Agnieszka Olszewska-GuizzoCredit: Weronika Gąsior
Interest is growing in designing urban spaces that support, rather than harm, mental well-being. Agnieszka Olszewska-Guizzo, a landscape architect and neuroscientist at NeuroLandscape, a non-profit research group in Warsaw, spoke to Nature about the emerging field of neurourbanism, and what it means to take a more scientific approach to urban design.
What is neurourbanism?
Neurourbanism is at the intersection of landscape architecture, neuroscience, environmental psychology and urban planning. It has arisen in the past decade from the need to make cities more mentally healthy places to live. According to a meta-analysis published in 2010 (J. Peen et al. Acta Psychiatr. Scand. 121, 84–93; 2010), people who live in a city have a roughly 40% higher risk of mental illness than people living in non-urban settings. That’s huge. And there are more people living in urban spaces than ever. Neurourbanism emerged as a way to measure the impact of the built environment in a more systematic and objective way than using questionnaires and surveys.
Nature Outlook: Cities
Is it just about creating more green spaces?
Urban nature does promote health, but I wasn’t happy with just greening everything. Only some characteristics of green spaces benefit people, so I wanted to discover what particular scenes induce the most positive response in most people. What combination of features works best? We’re trying to diagnose spaces and work out how to redesign them to better serve communities.
How do you characterize spaces?
One way is based on the content of landscapes. I developed a ‘contemplative landscape model’ (CLM) that breaks down landscape views into seven features that our brains register and react to. One is how deep the view is — deeper views are beneficial, but often lacking in cities. Another is how the ground and sky interact — a more diverse skyline is better. Other beneficial elements include streams or waterfalls, seasonality of vegetation, a warm colour palette and visible movement of shade.
Our brains cannot isolate one element and stop perceiving the rest, and benefits are fragile and easily erased by other factors, such as overcrowding. So to create a reliable measure, we need to consider everything at once. These features’ aggregated impact on the brain can be captured in a ‘CLM score’.
... continue reading