benign neglect

benign neglect

Consider the office cubicle. Some people pile their desks with everything
from old newspapers to unwashed
mugs; others are fastidiously tidy. (I
fluctuate.) I’m not saying that people
with messy desks are more productive,
although there’s some evidence that
they are; I’m just saying that if your colleague is a messy-desker then he or she
shouldbeallowedtogetonwithit.
Support for this position comes from
a study conducted by two psychologists,
Alex Haslam and Craig Knight. A few
years ago they set up simple office
spaces in which they asked experimental subjects to spend an hour doing
administrativetasks.
Messrs Haslam and Knight wanted to
understand what made people productive and happy, and they tested four
arrangements in a randomised trial.
One was minimalist: chair, desk, bare
walls. A second was softened with tasteful prints and some greenery. Workers
werehappierthere,andgotmoredone.
The kicker comes with the third and
fourth arrangements. In each case,
workers were invited to rearrange the
pictures and pot-plants as they wished
before settling down to work. But while
some were then left to their labours,
others were second-guessed by an
experimenterwhosteppedinandfound
apretexttorearrangeeverything.
This, unsurprisingly, drove people
mad. “I wanted to hit you,” one participant later admitted. Empowering people to lay out their own space led to happier,moreproductiveworkers.Stripped
of that freedom, everyone’s productivityfellandsomefeltquiteill

But Jane Jacobs
argued in The Death And Life of Great
American Cities that cities desperately
need old buildings and not just glorious
masterpieces but “a good lot of plain,
ordinary, low-value old buildings,
includingsomerundownoldbuildings”.
Her reasoning: cities are always in
need of new experiments and economically marginal activities. “Neighbourhood bars . . . good bookshops . . . studios, galleries . . . hundreds of ordinary
enterprises” all need somewhere cheap.
There’s nothing wrong with new buildings, argued Ms Jacobs, frustratingly for
those who hold her up as a Nimby icon.
But they should not be built everywhere
all at once. Something has to be
neglected and run down, or the city has
nosoilfromwhichnewbudscanshoot.
There is always a balance to be struck.
Every old building was once new. Every
desk needs the occasional wipe. And my
daughter is currently engaged in an
extended programme of supervised
room-tidying. Yet neglect is undervalued. Sometimes we need to learn when
toleavewellalone.