by Shani Lyubomirsky
A grey, looming skyline peeking through the fog. Towering skyscrapers with smog blanketing everything in sight. Cars honking, traffic lights blinking, seas of people winding through concrete jungles, focused on getting to their next immediate destination. While these strike up an universally-recognized image of a modern city, this style of living is relatively recent.
Population growth has necessitated urban living with the expansion of civilization booming with innovation across all fronts. However, these advancements come with an increasing price to pay for space.
Green spaces are becoming a luxury that many are increasingly becoming unable to afford. They are becoming harder to come by in cities, and the resulting impacts of those losses may already be impacting human and environmental health in distinct ways.
An increasing number of studies are finding that the decreasing amounts of green spaces may be a critical factor in the growing issue of poor mental health. According to Environmental Psychologist Susan Clayton, humans experience changes in their mental health when placed in “extreme environments,” which can be found in cities where excessive noise and pollution is the norm. A 2019 study found that some urban populations hold nearly a 50% increased risk of developing “psychiatric disorders such as anxiety and mood disorders compared with their rural counterparts.”
Projections illustrate that in 2015, two-thirds of the world’s population will reside in urban areas. While urbanization brings the benefits of economic and industrial development, it may lead to increasingly adverse health effects in city residents. According to an article published in the Industrial Psychiatry Journal, extreme environments could be accompanied by an increase in stressors such as “overcrowded and polluted environment, high levels of violence, and reduced social support.”
While cities have been romanticized in mainstream media and culture, its bright image may be masking a darker reality. The growing trend of city living is altering reality beyond expectations. This urbanization has rapidly altered family structure and social norms. Family units that would once care for their elderly and provide emotional support are now split between urban and rural areas. Taking these factors into account, urbanization can contribute to mental illnesses and might continue to do so without proper intervention. In conjunction with growing eco-anxiety surrounding the climate emergency, increasing research supports the idea that the creation of green spaces can have both human and environmental benefits: they can help to nurse the urban population back to health while revitalizing the environment.
A groundbreaking study performed on nearly one million Danish individuals discovered that children with the least exposure to green spaces from birth to the age of 10 experienced a 55% increase in the risk of developing subsequent mental illness (see figure 1 (NASA, n.d.). While this study included many confounding variables such as parental age, hereditary mental illness, and socioeconomic factors, the association held true even after adjusting for these variables, including urbanization.
This finding suggests that implementing green spaces in cities can be a method to improve the mental state of its citizens. Additional studies by Engemann suggest that green space exposure might lower risk of depression, schizophrenia, and “neural activity linked to psychiatric disorders” all while improving children’s cognitive development and general mental health with long-term positive benefits.
More studies are finding access to green spaces to be an environmental justice issue as much as it is a scientific matter. One study analyzing 37 metropolitan areas in Baltimore found that areas “inhabited by ethnic or racial minorities contained nearly half the canopy cover than their U.S.-born, white counterparts. Another study, conducting meta-analysis pulled from over 60 different studies, concluded that there is “significant income-based urban forest inequity.”
The findings of these studies have environmental justice implications: according to Urban Forest Consultant Darya Barar, the benefits associated with increased tree canopy are only seen if the green spaces are well maintained after implementation, the logistics of which are largely based on the interest of the community.
Communities without established green spaces are less likely to invest resources into these efforts when more immediate necessities — such as food and housing — often take priority. This is compounded in regions such as the arid Southwest in the United States where trees do not naturally grow and require significant funding and maintenance to be cultivated there. In these areas, directing funding towards implementing green areas becomes even more crucial.
Despite these trends, there is still a great amount of variance in green spaces from city to city. Sarah Hosterman, a landscape architect assistant for the city of Pleasanton, states that the requirements for natural space amenities are left to the discretion of each city, causing variance in parks and natural spaces.
“The benefits of good landscaping are improved aesthetics, property values, and quality of life. A robust urban forest can reduce greenhouse gases, slow traffic, increase property values, reduce energy consumption, as well as the heat island effect,” Hosterman said.
Hosterman details the effects of such development on housing prices: as more people move to Pleasanton in part due to its beautiful parks and green spaces, a cycle of increasing housing prices and affluent areas continues. The lack of funding towards green spaces keeps property values low, which continues the systemic cycle of trapping urban residents in poverty and in environments with detrimental health benefits.
The reality is that for many city residents, particularly in those lacking green spaces, policy and public health interventions become more critical. Urbanization is an increasingly inevitable phenomenon as the world’s growing population increases its demand for space, resources, and infrastructure. But in an era of increasing mental health crises, particularly those exacerbated by the pandemic, green spaces may have the potential to provide public health benefits while addressing environmental injustice, socio-economic inequality, and climate change.
As more of the world’s population lives in cities, promoting green spaces in city planning processes could pave the way for sustainable urban living on all fronts.
Sources:
Covert, B. (2015, August 14). How A Poor Neighborhood Becomes A Trap. Retrieved November 04, 2020, from https://archive.thinkprogress.org/how-a-poor-neighborhood-becomes-a-trap-b504acf5b0fc/
Engemann, K., Pedersen, C., Arge, L., Tsirogiannis, C., Mortensen, P., & Svenning, J. (2019, March 12). Residential green space in childhood is associated with lower risk of psychiatric disorders from adolescence into adulthood. Retrieved November 04, 2020, from http://www.pnas.org/content/116/11/5188
Green Space is Good for Mental Health. (n.d.). Retrieved November 04, 2020, from https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/145305/green-space-is-good-for-mental-health
Locke, D., Billy, H., & Morgan, G. (2020). Residential housing segregation and urban tree canopy in 37 US Cities. Retrieved November 04, 2020, from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338410701_Residential_housing_segregation_and_urban_tree_canopy_in_37_US_Cities
SL;, G. (n.d.). The relationship between urban forests and income: A meta-analysis. Retrieved November 04, 2020, from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29249844/
Srivastava, K. (2009, July). Urbanization and mental health. Retrieved November 04, 2020, from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2996208/
Shani Lyubomirsky (she/her) is a second year majoring in Environmental Science and Intended Data Science with a domain emphasis in Cognitive Science. Through Perennial, she hopes to explore the intersection between advances in tech and sustainability amidst the global climate crisis. In her free time, she enjoys music—she plays the flute and mallet percussion, creative writing, and going for very long walks.