Psychiatry.org⤴ has a post on how urban planning affects our mental health. A few of the features of urban environments that research has found as positive impact makers are:
- Green spaces, including small city parks and streets lined with trees.
- Active spaces, including walkable neighborhoods and areas for recreation and leisure that promote both physical and mental health.
- Social spaces, that encourage people to gather, such as with benches.
- Safe spaces, where people have less concern about safety (crime, traffic, etc.).
A lot of these things come together in the concept of walkable cities.
Walkable cities
A walkable city is an urban area designed to let people safely and easily reach daily needs, like grocery stores, schools, jobs, and parks, on foot or by public transit, without relying on a personal car. Most essential services sit within a convenient 10 to 20-minute walk.
A major source of forgetting, I want to argue, is associated with processes that separate social life from locality and from human dimensions: superhuman speed, megacities that are so enormous as to be unmemorable, consumerism disconnected from the labour process, the short lifespan of urban architecture, the disappearance of walkable cities. (Paul Connerton, How Modernity Forgets, 2009)
Walkable cities give more opportunity to go from a planned socialization culture to a casual socialization culture. In our current day in age, a lot has to do be done with intent. We're planning things way in advance and hope we feel like it when the date rolls around. It takes effort to plan, and it can also be exhausting to get in the mood to do your planned socializing.
If we arranged more of our cities or neighborhoods to be more walkable, we could have more casual, serendipitous interactions with our neighbors. In a walkable neighborhood where everything you need to live is a 15-minute walk away (recreation, restaurants, shopping, school, etc), you are more likely to go by foot. This is where you overhear conversations, run into people and see friends or acquaintances. And at that specific time, it is up to you whether you feel like connecting or not. It's fine to just say hi and wave, but it is probably more likely to you end up socializing more, since you're not in a high stakes situation where you have to catch up and feel like you have to compensate for not having seen each other for a while.
In a city where you do all your commute by car, you're missing out on a couple of things. Jon Jon⤴ proposes these in one of his TikTok videos about urban planning:
- In a car, you have no ownership of the environment in which you're moving through. As a person walking, you will take more pride and care, more about what's happening here than person who's driving.
- You're not running into people serendipitously / casually. We become less connected from each other and because we're all individually making choices of when and where we go within the city, we're not running to each other as often. This is why we're constantly having to make plans and getting exhausted or undersocialized.
- It's really expensive to have a city built around cars. Cities have to be bigger, need more infrastructure, roads, powerlines, etc.