What Does Mental Health Have To Do With Urban Design?

Clair Wholean, AIA, LEED GA is an architect with DLR Group| Sorg in Washington DC. Her work covers a broad range of project types, from hospitals to schools and community centers. A graduate of Cooper Union, Clair sees architecture as a vehicle for humanitarian and environmental change – health, wellness and sustainability are core principles driving design of a better world. Clair joins UD/MH as a regular contributor to Sanity and Urbanity.

Mental health can be seen as a sliding scale with disease on one end, optimal condition on the other. Most of us sit somewhere in between, hopefully closer to the optimal side. Things happen in life that tip that scale towards one end or the other, many of those things being in our environment. An urban environment has the possibility of pushing us in either direction. The stigma commonly associated with mental illness may stem from the idea that it is an internal problem that the person can change themselves. Yet the impact that the natural and built environment has on our mental health is palpable and often out of our control. Everyone has symptoms of poor mental health at times. Here are some examples of ways that cities can cause common mental health symptoms:

• Have you felt sad or down after spending an entire day indoors or underground?

• Have you worried for your safety, or the security of your belongings?
• Have you felt a lack of autonomy, like a bee in a hive, working and living in high rises?
• Have you felt that days or weeks go by without spending time outside, causing you to lose track of time?
• Have you gone home, to hole up in your apartment, sheltered away from noise, pollution, visual and social stimulation?
• Have you felt tension, aggression or anxiety in crowded trains or streets?
• Have you had problems sleeping due to sirens, light pollution, or exhaustion from a non-stop lifestyle?
• Have you felt helpless, anonymous or lonely because it seems that none of the other millions of people around you care about anything but themselves?
• Do you dream of your next weekend escape to the country?
  

These are all symptoms of an unhealthy mental state which can be caused or exacerbated by urban conditions. Yet this is no reason to truck out to the burbs. Cities offer extensive benefits for our wellbeing, which we can experience all the time:

• Have you felt refreshed by spending leisure time in a park?
• Have you felt energized by special events with thousands of people?
• Do you smile when walking past a child or pet a dog that goes by on the sidewalk?
• Are you inspired by interactions with new cultures and ideas?
• Are you more active because you commute via public transportation, taking escalators, stairs, walking or biking?
• Are you more productive and intellectually stimulated because of educational and career opportunities available to you in the city?
• Have you felt exhilarated after seeing a skyline or crossing a major bridge?

Improving the urban environment by integrating nature, social connection and stress-relieving elements can both relieve the negative symptoms and increase the positive interactions we have in the urban environment. Both the negative symptoms and positive benefits of urbanism are things every one of us can experience. Those of us who have the means to get away or change our environment can usually prevent the negative symptoms from going from a few bad days into a disorder, by putting ourselves in more frequent contact with the positive experiences. But many urban residents don’t have the ability to change their environment. By advocating for urban designers, planners and architects to collaborate with health professionals to design urban environments that promote our mental wellbeing, we can improve the effect the urban environment has on everyone.