The role of a positive spirit in the attractiveness, sociability and success of a public place

For a long time, architects, urbanists, scene makers and administrators have been interested in the material component to address the challenge of fulfilling the requirement for attractiveness, conviviality, sociability and success of public places (Whyte 1980), and some have even become masters and experts of the material form. On the other hand, the intangible component has not drawn much attention despite the good will of some masters like Louis Khan who made the materials tell the stories of his projects (Garcelon et al. 2012). However, since the ratification of the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2003 (Brumann 2013; Turgeon 2010) the cultural heritage has enjoyed the same recognition as the material one (Turgeon 2010).

The intangible component of public places refers to two phenomena: the ambiance (atmosphere) and the spirit.

In contrast to the phenomenon of atmosphere, that of the spirit has remained the poor cousin of the intangible components. Indeed, most researches on the architectural and urban spirit are generally conceptual, theoretical, philosophical and educational (Norberg-Schulz 1981; Brochot, La Soudière 2010; Joly, Turgeon 2010). To the best of our knowledge, empirical studies on the subject are scarce and even more so for those interested in the quantitative measure of the spirit. Hence, the interest in exploring the subject.

In this paper, we are interested in the measurement of the valence of the spirit in public places and its contribution to rendering a place attractive, convivial and successful. The question then is how to measure the spirit of public places? What impact does the spirit have on the attraction, interactivity, conviviality and sociability of public places? What makes one place more appropriate than another?

This study’s objective is to measure the spirit, to verify the hypothesis that the spirit of a public place makes it more attractive, whereas a negative spirit produces the opposite effect.

The empirical analysis relies on three empirical techniques: the first one is qualitative (observation grid), another two are quantitative in nature: one is descriptive statistics (RII index of relative importance) and the other is inferential statistics (T-test). The latter was conducted in three stages: first, the spirit of the place was compared, then the cognitive spirit and finally the emotional spirit.

In addition, to verify our hypotheses and collect data, we selected two public places as case studies: Ghardaïa’s market place and Metlili’s August 20 place.

The answer to this question will allow us to operationalise the spirit of a public place. To achieve this, we rely on the ‘theory of the spirit’ and more particularly on the works of Premack and Woodruff and that of Duval et al., which draw on neuropsychology. In their theoretical conceptualisation, Premack and Woodruff think that “an individual has a theory of the spirit if he attributes mental states to himself and to others” (1978) and if he is able to understand them (Duval et al. 2011). In other words, there is a form of psychological projection on the considered object.

This capacity of inference, attribution and deduction of mental states can include even the spirits of public places. These are affected by their current users; the expression of genius or spirit of the place refers to the human spirit that lies in it or haunts it according to Turgeon (2008).

Mental states refer to the cognitive and affective states that are essentially related to the emotional life. Thus, we can easily understand why, according to this theory, the spirit has two different natures: cognitive and affective. This distinction has driven some authors to differentiate between two representations of two typologies in the theory of the spirit (Duval et al. 2011). The first is characterised by its coldness because it refers to thoughts and the second by its warmth since it is associated with emotions (Coricelli 2005).

Moreover, the spirit of a public place can also be apprehended by the theory of the spirit of the place or the genius loci developed by Norberg-Schulz (1981). In his works, this architect philosopher very often combines the term ‘genius of the place’ to his ‘atmosphere’ which results in some confusion.

To differentiate between atmosphere and spirit, we employ two concepts : the first concept is that of sensorial marketing and relational marketing, by which two types of atmosphere are defined (Lemoine 2003): the sensorial (Kotler 1973) and the relational (Bitner 1992; Daucé, Rieunier 2002); whereas the second concept is based on psychology in which two types of spirits are defined: cognitive and emotional. However, in the architectural and urban literature, the confusion between the two is glaring.

The spirit of the place is defined as being “a rational dynamic between the material elements (sites, landscapes, buildings, objects) and intangible (memories, stories, rituals, festivals, expertise) physical and spiritual, that produce and generate some sense, some value, some emotion and some mystery” (Turgeon 2008). Somehow, we understand from this that the spirit designates the materiality and the immateriality of the place, while knowing that the suffix ‘ity’ added to a name does not refer to its material entity, but to its state, to its characteristic features (Dal 1997) and to its way of being (Grabar et al. 2006).

Furthermore, the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) defines the spirit of the place according to its operative acceptation as being “the set of the material elements that give meaning, value and emotion to the place” (Amendoeira et al. 2008). Thus, we can conclude that these two last definitions agree well with that of the ‘theory of the spirit’.

