Imagine walking over
a bright rainbow-coloured crosswalk in Davie Village, Vancouver’s vibrant gaybourhood and then making a turn into a laneway lined with shrubs and shared gardens. Would you be more willing to chat to a stranger en route rather than in an area surrounded by simple, raw concrete constructions?
In an experiment involving a walking tour of the city district, cognitive neuroscientists and urban planners found exactly that: visitors reported feeling happier and more trusting of strangers around the rainbow intersection and greenery than anywhere else on the guided walk. They believed that if they lost their wallet there, chances were higher of getting it back if a stranger found it.Crafting with Principles of Excellence
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Meanwhile in London, British Land has turned the concrete-scape of Paddington Central – a campus with office, residential, hotel and retail spaces – into a green community centre with air hockey and table tennis tables, artwork, a herb garden for the local restaurants, and out-of-office-hours activities for workers and residents. Happy City, a Vancouver-based urban design and planning consultancy, helped the British property developer with the transformation towards a green campus, which was completed in 2017.
As people are becoming more aware of the influence of the surroundings on their health and wellbeing, urban planners and architects are starting to consider the social aspects of spaces to stave off loneliness and isolation, improve quality of life and ensure individuals and communities can pursue their own happiness.
Happy City often works with psychologists and neuroscientists to understand the implications of urban design. Using psychological surveys and skin electrodes to measure people’s emotional arousal in the moment, they learned that “people were much happier on sidewalks with active edges, that is sidewalks lined with small shops and services, than they were on sidewalks with blank or glass walls,” says Charles Montgomery, Happy City’s founding principal and author of the namesake book, adding that pedestrians usually walk more quickly along blank edges. “When you combine that insight with others, it gives you direction on how to design,” he says.
Psychologists have long known that exposure to green space improves people’s mood and wellbeing. Even in busy cities, a mere 20-minute walk through nature can reduce stress and symptoms of depression – at least for a spell, says Robin Mazumder, a doctoral candidate in cognitive neuroscience at the University of Waterloo in Canada.
Being Surrounded
He has been using VR to examine how being surrounded by tall buildings makes people feel. To do this, Mazumder exposes his test subjects to a range of digital and real-life cityscapes of London whilst monitoring their sympathetic nervous system through skin conductance measurements – an indicator of stress that changes when we sweat. The observed increases in stress levels could be associated with feelings of enclosure, intimidation, lacking view of the sky, or an evolutionary response to non-natural settings, he says.
That high-rise buildings can cause a sense of oppressiveness and that people prefer to wind down in a quiet, green space is perhaps not so surprising, not least because skyscrapers are known to amplify noise, concentrate air pollution on ground level, and cause a downdraught wind effect. “If my work shows that these [skyscrapers] have negative impacts on people’s emotional states, how can we use that to advocate to maintain open spaces in cities?,” asks Mazumder. His research aims to explore whether city environments with a high density of tall buildings can have a long-term detrimental effect on wellbeing or whether people are able to recover from daily stress, a question he admits is not so simple to answer just by measuring study participants' physiological responses and subjective answers to a mood questionnaire.
Cities shouldn’t stop building up altogether, Mazumder says, but could create more rooftop gardens, open up existing parks to the public and encourage art installations. “I think that also does something to our psychology. Access to beauty is extremely important,” he says. People living in concreted areas with no access to nature could benefit from such installations. “There’s been research that suggests when people experience awe, they are more social and more likely to connect with other people,” says Mazumder.
In the Vancouver case study, people’s mood was lifted around the colourfully-painted crosswalks, which comes as little surprise according to Happy City’s Montgomery. “Colours are symbols. The rainbow crossing, for some people, triggers feelings of playfulness and contentment, and for others, connotes social inclusion,” he says.
by
Sabrina Weiss
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