Animal welfare campaign organizations articulate their case around ‘five freedoms‘ that animals under human control should have: freedom from hunger or thirst, freedom from discomfort, freedom from pain and disease, freedom to express normal behaviour, and freedom from fear and distress. Perhaps because we don’t like to see ourselves as being free rather than ‘under control’, nor indeed do we like to see ourselves as animals, it’s not clear to me that we seek to grant ourselves the same freedoms in the habitats we create for humans. There are parallels between the five freedoms and the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The second and sixth of these are ‘zero hunger‘ and ‘clean water and sanitation‘ for example, while the third is ‘good health and well-being‘. But discomfort, expression of normal behaviour, and fear and distress are more tangential.

In the UK, planning legislation has been relaxed allowing the conversion of unused office accommodation into flats, some with floor areas as little as 13m². Though this might seem a pragmatic approach to resolving the country’s housing crisis, ‘zoning‘ in city planning can mean offices are built in places that do not provide convenient access to services that residents need. With accommodation such as this being chiefly aimed at the poor, this ‘inconvenience’ means exacerbating hardship.

The trend, however, as been more generally towards smaller room sizes in new build British homes, as developers seek to maximize returns on investment. While an article in the Journal of Happiness Studies finds little evidence of larger living space leading to greater subjective well-being, another article in Building Research & Information reviews various health issues that can be caused by being short of internal space in homes. The main basis for the health issues is argued on needs for privacy and space for socializing, and the article concludes by saying that one fifth of English households have insufficient internal space. Insofar as socializing and needing privacy are normal behaviours, these changes deny humans a basic freedom.

The question of what is ‘normal’ behaviour for humans is an interesting one. Our day-to-day lives are very different from those of people 100 years ago. As for our genes, evidently ‘native’ Europeans with lactose intolerance haven’t even caught up with the invention of agriculture. (To the extent that right-wing extremists drink milk to prove their ‘supremacy’ — don’t tell them about lactase persistence among African pastoralist communities.) Normality is heavily culturally determined, of course, and culture can change more quickly than genes, but still, it’s possible some cultures are out of step with what human bodies and brains have been programmed to expect. Is patriarchy ‘normal’? Or sitting in a chair all day staring at a screen? Or commuting? Or microwaving a TV dinner? Is there any part of our daily lives that really allows us to express normal behaviour for humans?

Freedom from fear and distress is interesting too. The film ‘The Matrix’ posits that the first ‘paradise matrix‘ was rejected by human brains — they kept trying to wake up from it. Indeed, in popular psychology ‘paradise syndrome‘ is described as a feeling of dissatisfaction despite having achieved a great deal.

That is a dark assessment of the human psyche: a belief that happiness is impossible or unbelievable. Normatively speaking it could almost be seen as a tool of mass-manipulation, encouraging people to accept unhappiness as a way of life. For the architects of the ecocyborg, it poses a difficult question. If we really believe the world needs a little fear and danger in order to keep us happy, the ecocyborg cannot be a 100% safe place. We may even already be seeing a reaction to this among those who pursue ‘adventure sports‘. What are the designers to do, then? Deliberately create places with the potential for harm?

The five freedoms are articulated around moral responsibility towards captive animals. We may not think of ourselves as animals or as captives, but clearly the more a society imposes constraints on its citizens, the greater the responsibility it should take for their welfare. If we cannot live anywhere we want, but only in built environments we can afford; if we cannot do whatever we want to enhance our lives, then to some extent we are confined. I contrasted urban and rural environments for the very different attitudes we have towards freedom in them in an earlier post. When the ecocyborg takes over, there will be no rural environment, no nature and no wilderness. Captivity will become the norm, and we owe it to ourselves to think about how we can enrich habitats for humans to maximize welfare.