Besides, etymologically, the term genius stems from the word ‘genereginere’, which means ‘to generate’, ‘engender’ or ‘give birth’ to an idea, to a thought, to a knowledge, to a belief, to a feeling, or to natural phenomena (atmosphere) or supernatural, not to say ‘Genius’ by summoning a divinity (Butor, Calle-Gruber 2007). According to Berryman (2005), the genius also takes on a meaning of the place that results from a cognitive and affective experience. This shows that the notion of genius or spirit of the place agrees well with the theory of the spirit in neuropsychology.

To evaluate the spirit of a public place, we need to measure both its cognitive state and its affective state (emotional); we must first comprehend their cognitive spaces (Cauvin 1999) and at least their emotional spaces (Kaufmann 1999). It is worth mentioning here that the emotion (the most affective reaction) is considered as being part of the seven categories of the affect. The remaining categories relate to ‘feeling’, ‘mood’, ‘temperament’, ‘preference’, ‘attitude’, ‘appreciation’ (the most cognitive of these reactions) (Lichtlé, Plichon 2005).

In this study, we limit ourselves to the emotional space, because when it comes to emotion, the effect results from the interaction of the users with their public places. Thus, when it comes to the other types of affect, the expressed feeling can be induced by something else that has no relationship with these places as locations.

Today, with new advances in neuroscience, cognition and emotion are considered as intimately linked (Lichtlé, Plichon 2014). Thanks to brain imaging techniques, it is now understood that everything takes place in the central nervous system corresponding to the brain and spinal cord (Myers 2004).

More than a hundred and fifty theories of emotion have been developed since the 19th century (Gardiner et al. 1937/1970). This number not only gives a hint of the difficulty to comprehend them all, but also reveals the complexity of this concept. However, Kemper (1987 in Derbaix, Pham 1989) classified them according to seven approaches: evolutionist, related to the function of adaptation; neural because the primary emotions are attributed to some neural circuits; psychoanalytic based on Freudian concepts; automatic, since they follow the activation of the peripheral nervous system; empirical classification, for it aims to isolate at the outset the subjective verbal relationships of emotions; centralisation in the development of emotions in babies and children; and finally the approach based on facial expressions.

Thamm (2006), on the other hand, proposes three types of approaches: the labelling approaches, the psycho-revolutionary approaches and the socio-revolutionary approaches. The labelling approaches comprise two approaches: The ‘prototypical’ approach and the ‘dimensional’ approach. The ‘prototypical’ approach, also called ‘discrete perspective’ is based on the conceptualisation of emotions as being “discrete categories and phenomenologically distinct” (Lichtlé, Plichon 2014). This approach considers two types of emotions: primary or fundamental emotions varying according to the researchers from 7 to 15 emotions (Izard 1977; Plutchik 1980; Tomkins 1980; Ekman 1982); and secondary emotions, complex or mixed, resulting, according to Plutchik (1980), from the combination of emotions of the first type, exactly as primary colours mix to form new colours.

However, the dimensional approach, also known as the ‘dimensional perspective’, “suggests that to better understand the impact of emotions, it is necessary to regroup them in a number of underlying dimensions” (Lichtlé, Plichon 2014). Thus, Osgood and Suci (1955) as well as Russell (1980) describe emotions as the variation of two dimensions. The first is that of the ‘valence/evaluation’ expressed on the level of feeling, of well-being or of degrees of satisfaction ‘positive or negative’. The second dimension is that of ‘activation/arousal’ expressed in the context of physiological, physical and mental activity in terms of ‘high or low’ as illustrated on the abscissa in Fig. 1.

What emerges from the labelling approach is that emotion is “a multidimensional construct of which the principal dimensions are the intensity, the polarity (the direction), the content” and the consciousness (Derbaix, Pham 1989).

Fig. 1

In the framework of our study, we opted for measures of the subjective experiences because of their reduced cost and their ability to be conducted on large samples (Lichtlé, Plichon 2014). Despite being commonly used in marketing (Bagozzi et al. 1999), these measures suffer from some inconveniences linked, on the one hand, to the difficulty of understanding the meaning of the proposed words (Lichtlé, Plichon 2005), and on the other, to the validity and reliability of the scales of the survey (Lichtlé, Plichon 2014).

Baudouin and Tiberghien (2007) define cognition as being ”the mind” designating “the function that produces the knowing” and thus whatever its nature: intelligible, sensitive, spiritual, psychological or moral (ethical). Therefore, in this first definition, the intelligible knowledge manifests itself: either by the «formation of a concept in the mind [by] the abstraction and the generalization» (Robert 2005) through the understanding and the representation, that is, by reasoning and interpretation. The sensitive knowledge, on the other hand, reveals itself in the form of impressions, of sensations through perception. The spiritual knowledge is expressed through established ideas and beliefs. However, the knowledge or an understanding can be moral when it “concerns the mores, custom [of a society, of an individual] relative to ‘good and evil’” (Robert 2005).

