Buildings and cities can affect our mood and well-being, and that specialised cells in the hippocampal region of our brains are attuned to the geometry and arrangement of spaces we inhabit. Yet urban architects have often paid scant attention to the potential cognitive affects of their creations on a city’s inhabitants. The imperative to design something unique and individual tends to override considerations of how it might shape the behaviours of those who will live with it.
Conscious Cities Conference in London considered how cognitive scientists might make their discoveries more accessible to architects. One of the conference speakers, Alison Brooks, an architect who specialises in housing and social design, told BBC Future that psychology-based insights could change how cities are built.
Thanks to psychological studies, we have a much better idea of the kind of urban environtments that people like or find stimulating. Some of these studies have attempted to measure subjects’ psychological responses in situ, using wearable devices such as bracelets that monitor skin conductance (a marker of physiological arousal), smartphone apps that ask subjects about their emotional state, and electroencephalogram (EEG) headsets that measure brain activity relating to mental states and mood.
One of Colin Ellard’s most consistent findings is that people are strongly affected by building facades. If the facade is complex and interesting, it affects people in positive way; negative if it is simple and monotonuos. The writer and urban specialist Charles Montgomery, who collaborated with Ellard on his Manhattan study, has said this points to “an emerging disaster in street psychology”. Another oft-replicated finding is that having access to green space such as woodland or a park can offset some of the stress of city living.
A study of the population of England in 2008 found that the health effects of inequality, which tends to increase the risk of circulatory disease among those lower down the socioeconomic scale, are far less pronounced in greener areas. One theory is that the visual complexity of natural environtments acts as a kind of mental balm. That would fit with Ellard’s finsings in downtown Manhattan, and also with a 2013 virtual reality experiment in Iceland in which participants viewed various residental street scenes and found the ones with the most architectural variation the most mentally engaging. Another VR study concluded that most people feel better in rooms with curved edges and rounded contours than in sharp-edged rectangular rooms – though the design students amng the participants preferred the opposite.
The importance of urban design goes far beyond feel-good aesthetics. A number of studies have shown that growing up in a city doubles the chances of someone developing schizophrenia, and increases the risk for other mental disorders such as depression and chronic anxiety. The main trigger appears to be what researchers call “social stress” – the lack of social bonding and cohesion in neighbourhoods.
Sociologist, William Whyte, advised urban planners to arrange objects and artefacts in public spaces in ways that nudged people physically closer together and made it more likely they would talk to each other, a process he called “triangulation”. Enriching public spaces will not banish loneliness from cities, but it could help by making residents feel more engaged and comfortable with their surroundings. One thing that is guaranteed to make people feel negative about living in a city is a constant sense of being lost or disorientated. Some cities are easier to navigate than others – New York’s grid – like street pattern makes it relatively straightforward, whereas London, with its hotchpotch of neighbourhoods all orientated differently and the Thames meandering through the middle, in notoriously confusing.
But that’s the thing about cities: people who live in them do a good job making them feel like them home despite all the design and architectural obstacles that may confront them, be it in a byzantine library or a sprawling park. A visible manisfestation of this are the “desire lines” that wend their way accross grassy parks marking people’s preferred paths across the city. They represent a kind of mass rebelion against the prescribed routes of architects and planners.
Source:
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170605-the-psychology-behind-your-citys-design
