Suicide, Cities and my train experience of a 'jumper'

So I was thinking the last few days about death and suicide, not particularly about myself committing suicide, but the concept due to recent events of experiencing an event in a city context with this theme incorporated. And of course the impacts of today's lifestyle that feed the need to commit this act.

On Monday 21 October at 3.07pm I noticed an abrupt change in tempo and the usual seamless riding experience of the organic and soft swirling of the East Midlands fast train down to London St Pancras. The feeling resembled that of travelling over fallen branches or rocks on the track, or some sort of rail track engineering issue that caused minor upheaval. The train began to decrease in speed whilst we could all smell a faint odd burning odour beneath us. The train came to a halt and we were stationary in the middle of nowhere. Surrounding our full train were two tracks either side, (now closed for the foreseeable future) plentiful greenery and silence...

We were soon informed we were twenty minutes from London and in between stations just after Radlett's platform. (Never before had I heard of this place existing, but it does and there aren't any motorways or useful modes travel infrastructure nearby, just emptiness and bush).

The sudden disruption was in fact a jumper. The term 'jumper' is an urban cultural one, coined from the evolution of society and used to describe a person who commits suicide by jumping from a high place. Just after Radlett, which the train had sped past at 100mph, a human being had let themself go in front of this train to which I was sitting on (coach b at the front). The first train section had the initial impact and crushing of this person. The body was gnarly and gritty and coarse beneath us under the steel engineering. It was weird to think only this vessel was between us travellers and the remainders of a person. I dare to think what the body of the train looked like after this...

My return journey form Leicester ended up being an elongated one, with the journey stretched out from 1h5 minutes to 3 and a half. The irony of this incident is that I study cities and all the interwoven policies, theories, ailments, history, change, comparisons to other countries, global discourses, people in places and designing for human beings, but rarely does one think about death within them on a regular basis. It is easy and positive to address 'life' within cities and moulding it for the future, but death is rarely taught or reflected on, on an authoritarian level. Don't get me wrong, it is indirectly considered in planning objectives when catering for the poor, homeless, old and sick etc. but only as a bi-product, not as a formal addressing of death in focus. I find this interesting, bewildering and scary even. Even graveyards are a dying (excuse the pun) business and you don't hear much about them on the news or within top stories about the glamour of new cemetery start ups and thriving graveyard management systems. When was the last time you saw a funeral directors as often as you did a Sainsburys local? Rarely. Death is looked at as a thread within the development of new entities or insurance matters, such as fire prevention acts within new buildings, or risk assessments on site visits to architectural ruins, or the location of traffic lights and crossings within travel infrastructure. It isn't usually the forefront of policy or design within our culture. 

For example, in international locations it is probably more important to think about it at the initial stages of any design or action or intervention due to volatile climate conditions. Take building houses in tropical locations- they are built at certain locations or distances from the shore, in order to prevent disruption to homes, death or injuries. In our climate, country, and society, this isn't the case. Death for the UK or other high-flying, hub cities, isn't. What causes our deaths, other than accidents or unseen events, is actually the act of trying to kill oneself due to society or living within city conditions. There is probably a huge number of reasons why people die, but narrowing it down to deaths on purpose and deaths on purpose within big, advancing cities and deaths within this scope involved with the strategies people take to kill themselves and the causes from the city that lead them to it, is a more manageable investigation.

I missed my planning module and like I said this is slightly ironic. Cities are not only beautiful, prosperous, changing, ' light ' entities and spaces full of opportunity and new experiences, but they are also collection and manifestation of organisms that all have a common fait- death. We never plan for this on a broad, prioritised scales. This is what has sparked my interest in this topic for a research thesis or viewing lens to approach cities with, perhaps.

The everyday human and infamous scholar, from my knowledge, regularly think about making life better and 'the new' and prolonging life, as well as how bad, evil and infectious they are, but never fully delve into the ever feared (especially by me) realm of death. The unknown. The change from experiencing, to total unconsciousness. Is there even a link? Is it invaluable? Perhaps not, but it should be discussed and people should be made aware as an alternative approach to viewing cities.

After the incident and immediately after, I felt very odd. Like not very present, a bit dull, static, not sick but indifferent, not hungry. It felt very real that can only be explained if you were there as opposed to being told by someone. The realisation to oneself is very different. It was the knowledge as to what was under me that changed my perception of the collision between two bodies. Before knowledge I was fine, perhaps confused and worried about an explosion or train fault or impending zombie doom (just been made to watch 'The Walking Dead by my boyfriend, which sparked a series of bad dreams), but not anxious or evoked. Immediately Bacon's saying 'knowledge is power' became real. That knowledge had the power to totally transform my mood from 'ok' to sad, reflective, helpless and pitiful. I felt for that person more than anything, more than my own well-being, and schedule at the time. I felt for that person's family and wondered what he/she may have left behind. I felt for the train driver and the shock he must now be experiencing. I felt for the other passengers who shared this with me and hoped they wouldn't feel too bad. I wanted vodka.

