Wildness and Wellbeing

Nature, Neuroscience, and Urban Design

Zoë Myers

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9789813299221
• eBook ISBN:
  9789813299238
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping
• Index: Social Sciences

Wildness and Wellbeing explores the dynamic relationships between urban nature and mental health, offering practical strategies for urban design. Mental health is a leading global issue and our urban environments can contribute to conditions such as depression and anxiety. Presenting the latest research, this book explores how neuroscience can offer new perspectives on the crucial role everyday multisensory interactions with nature can have on our mental wellbeing. These insights can help us (un)design our streets, neighbourhoods and cities, allowing nature to be integrated back into our cities. Wildness and Wellbeing is for anyone interested in the connections between urban ecology, health, environmental science, planning, and urban design, helping to create biodiverse cities for mental health.

© The Author(s) 2020

Z. MyersWildness and Wellbeinghttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9923-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Our Nature in/of the City

Zoë Myers¹

(1)

Australian Urban Design Research Centre, University of Western Australia, Perth, WA, Australia

Zoë Myers

Email: [email protected]

Abstract

This chapter presents the rationale for needing to urgently turn our attention to how urban stressors, ecological degradation and climate change can be detrimental for our mental health and wellbeing, and the potential for embodied and relational interactions with urban ecologies to counter this. This chapter introduces the applicability of neuroscience to design, and how it contributes to a complementary perspective. Here it is argued that combining a land use approach focusing on leftover, in-between land, with allowing wild urban natures, will be most equitable, accessible, and accumulative for providing opportunities for nature interactions that can foster mental health and wellbeing.

Keywords

Mental healthUrban designNatureEcologyNeuroscience

End Abstract

1.1 Introduction

Cities are significant to almost all elements of current research as most of us live, or will soon live, within them. It is an oft-cited—and admittedly redundant (McHale et al. 2015)—estimate that by 2050 70% of the global population will live in cities (United Nations 2014). While the scale and diversity of our urban environments differ wildly—indeed it is problematic that “the urban is treated as an empirically self-evident, universal category corresponding to a particular type of bounded settlement space, the ‘city’” (Brenner and Schmid 2015, p. 163)—their impact is vastly disproportionate to global health, be that environmental, ecological, economic, social, or psychological. Of these, until recently, psychological health has been somewhat neglected in the face of more dramatic or urgent concerns. It is also considered a largely personal phenomenon, treated at the individual level, with antidepressants and other medications, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), and talk therapy, among others. Addressing it in the context of design and planning requires an acceptance of it being a collective demographic symptom of urban life that at least in part relates to the physical and sensory environments, and that spatial intervention into these areas is therefore a pragmatic, rational, and vital priority for the future wellbeing of our cities’ residents.

The urgency of this issue has not gone unnoticed. Since 2015 mental health and wellbeing have been included in the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals, and the World Health Organisation’s Mental Health Action Plan 2013–2020 (2013) recognizes the essential role of mental health, which it defines as

a state of well-being in which an individual realizes his or her own abilities, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and is able to make a contribution to his or her community. (p. 38)

In 2011, Yale psychologists Kazdin and Blase (2011) argued that individual psychotherapy—with its cost-inhibiting factors and lack of adequate resourcing—needed innovative reinterpretations, platforms, and modes to meet the exponential needs of a distressed populace. In response, researchers from the University of Chicago urged the uptake of a long-overdue public health approach to mental health (Atkins and Frazier 2011). It is within this context that the physical environment can be seen as a logical way for those outside the health professions, in areas such as design, to offer evidence-based spatial and sensory interventions to this field (Lang and Rayner 2012).

This is a book, then, that seeks to explore intersecting research questions at the nexus of city and human, nature and form, science and design, to ask: In what specific ways can urban design use neuroscience that supports the positive effects of nature on mental health? What might be required of us with regard to reconceptualizing ‘nature’ in order to revisit these ideas in a more nuanced, agile way? How might we, in Söderström et al.’s words, “unpack ‘the city’” (2016): “to see it as a heterogeneous, non-deterministic and enabling milieu, rather than as an undifferentiated factor of psychic stress” (p. 105), to rethink the standard vernaculars of how people are perceived in design and planning? Here, then, I also choose to use the term ‘wellbeing’, which is “situated and relational, an effect of mutually constitutive interactions amongst the material, organic and emotional dynamics of places” (Atkinson 2013, p. 138). Its efficacy is to enable a broad individual approach to ‘feeling well’; one that can allow a more temporal and personal definition of health. To this end, a focus on both mental health and wellbeing broadens the scope of positive nature interactions.