Therefore, the word ‘cognition’ corresponds in the human being to a “functional product of the activity of the brain” (Baudouin, Tiberghien 2007) whether it be perception, attention, judgement, imagination, memory (the souvenir) or representation. These six last activities are considered part of the main functions of the mind and the key concepts of cognition.

Today, cognitivism influenced by the neuroscience is undergoing a revolution thanks to Connectionism. The neuroscience assumes that the brain receives information from the environment via the body and process them via a network of neurones. In other words, what is considered as spirit and mental processes are merely biological. Indeed, without the body, there would be no spirit, no thought, no mood and no mental state (Steiner 2005). Consequently, it can be affirmed that without the immersion of the body, without the stimulation of the senses by the environment, without the sensitive experience in situ, there would be no cognition.

To objectively assess the attractiveness, sociability and success of Ghardaïa’s market place compared to those of Metlili’s place, which is completely deserted, unattractive and unsuccessful, we used an observation grid based on the eight (8) criteria developed by William H. Whyte (1980) (Table 5).

The value of the score ‘Sc’ is between 0 and 1. If ‘Sc ≤ 0.4’, the place is not successful and not attractive and if ‘0.4 ≤ Sc ≤ 1’, the place is successful. As a result, we can deduce that Ghardaïa’s market place is successful, but Metlili’s place of August 20 is not.

To analyse the questionnaire and assess the significance of the dimensions related to the spirits of the public places examined in this study, we calculate the “Relative Importance Index” coefficient (Waris et al. 2014).

The method of Relative Importance Index was used to determine the relative importance of the three dimensions of the mind. The Relative Importance Index (RII) is a non-parametric technique widely used by researchers to analyse structured questionnaire responses for data involving the ordinal measurement of attitudes (Kometa et al. 1994).

Equation (1) shows the formula used to determine the Relative Importance Index (Chan, Kumaraswamy 1997):

where: w = weight given to each factor by respondents and ranges from 1 to 5 on the Likert scale, ‘1’ is ‘not significant’ and ‘5’ is ‘extremely significant’.

A is the highest weight and N the total number of respondents. The RII value is between 0 and 1, not including 0.

This shows that the higher the RII, the larger the dimension of the spirit, and vice versa. The comparison of RII with the corresponding level of significance is measured by the transformation matrix proposed by Chen and al. (2010). They hold that the values of the relative index are transformed into five important levels: high (H) (0.8 ≤ RI ≤ 1), high-medium (H-M) (0.6 ≤ RI < 0.8), medium (M) (0.4 ≤ RI < 0.6), medium-low (M-L) (0.2 ≤ RI < 0.4) and low (L) (0 ≤ RI < 0.2).

Table 6 presents the relative importance index (RII) of the dimensions of the spirit of the place with its different types for each public place, as well as the corresponding ranking and their level of significance.

As can be seen in Table 6, three dimensions with ‘high (H)’ significance levels and ‘very positive’ qualities were assigned to Ghardaïa’s market place. They include the emotional spirit, the cognitive spirit and the place spirit dimensions. One (1) dimension recorded a ‘high-medium (HM)’ significance level and a ‘positive’ quality for the place of August 20. This concerns the cognitive spirit dimension. Finally, two (2) dimensions, related to the emotional spirit and the spirit of the place, recorded a ‘medium (M)’ level of significance and a ‘negative’ quality for the place of August 20.

Therefore, although the cognitive spirit of Metlili’s place was recorded as positive with a RII high-medium = 0.61, its spirit was negative with a medium RII = 0.57. This is attributable to its emotional spirit which turned out to be negative with a medium RII = 0.54. By contrast, the spirit of Ghardaïa’s market place proved to be very positive, similar to the emotional and cognitive spirits. Thus, we can conclude that the spirit of Ghardaïa’s market place is of higher quality compared to that of August 20 place.

Nevertheless, to assess the significance ofthese results, an inferential technique (T-Test) was used. As expected, the results show that the spirit of the market place of Ghardaïa is better perceived compared to the place of August 20. These results demonstrate clearly that the spirit of the market place of Ghardaïa is different to that of the place of August 20. With a threshold of 0.01, the test ‘t’ reveals a significant difference between the mean scores of the two public places despite typo-morphological similarities, t (47) = 6.464, p < 0.01. The users of the market place of Ghardaïa appreciate its spirit (M=50.92, SD = 4.942). Conversely, the users of the place of August 20 have lower perception of the spirit of this space (M = 34.20, SD = 11.906). As shown in Table 7, the difference is significant; the spirit of the place of Ghardaïa obtained a very positive valence whereas that of the place of August 20 obtained a negative valence.

Furthermore, we find significant differences between the cognitive and the emotional spirits of these two public places. Because, on the level of the cognitive spirit, with an alpha threshold of 0.01, t-test reveals a significant difference between the cognitive scores, t(47)=4.025, p<0.01. The users of the place of Ghardaïa perceive the cognitive spirit as being very positive (M=16.67, SD=2.353) compared to the users of the place of August 20 (M=12.60, SD=4.444) (Table 8).

