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Journal of Urban Design and Mental Health 2016;1:5
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Planning for Wellbeing
Rhiannon Corcoran and Graham Marshall
The Prosocial Place Programme: Institute of Psychology Health and Society and Heseltine Institute of Public Policy & Practice, University of Liverpool, UK
The Prosocial Place Programme: Institute of Psychology Health and Society and Heseltine Institute of Public Policy & Practice, University of Liverpool, UK
Introduction
With the simplistic aim of deregulating the development process, in 2012 the UK’s Coalition Government radically overhauled the Statutory Planning policies that guide and support place-making. The resulting National Planning Framework (NPPF), which continues to be revised, primarily promotes the development ‘industry’ with the expectation of nationwide growth following in its wake. This objective is clearly underpinned by the perceived and promoted concept of a housing ‘crisis’ in the South East of England. With this, the value of ‘Place’ as infrastructure is transformed to constituent commodity – like ‘home’ to ‘house’.
To-date, little in the way of considered thinking has taken place within this review that indicates an understanding of the quality of place, or the design of cities, towns, districts and neighbourhoods that match people’s needs. This inaction is at odds with our belief that the UK Government’s stance on the localism agenda (Localism Act 2011) presents a real opportunity to reposition design and the ethics of place-making right at the heart of clear and evidence-based planning policy. The NPPF is designed to promote sustainable growth; we believe that this is not possible without first promoting ‘social sustainability’
With the simplistic aim of deregulating the development process, in 2012 the UK’s Coalition Government radically overhauled the Statutory Planning policies that guide and support place-making. The resulting National Planning Framework (NPPF), which continues to be revised, primarily promotes the development ‘industry’ with the expectation of nationwide growth following in its wake. This objective is clearly underpinned by the perceived and promoted concept of a housing ‘crisis’ in the South East of England. With this, the value of ‘Place’ as infrastructure is transformed to constituent commodity – like ‘home’ to ‘house’.
To-date, little in the way of considered thinking has taken place within this review that indicates an understanding of the quality of place, or the design of cities, towns, districts and neighbourhoods that match people’s needs. This inaction is at odds with our belief that the UK Government’s stance on the localism agenda (Localism Act 2011) presents a real opportunity to reposition design and the ethics of place-making right at the heart of clear and evidence-based planning policy. The NPPF is designed to promote sustainable growth; we believe that this is not possible without first promoting ‘social sustainability’
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Stevenage New Town: Building for a New Way of Life
"The people have had well-paid regular jobs in the factories and this has conduced to producing a feeling of contentment. It has enabled them to furnish their homes well, to acquire television, cars, and domestic gadgets, so that many who came as habitual grousers were transformed into contented citizens in a few years." - Stevenage New Town Development |
The 1950’s quotation above from the Stevenage New Town Development illustrates the misguided materialist’s understanding of wellbeing that persists today in the simplistic call for Garden Cities.
Employing theory, evidence and anecdotes around the concepts of community wellbeing together with related objectives of community resilience and social sustainability can lead the way as we rethink how to plan and develop the places we live in. By wrapping up common objectives across the sectors of health, social care and planning, ‘community wellbeing’ provides a common currency to think about the aims of the symbiotic place/ people nexus. Furthermore, unlike urban design, wellbeing has a strong evidence base that can underpin policy and which has been distilled into widely applicable and translatable guidance in the form of the New Economics Foundation’s ‘Five Ways to Wellbeing’.
Leaving aside academic debates about the definition of wellbeing, the capacity to ‘feel good and function well’ clearly depends on having access to the things that make life worthwhile – our needs and wants. This translates into 2 routes to the achievement of wellbeing. The hedonic pathway to wellbeing is derived through the pursuit of maximum pleasure and minimum pain typically associated with the derivation of ‘wants’. By contrast the eudaimonic pathway to wellbeing is the pursuit of meaningful goals that transcend the hedonic self – a human need.
Importantly, these pathways to wellbeing play out in place and economies in much the same way as they play out in individuals, and they have much the same outcomes in terms of sustainability. An imbalance towards hedonic wellbeing both results in, and is promoted by, resource depletion, short term-ism, quick wins and hedonistic business economies – unhealthy and unsustainable in short.