I wondered why, why this person wanted to leave life. A quick exit and why my train? And why a train exit to start with? It's gruesome, seems painful and is instant, so much so, you must have to be extremely set, strong and decisive, going against normal human instinct, to act as impulsively as that. Other people reacted differently, perhaps more about their day's schedule change or being annoyed, or wanting the free cuppa East Midlands were offering, (weird I couldn't consume at all at that moment) but mainly everyone was subdued and patient and quiet, left to their own minds... So much invisible energy and ideas swirling around in one cabin...

I first investigated the link between death and the built environment during the finding-the-feet-stage of my undergrad dissertation process. I too felt empowered by the fact architecture and the environment could help prolong, if not the save lives of the sick or terminally sick, in conjunction with reflection on a previous personal bereavement. The environment is a marvellous thing and when sculpted right it is even better for the human soul and well-being, with numerous proven health benefits. I wanted to help people and save some of their lives with it. It soon became apparent this is a harder task to achieve on your own in only a few months, 15000 words and the lack of care homes and resources around for me to go an invade the privacy of the ill, so I was out of my depths. This saddened me. I also realised you can't really prevent death with the environment. It just helps with the will to want to carry on. It was almost an unanswerable question I was pushing onto myself. I wish I knew if there was a real and obvious link between saving someone's life and the environment, but so far it has been a very complex, individual and empirical connection that is never consistent or the same for every human being. Too vast for just little old me.

So here I am at masters level pressing on a similar theme with a more Westernised global city sway - the macro picture and one that envelopes everyone and thing into this tightly packed, sparkly, pulsing entity. The organisation of parts and its link to death and suicide in the globalising, ever-more complex urban realm.


The news result has been little so far. It has been confirmed to have been a 42 year-old man. The tiniest story on St Albans Review stated so. After learning about the emergence of the media, news, papers and magazines in lectures, as means of representations of city life, news stories and my daily read of The Metro becomes evermore intriguing to me. There is now an added layer to reading the newspaper on my commute to uni most days and a symbolic one at that. Yes I am conforming to societal routine and we as commuters, provide the demand and schedule timings for news corps and the distribution companies to operate to, but there is a weird phenomenon between reading about the city that I am in and being in it. I use it everyday and try to explore as much of it as I can when time permits, but I will never fully understand it and it is not static, so no one will ever be able to. It is so vast and full of things occuring every minute, that a single person can't keep up and will never fully know all about the history of a place ever...I find this so spooky and I will only always have opinions, perceptions and knowledge of places and cities based on what I absorb, do, see, read and retain for that matter. I am therefore in fact biased and subjective no matter how I choose to argue an objective standpoint from the variety of sources I consume, because the people providing and delivering the news to me are selective in what is to be shared and what is ignored and I am biased by my choices, whether conscious or subconscious; where I go and what I experience and remember. 

The planners perspective helps to deal with this- to see the city from above in all its glory or terror, functioning all at once without you as the individual within it. Hence drawing plans are from a birds' eye view, looking down on, from an extruded, detached distance helps to shift perspectives from more subjective to objective. It offers an alternative lens into the city, where one can see quantities over qualities with more ease. I don't think you can ever grasp a city from either standpoints. It is a concept that can never be understood in totality.

This Radlett suicide was barely covered by the news, I was shocked. But then so many people aren't shocked by this, because it is such a normal incident. Not for me. Apparently there has been 35 cases of rail line jumpers already within the last three weeks (source from a person whose brother works in rail transport management). I expected each one to have a substantial note in the news...it's a person's life after all, but apparently not. It's not part of ecology, this death, like when cats eat birds, that eat worms, that eat miniature soil organisms...it is an anomaly and bi-product of modern society, so shouldn't it deserve a mention? An abstraction or alternative tangent of reality. I grapple with the idea of throwing myself in front of a speeding train...and loosing all of myself to the collision. It is such a bold, violent way to go. Then again, normal, natural death doesn't get reported...

Apparently there are a select few stations it occurs at, routes and specific times of day that don't case too much disruption to travel and societal routine (again from the brotherly source). The stations are usually fairly long with the open end and are unguarded. This to me poses the question about why things involved with the spatial organization and construction of infrastructure is not being adapted to eradicate these occurrences? And also leaves scope for investigating spatial policy for this field of the built environment and its issues, (amongst other similar built fields that may permit death) again linking back to my thirst for such a subject on my dissertation.

The main questions here, that I guess we will rarely ever get to know as they are personal and inside the minds of these jumpers, is what the causes are that lead to such behaviour? What is the root of the problem leading to action? Can it be prevented by the spatial, because it looks like the mega picture of the societal/economical/political isn't going to change any time soon, which may be the overarching rulers of causes to some incidents. These bigger power structures feed into the more impressionable ones, such as the emotional and sociological, causing individual adaptions within oneself, of well-being,health, happiness realms etc. The quest goes on...