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Cities can make us happier, says UChicago study

2021-08-10T11:26:00-04:00

Researchers at the University of Chicago have released a new study examining the impact of cities on human wellbeing, concluding that the socio-economic networks and active environments of large urban areas in the U.S. can result in lower rates of psychological depression.

The findings are part of a broader research project that aims to quantify and map what it feels like to live in a city, building on previous research that showed how people’s use of a city’s infrastructure networks can lead to increases in social interaction, innovation, and wealth production. “We wondered if those same principles and mathematical models could be applied to psychological phenomena, such as depression, to see if the actual social and infrastructure networks of cities—and how they change as cities get larger—could affect people's psychology in a consistent way,” said Andrew Stier, one of the study’s authors.

Previously on Archinect: Architecture Community Experiences a Noticeable Impact on Mental...

How architecture plays a key role in fighting loneliness in our cities

2018-12-20T19:12:00-05:00

Winston Churchill once observed that we shape the buildings and then the buildings shape us. I have written elsewhere about how architects and planners, albeit unwittingly, are complicit in producing an urban landscape that contributes to an unhealthy mental landscape. Can we think of different ways to be in the city, of a different architecture that can “cure” loneliness?

Tanzil Shafique, a Ph.D. researcher in urban design at the University of Melbourne, conducted a graduate design studio where students came up with potential architectural and urban responses to loneliness.

Loneliness is on the rise throughout the world's cities

2016-04-12T15:13:00-04:00

”...it might be that loneliness is often due to circumstance. The thing with cities is we are absolutely surrounded by people...We can see other people living richer, more populated lives than our own. At the same time, we can feel very exposed … there are lots of eyes on everyone. That is why the loneliness of the city has a particularly distinct tang to it. Loneliness, however, is often like bad weather, “it passes through our lives”.

More about mental health on Archinect:

The Internet and the Future of Loneliness

An environmental psychologist on why boring design is bad for your health

How urban designers can better address mental health in their work, according to a new think tank

Study Links Walkable Neighborhoods to Prevention of Cognitive Decline

The Internet and the Future of Loneliness

2015-04-02T15:37:00-04:00

...the promise of the internet is contact. It seems to offer an antidote to loneliness, trumping even the most utopian urban environment by enabling strangers to develop relationships along shared lines of interest, no matter how shy or isolated they might be in their own physical lives. But proximity, as city dwellers know, does not necessarily mean intimacy. Access to other people is not by itself enough to dispel the gloom of internal isolation. Loneliness can be most acute in a crowd. -Laing