Research
In research conducted as part of the community evidence programme of the national What Works Wellbeing Centre, we asked professionals from diverse sectors (including practitioners, policy-makers and researchers in public health, and community development within local government, third sector and the private sector) all working in the area of wellbeing to respond to an online survey about community wellbeing. 62% of the 317 respondents believed that community wellbeing emerged in the context of: “strong networks of relationships and support between people in a community, both in close relationships and friendships, and between neighbours and acquaintances”. The ability to take action to improve things, and feelings of belonging to and security in place, were also widely endorsed notions related to high levels of community wellbeing. In terms of how we might encourage these outcomes, the respondents offered ideas that typically involved ‘reclaiming the public realm’ through initiatives such as “Playing out interventions” where streets are closed to traffic for scheduled periods to allow people to reclaim the streets, or where communities make concerted efforts to clean up or refresh their shared spaces.
The evidence emerging from this online survey demonstrates why, how and where community wellbeing can be the grassroots driving force behind better places to live and it shows how action in places energises optimistic communities. However, we argue that by adopting some simple wellbeing maxims to guide built environment policy, the living environment professions can position people’s ‘thrival’ at the heart of a formal place-making ethos. As it stands, the consolidated design guidance, as it survives in the NPPF, remains too subjective, vague and focused on the traditional arts-based cultured preferences of design professionals. It does not focus centrally on the needs and responses of people to place. In our terms, successful places serve their communities and, a community is seen to be well-served when it thrives in place. We introduce below the beginnings of our thinking about how the ‘Five Ways to Wellbeing’ can be applied to form the skeleton of what we refer to as “well-design”.
New Economic Foundation - The Five Ways to Wellbeing
Connect to others
Connectivity is already an accepted fundamental principle in the design of place. The translation into design and development guidance is, therefore, straightforward.
Give
The importance of giving or altruism to community wellbeing cannot be over-stated. We believe that cooperative pursuits towards the collective good are the basis of community wellbeing. Thus:
An important element of “give” exists in the form of volunteering and ‘place activism’ - a feature of community wellbeing that emerged from the professional’s survey that was part of our ongoing community wellbeing evidence programme. By volunteering our time in pursuit of ‘well-places’ we also continue to learn, be active, get connected and take notice. Thus:
Take Notice of the world around you – catch sight of changes and be aware of your responses to them.
Neuroscientific evidence shows that, unless we are engaged in actively processing information entering our senses from the external world, we tend to dwell in our internal world of thoughts, feelings, recollections and mind-wanderings (Buckner, Andrews-Hanna and Schacter, 2008). Further evidence shows that low mood is captured as a tendency to dwell more in this internal word with a focus on pessimistic or worrying concerns (Greicius, Flores, Menon et al 2007). Therefore, flexible, dynamic designs that challenge, surprise or gently re-orient people’s attention away from their own internal thoughts or pre-occupations and towards the external world are desirable by being good for our individual wellbeing. Good urban design should make us actively process information from our surroundings; it should make people look up from their gadgets and remove their earphones to experience the world in reality instead of virtually or vicariously. In addition, we have to take notice of each other, culturally engage and socially negotiate. Thus:
Keep learning
Design and development processes that involve, question and engage people in place-based outcomes and objectives will help them to keep learning and develop an understanding of the fundamental elements and utility of place for others beyond ourselves. In other words, the co-production of places will facilitate the emergence of an allocentric response to place. Thus:
Furthermore, to maintain an active, experiential response to and learning about the function of places, designs should encourage a conscious ‘foraging’ style of way-finding and route taking. Again, evidence from cognitive neuroscience shows that uncertainty engages the brain in active information processing towards the making of adaptive choices (e.g. Huettel, Song and McCarthy (2005). Thus:
Be Active
Recent movements towards healthy cities and Healthy New Towns as well as Design Council CABEs ‘Active by Design’ focus means that the translation of this guidance into place-making is already developing.
Conclusion
There is nothing very controversial in this proposed reformulation of urban design/development principles. However, the adoption of such principled policies would allow urban design and planning to address the fundamental function of places while being grounded in objectivity. This would enable continued and meaningful evaluation and monitoring of design objectives for new and existing places in terms of how they change and maintain people’s lives for the better.