Concerning the emotional spirit, with a 0.01 level, the difference between the means using the t-test is found to be significant emotional scores, t(47)=6.499, p<0.01. The users of the place of Ghardaïa consider the emotional spirit as being very positive (M=34.25, SD=4.183). On the other hand, the users of the place of August 20 see the emotional spirit as being negative (M=21.60, SD=8.742) (Table 9).

This study was based on experiential marketing (Holbrook, Hirschman 1982) and the psychological sciences, namely the «theory of the mind» (Premack, Woodruff 1978; Duval et al. 2011) to clear up, even though briefly, the confusion between the atmosphere and the spirit of the place. Each of the two concepts is composed of two dimensions. The first is made up of the sensory atmosphere (visual, sound, tactile, olfactory and gustatory); and the relational atmosphere (intimate, personal, social and public). The second consists of the emotional spirit and the cognitive spirit.

Nevertheless, since both public places of Ghardaïa and Metlili have a very similar architectural and urban typology, but have not met with the same success in terms of social attractiveness, hence we assume that the difference lies in their spirits of the place.

Based on the qualitative analysis using the observation grid (Table 1, Whyte 1980), we can objectively confirm the difference in terms of success between these two places; Ghardaïa’s market place is clearly more successful with a score of 1 compared to Metili’s August 20 place with a score of 0.37.

In addition, based on quantitative analysis, the result of the Relative Importance Index revealed high levels in favour of the three spirits for Ghardaïa’s market place. The emotional spirit, the spirit of the place and the cognitive spirit are ranked first, second and third respectively. Conversely, those of Metlili’s August 20 place hold the last three positions in the ranking. Only the cognitive spirit is of high-medium level of significance. The spirit of the place and the emotional spirit recorded medium levels of significance.

Finally, the inferential quantitative analysis of the T-test confirmed the significant difference between the spirits of the two places.

The main objective of this study was to highlight the role the spirit can play in the attractiveness and success of public places. At the end of this investigation, we can confirm our hypothesis that despite architectural and urban similarity, the lack of attractiveness of Metlili’s August 20 place is due to its negative spirit whereas Ghardaïa’s market place is a success because it has a positive spirit.

Thus, we found that, on the one hand, the cognitive spirit of Ghardaïa’s market place is perceived very positively, while that of Metlili’s August 20 place is perceived positively. Furthermore, the emotional spirit of Ghardaïa’s market place is felt very positively while that of Metlili’s August 20 place is felt negatively. Therefore, we can conclude that the difference between the spirits of the two public places is affected by the difference in the valence of their cognitive (cognitive spirits) and emotional (emotional spirits) spaces. However, the results show that the gap between the cognitive spirits (cognitive spaces) in the two public places is no greater than that of their emotional spirits (emotional spaces).

However, from a cognitive viewpoint, we assume that this discrepancy is due to the fact that Ghardaïa’s market place is historically loaded while Metlili’s place was built less than two decades ago. Moreover, we should bear in mind that Metlili’s place was modelled on the architectural style of Ghardaïa’s market place. And that the latter was its ideal type. In other words, the August 20 place is an almost identical copy of Ghardaïa’s market place. And as we know, the original has more value than the copy. Thus, in the design phase, it is not only necessary to limit oneself to tangible aspects but also to take into account the intangible components.

Furthermore, on the emotional plan, we can see that the discrepancy is wider. Peter Zumthor attributes this difference to the atmosphere of the two public places; he considers that the “atmosphere affects our emotional perception” (2015: 13).

Due to the absence of a similar study, we cannot compare our results with those of other research. However, we can affirm that these empirical results agree well with the theory of the Stimuli-Organism-Response (SOR) model (Russell, Mehrabian 1978). Indeed, if we project our results onto the S.O.R. model, we can deduce that the atmosphere (stimuli) actually acts on the approach or escape behaviour (response) according to the positive or negative spirit of the place (organism).

The objective of this study is twofold: on a theoretical level, it aims to present the paradigmatic theories of the mind and its measurement. And as demonstrated, the experiential tool for public places, built upon the experiential paradigm of Holbrook and Hirschman (1982) and the modules of Schmitt (2010), allows measuring their spirits. On a practical level, it ensures the success of a public place by enabling designers to integrate not intuitively, but formally, the characteristics of the intangible components: the sphere of the spirit and the atmosphere.

Finally, given the limitations imposed by the small size of our samples and the implementation of the verbal scale, the scope of this study and the generalisation of the conclusions must be qualified. The combination of this technique with others is highly desirable. Investigating the spirit of other types of public spaces with this or other methods is undoubtedly highly recommended.