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DonatePublished on January 18, 2024
Does your city affect your mood?
Whether you realize it or not, our urban environment can have an incredible influence on our mental and psychological health. There’s even an emerging field called neurourbanism, in which researchers seek to understand the impacts that urban stimuli have on our emotions and wellbeing.
Robin Mazumder had already become interested in how our environment contributes to illness or disability while training as an occupational therapist. But a chance encounter with a University of Waterloo neuroscience professor propelled him into the field of neurourbanism.
After completing his PhD at the University of Waterloo, Mazumder is now a Postdoctoral Researcher at TU Berlin. The Toronto-born, Victoria-raised neuroscientist tells Evergreen about his inspirations, how public spaces contribute to wellbeing and shares some emerging trends in the field of neurourbanism.
What is neurourbanism?
Neurourbanism is the application of neuroscience and other psychological methods to understand what’s happening in both the brain and the body,in urban environments. It involves looking at elements like stress and wellbeing to see how we can design better cities. How can we use neuroscience to discover what’s making you stressed or making you happy when you’re, for example, in the middle of Times Square versus being in the middle of Central Park, and what does that difference mean about not just momentary overwhelm but also its accumulation and relationship to the development of stress-related illnesses?
What inspired you to pursue this research?
I chose to work in mental health following my Masters in Occupational Therapy (OT) from the University of Toronto. My first job was at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in Toronto on an inpatient schizophrenia unit, where my role involved helping people with serious mental illnesses transition to the community. OTs pay attention to how the environments people live in influence health; that first role was what made me consider how the city causes mental illness.
Throughout my OT career, I had my heart set on trying to understand how we might do something about the urban mental health epidemic. By chance I came across an article about how boring cityscapes are bad for your mental health, authored by a professor of neuroscience at the University of Waterloo. I connected with him, and soon after, I began my PhD in cognitive neuroscience, focusing on the psychological impacts of urban design.
I also live with Bipolar Disorder, something I shared publicly recently. It is a complex mental illness characterized by depression and mania, but also, interestingly, has been shown to be related to urban living, making me my own case study.
Have you identified specific design elements that positively or negatively impact wellbeing?
My PhD focused on building height, so I looked at how being in the presence of skyscrapers created stress in the body. To do that, I took people to Central London [England] to measure their physiological response to high-rise buildings. In a second group, 360-degree video (with audio) was taken of the exact locations used in the first study. Participants were then exposed to the video using immersive virtual reality in the lab. One of the studies published found that building height does negatively influence people’s psychological state.
The argument for building higher is often about densification, and I’m in full support of housing — I don’t think we should only build single-level homes. However, I do think that the emphasis on building upwards is contingent on our perception of the use of space on the ground.
We’re trying to develop some practical insights so that we can work with policy makers and practitioners to understand how built environment variables such as road width or architectural diversity influence us both as individuals and as a society. There are all these areas of psychology that we’re pulling together to try to make inferences about how these design decisions impact our brain activity and, fundamentally, our health.
“In the best-case scenario, we all have an opportunity to help shape the design of public spaces. People can have a bigger impact on the design than we think.”
– Dr. Robin Mazumder
How do you think public spaces contribute to the overall wellbeing of individuals within urban environments?
I think public space design is one of the most important aspects of the urban environment. Public space is where we come together. And if social isolation was what I observed as having one of the most detrimental impacts on the people I was working with as an occupational therapist, the spaces that are designed intentionally can be monumental for people who are otherwise alone most of the time.
In terms of research, we did a study in 2016 where we took participants of the Project for Public Spaces conference on a walking tour in Vancouver’s West End. From a scientific perspective, we were trying to compare how urban design interventions — such as greenspace and other placemaking initiatives — would be associated with greater feelings of social trust, happiness and other feelings of wellbeing.
We went on a six-stop tour, comparing sites such as hardscaped, basic back alleys against greenscaped, revived back alleys that had benches and a little free library. We found that, pretty much across the board, interventions like paint and urban greenery are associated with high levels of social connectedness and feelings of wellbeing.
What do you see as emerging trends in the field of neurourbanism?
I think AI is going to be huge. I use machine learning in my research for predictive analytics — predicting what’s going to happen in public spaces as a product of public space design. Also, wearable technology and cell phone technology are going to be tell us a lot more about people’s physiological states as they relate to place. There will be deep repositories of real-time physiological data that can tell us about the impact of places. When you consider what AI can do with that data, it’s kind of terrifying, but I see these as tools for city builders to make more evidence-based design decisions. Data can also help us instrumentalize constructs such as equity to see who feels safe and who does not in public space, or who benefits from greenspace and who does not.
The other important thing is that, in the best-case scenario, we all have an opportunity to help shape the design of public spaces. People can have a bigger impact on the design than we think. And that’s huge because these spaces linger within our cities; they stick around for generations. So, I just encourage anybody, if they have any ideas or thoughts about how public space can be improved to speak directly to the politicians and policymakers who are responsible. Everyone’s voice matters.
Visit Dr. Robin Mazumder’s website for more information about his research and upcoming speaking engagements.
Do you want to help shape urban settings into healthy places? Learn how Evergreen is empowering communities across Canada to build public spaces that serve their needs and those of our planet.
