Can the Urban Environment Reinforce Certain Psychological States?

Part 1 of a 2 part series.

The idea for this blog came from a conversation with landscape architect Stephen Storheim of Design Workshop in Salt Lake City, Utah. He recently mentioned the desire to have an urban landscape he could move through at lunchtime, from the office to a restaurant and back, that didn’t require negotiating auto traffic. This parallels a line of thought I have considered since 2005 originally titled Performance Stress Management, but that might better be generalized to performance cognitive management.

“Stress” carries lots of baggage, though fatigue and cognitive shutdown are stress related events. A better way of conceiving this is perhaps managing states of work and restorative consciousness that provide optimum results for creating, analyzing, rudimentary task work, wise judgment, decision-making and the like. What kinds of environments—or micro-environments—best suit the focus and concentration, or the recuperation and counterbalancing of such mental states?

Peruse the rich visual images of an architecture or landscape architecture magazine. How do you imagine yourself in these environments, and how do they make you feel? Often these images are without the connective tissue of busy streets, cacophonous noise, or the bombardment of motion to the visual senses. Christopher Day, in Places of the Soul: Architecture and Environmental Design as a Healing Art, makes special note of the distinction between a photograph—de-contextualized, framed representation—from architecture, a living environment with long term impact on emotional and psychological wellbeing. This is a clue tuning us to how urban environments impact the individual.

At the intersection of consumer expectations and the urban environment we are often told to face reality. We are often told to accept less than ideal aural, visual and emotionally impactful environments, environments that impact mental states and our wellbeing. Is this necessarily so? Granted, at the speed we tend to build and live, we often find in hindsight things we can’t just make go away. Overhead power lines outside the window of a local $199k condo, which otherwise looks very inviting, could have enormous consequences on one’s mental state. Given the significance of windows, views and view sheds, looking out onto power lines could be very dissatisfying.

Yet, one might ignore the negative feelings and thoughts likely to recur and reinforce each time one looked out the window, or thought about the view, because they enjoyed other aspects of the condo and are paying $199k. Imagine leaving such a condo having triggered that subconscious sense of dissatisfaction on your way out the door to work. In a city that has the potential for sunny, blue sky days, how does smog and yellow haze impact your perceptions and background thoughts on the way into the office?