As the Crow Flies

Feeling stuck in your environment? Take a page from the animal kingdom.

By Shane Reiner-Roth

“As the crow flies” is an old idiom used to express the most direct path between two points. The phrase implies that crows ignore the twists and turns of the land, soaring over houses and trees to get where they’re going.

Yet this is a bit misleading—not only about crows, but about the behavior of much of animalkind. Thriving in cities across America, crows are close observers of our habits, and of the built environment more generally. The urban ecologist Robert Blair designated crows, among many other urban critters, as “urban exploiters,” able to tap into resources and make themselves at home, even in environments designed to exclude them.

The irony here is that, though the urban environment is supposedly built exclusively around human needs, much of our anxiety, depression, and general unease can be attributed to its design. In too many cities, public transit and pedestrian infrastructure are, on the whole, decrepit and underdeveloped, while automobile infrastructure is not only alienating but demanding.

If we don’t impose these and other mandates on ourselves, the police system will do it for us, and will often overstep. Most of us may then be what Blair calls “urban adapters”: we can survive the built environment, but we long for something better.

While humans retreat to the suburbs in a vain attempt to escape the stresses of cities, crows flock to them, studying their rules and rhythms to use them to their best advantage. David Attenborough narrated the method that one crow, for instance, devised to crack open nuts using the flow of traffic in a Japanese town. Perched on a telephone wire, we see it drop a nut onto a pedestrian crosswalk, wait for it to be run over by a passing automobile, and swoop down during a red light to pick up its well-deserved treat. Without jobs and bills to pay, crows have plenty of time to bend rush hour to their whims.

I’m writing in Los Angeles, where the crow population cannot easily be estimated—given their penchant for roosting in the many trees we planted, the bridges we built, and the alleys we neglected—yet the species has thrived for four decades despite widespread ecological redevelopment.

I share my avian fascination with Eve Klein, an environmental psychologist and professor in the architecture department at Pratt Institute. Klein brings together architecture, planning, and environmental psychology to translate human experience and analytics into design strategy. In Brooklyn, she tells me, one is more likely to spot a pigeon—another one of Blair’s “urban exploiters,” which has exploded in population by politely rubbing wings with the city’s throngs of pedestrians in exchange for food and shelter to roost. “Most of the time,” says Klein, “if you’re walking down the sidewalk and there’s a cluster of pigeons, the pigeons are the ones that are going to move out of the way. But during Covid [lockdowns], as soon as no one was out, pigeons were flying down the sidewalk at about five feet.”

Klein explained this behavior using the concept of “affordance,” a term defined by the psychologist James J. Gibson as anything that a given environment provides or furnishes an animal. The crows perceived nut-cracking as an affordance of a Japanese intersection; the pigeons perceived a new means of low-flight navigation as an affordance as soon as we were off the sidewalks.

Photo: Andrew Milligan

An animal can only make use of affordances, of course, by first perceiving that they exist despite their existential ambiguity. In The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, Gibson explains that “an affordance is neither an objective property nor a subjective property; or it is both if you like.” To an average adult, for instance, a staircase objectively affords movement between floors; while for a child or a cat, a staircase provides additional affordances, including sitting, resting, and observing. Though the built environment was not designed with these affordances in mind, they are clear as day to the less jaded among us, and particularly to our animal neighbors.

Importantly, this is true even when humans incorporate outright hostile architecture to discourage their presence. Crows and magpies in European cities, for instance, were recently discovered reappropriating metal strips from anti-bird devices to build their nests.

How badass is that? Or, more specifically, how can humans learn from the affordances perceived by non-humans?

The French anarchist writer Guy Debord might have been watching crows fly over Paris boulevards as he developed his concept of “dérive,” an unplanned journey in which “one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.” In 1957, Debord produced The Naked City, a deconstructed map of Paris stitched back together with arrows suggesting one’s own chosen paths of movement across the historic city, even if that meant tunneling through buildings or jumping over rooftops.

Additionally, designed forms of resistance have come to compensate for the deliberate lack of affordances in modern urban areas. The Chicago-based artist Sarah Ross, for instance, produced a series of “Archisuits” that allow humans to adapt to hostile architecture designed to prevent “loitering” in public space. “The project points at architecture as an arm of the law, a form that uses the built environment to police and control raced, classed, and gendered bodies,” she writes. “‘Archisuits’ suggest a wearer might resist by not only being present but being present comfortably and leisurely.”

In 2019, the people of Hong Kong banded together amid pro-democracy protests to construct mini-Stonehenges out of bricks that functioned as roadblocks against police forces. As a spatial act of political resistance, the miniscule arches transformed materials that had, up to that point, been typically applied to the construction of government buildings and other elements of anti-democratic infrastructure, through a simple and widely replicable act of resistance.

I invite you to reimagine an old term: “as the crow flies” can be an expression of freedom and resourcefulness amid conditions that could otherwise be perceived as restrictive. Unencumbered by the human concepts of standardized time and disciplinary space, non-humans so often engage with the built environment by their own rules, as can we. ⌂

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Shane Reiner-Roth is a writer, lecturer and curator based in Los Angeles. Currently teaching at UCLA and USC, Shane has written about the built environment for publications including Architectural Digest, Dezeen, The Architect’s Newspaper, Architectural Record, and the Los Angeles Times. Reiner-Roth also runs @everyverything, an Instagram account that documents the absurdity of the built environment.