Two excellent concepts have provided a starting point for the work here. Firstly, Fitzgerald and colleagues’ proposal of a ‘neuropolis’: the city as one that holds the potential to enable “healthy neurological functioning in its citizens, and thereby a space that fosters individual and collective flourishing” (p. 231). This city, encompassing a field of sensory perceptions and neurological engagement as well as the social political structures that frame it, offers an opportunity to revisit interactions between individual and environment through the brain. This complements Wolch’s ‘zoöpolis’; a “renaturalized, re-enchanted city” (1996, p. 29); one in which encounters with animals and nature are experienced with immediacy and cultivate co-existence. These vivid ideas of how cities can be reimagined, through engagement of our bodies and with the natural environment we are embedded within, offer compelling directions for urban design. And so, this is where this book ultimately lands: that creating and fostering genuinely healthy, diverse natures in our cities is fundamental for both people and the environment. We not only can do both; it is in our best interests to do both (Fig. 1.1).

Fig. 1.1

Road reserve, Melbourne, Australia

1.2 Pathology and the City

There are undoubtedly many wonderful and beneficial aspects of living in a city. Social connection, economic advantage, cultural and educational opportunities are only some of the ways being a city dweller can positively add to life experience. However, detrimental influences are well-noted: increasing congestion and density; air, noise, water, and soil pollution; social disconnect and isolation; loss of habitats; as well as increasing economic disparity and work-related stress, increasing health issues such as cardiovascular disease (Vandasova et al. 2016; Yitshak-Sade et al. 2017). Thirteen percent of all global childhood asthma cases this year (2019) are estimated to be from traffic pollution (Achakulwisut et al. 2019, p. e170); 64% being in urban areas (or 90% if including adjacent suburban areas) (p. e175), and 92% of which would occur in areas under the permitted pollution guidelines (p. e170). Furthermore, these effects do not respect urban boundaries but have global impact (Ngo et al. 2018).

With regard to psychological health the evidence is also troubling. One in four people worldwide will suffer a significant mental health episode in their lifetime. Mental health issues are insidious, and have diffuse effect: in terms of global health burdens, the emphasis has shifted to chronic conditions and non-communicable diseases, with depression being the largest category of disability (World Health Organisation 2017, p. 5). There was no decrease in recorded rates of anxiety and depression in Australia, Canada, England, and the United States between 1990 and 2015 (Jorm 2017); however, there was a 41% increase in the prescription of antidepressants between 2002 and 2007 in Australia, for instance (Hollingworth et al. 2010, p. 515). While there is some concern that these figures are due to a lowered threshold for diagnosis (Baxter et al. 2014) (in part potentially explained by the expansion of definitions and reliance on symptoms for diagnosis) (p. 513), there has undoubtedly been a significant increase in mood affliction, whether clinical or otherwise. There is also a tremendous economic cost, both through productivity and treatment (Chisholm et al. 2016; Lee et al. 2017).

Depression (here used to refer to Major Depressive Disorder) is an illness characterized by feelings of sadness, lack of enthusiasm, and irritability (Leistedt and Linkowski 2013, p. 55), though it manifests differently for each person, and thus can be considered a heterogeneous group of symptoms (Hacimusalar and Eşel 2018). It is significantly associated with rumination, a mental behavior, whereby you get ‘stuck’ rethinking something over and over. Anxiety is an umbrella term to refer to a wide range of maladies from the general to the specific, but which are characterized by...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Our Nature in/of the City
• 2. Reimagining an Urban Nature
• 3. Multisensory Nature and Mental Health
• 4. Urban Nature and Designing for Mental Health
• 5. Conclusions
• Back Matter