Connectivity is already an accepted fundamental principle in the design of place. The translation into design and development guidance is, therefore, straightforward.
- Well-Design should prioritise and facilitate legible connections to and between potential hubs and gathering places, and remove the barriers to everyday interactions.
Give
The importance of giving or altruism to community wellbeing cannot be over-stated. We believe that cooperative pursuits towards the collective good are the basis of community wellbeing. Thus:
- Well-design should include flexible places and environments that prioritise, accommodate and give explicit consent to cooperative community activity.
An important element of “give” exists in the form of volunteering and ‘place activism’ - a feature of community wellbeing that emerged from the professional’s survey that was part of our ongoing community wellbeing evidence programme. By volunteering our time in pursuit of ‘well-places’ we also continue to learn, be active, get connected and take notice. Thus:
- Well-design should encourage, facilitate and enable people to volunteer their time as a form of ‘stewardship’ in the pursuit of good places to live.
Take Notice of the world around you – catch sight of changes and be aware of your responses to them.
Neuroscientific evidence shows that, unless we are engaged in actively processing information entering our senses from the external world, we tend to dwell in our internal world of thoughts, feelings, recollections and mind-wanderings (Buckner, Andrews-Hanna and Schacter, 2008). Further evidence shows that low mood is captured as a tendency to dwell more in this internal word with a focus on pessimistic or worrying concerns (Greicius, Flores, Menon et al 2007). Therefore, flexible, dynamic designs that challenge, surprise or gently re-orient people’s attention away from their own internal thoughts or pre-occupations and towards the external world are desirable by being good for our individual wellbeing. Good urban design should make us actively process information from our surroundings; it should make people look up from their gadgets and remove their earphones to experience the world in reality instead of virtually or vicariously. In addition, we have to take notice of each other, culturally engage and socially negotiate. Thus:
- Well-design should promote people’s conscious awareness of place, of each other and our relationships.
Keep learning
Design and development processes that involve, question and engage people in place-based outcomes and objectives will help them to keep learning and develop an understanding of the fundamental elements and utility of place for others beyond ourselves. In other words, the co-production of places will facilitate the emergence of an allocentric response to place. Thus:
- Well-design should embrace ‘engaged design’ to enable individuals to learn about and develop an allocentric response to place.
Furthermore, to maintain an active, experiential response to and learning about the function of places, designs should encourage a conscious ‘foraging’ style of way-finding and route taking. Again, evidence from cognitive neuroscience shows that uncertainty engages the brain in active information processing towards the making of adaptive choices (e.g. Huettel, Song and McCarthy (2005). Thus:
- Well-design should avoid paternalistic risk-averse approaches that strip individuals of their choice and their sense of agency.
Be Active
Recent movements towards healthy cities and Healthy New Towns as well as Design Council CABEs ‘Active by Design’ focus means that the translation of this guidance into place-making is already developing.
- Well-design should promote active movement to and between potential hubs and gathering places to facilitate the pursuit of everyday physical activity.
Conclusion
There is nothing very controversial in this proposed reformulation of urban design/development principles. However, the adoption of such principled policies would allow urban design and planning to address the fundamental function of places while being grounded in objectivity. This would enable continued and meaningful evaluation and monitoring of design objectives for new and existing places in terms of how they change and maintain people’s lives for the better.
References
Buckner, Andrews-Hanna and Schacter (2008) Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1124 (1): 1–38.
Greicius, Flores, Menon et al. (2007) Biological Psychiatry, 62, 429-437
Huettel, Song and McCarthy (2005), Journal of Neuroscience, 25, 3304-3311
Buckner, Andrews-Hanna and Schacter (2008) Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1124 (1): 1–38.
Greicius, Flores, Menon et al. (2007) Biological Psychiatry, 62, 429-437
Huettel, Song and McCarthy (2005), Journal of Neuroscience, 25, 3304-3311
About the Authors
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Rhiannon Corcoran is a professor of psychology and Graham Marshall is an award winning urban designer and a visiting senior research fellow; both at the University of Liverpool Institute of Psychology, Health and Society. They co-direct the Prosocial Place Programme that aims to understand and address the pernicious impacts of low-resource urban environments on health and wellbeing and to develop an evidence-based approach to urban design. Contact Rhiannon @rhiannoncor and Graham @prosocialplace
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