronted with and forced to engage with that imbalance, which is not easy to grapple with psychologically. This is something that makes us very uneasy, anxious, and, at some level, repulsed.

The tourism and travel industries are also (albeit most likely unconsciously) exposing this imbalance. Think about the cities most people want to visit on their holiday. A large majority of these destinations, I would argue, were created within a place and space in human history that was expressing right-brained thinking.

For example, one could argue that the great Cathedrals of Europe espouse right-brained values such as beauty, love, spirituality, contemplation, and connection to community. They are outrageously inefficient (from a left-brained perspective) economically, and, from a scheduling perspective, many of them took centuries to build. Yet it is these buildings that draw people from all over the world. Why doesn’t a warehouse, grounded firmly in the left hemisphere, built on time and under budget, and optimized perfectly for financial returns, attract people from all over the world? It’s a phenomenon that exposes our value systems and warrants some reflection and curiosity.

Our contemporary culture could benefit from exploring this imbalance and reconnecting with and honoring our right hemisphere as it pertains to the design and construction of our environments.

Many may envision this as a surface-level reintroduction of aesthetic ornamentation on buildings, however it goes much deeper than this. For me, it is several layers deeper, based on the idea of value. What does our culture value? Efficiency, optimization of economic returns, speed of construction, etc., i.e., those values of the left brain. Or are we beginning to see the detrimental effects of cities constructed with those values at their highest priorities, and swing the pendulum back? Back to values such as community, beauty, spirituality, and local culture. In short, it is more of a cultural value shift than asking what our buildings look like on the surface. When we rebalance our cultural values, the shape of our buildings and cities will naturally follow.