What is stress and calm in the Urban Environment?

Stress and calm in any environment—home, car, work, play, city, suburb, country—is on one hand based on individual perceptions and immediate experience. We can’t just write off stress as a perceptual: “I think I’m stressing; I think I’ll relax”. Once discomfort, looking, listening, and thinking accrue, stress hormones and neurochemistry take over. Once triggering occurs, even an environmental shift can take 20 minutes or more to dissipate the effects.

On the other hand, some situations commonly induce a degree of stress or calm for many of us. Bumper to bumper traffic, a sudden computer crash, and crowding are likely examples. We might pass the time relaxing, or utilize a resilient side of our personality, but many of us will eventually react with thoughts and feelings that lead to stress. Conversely, natural settings—beaches with waves, sunsets on patios and porches, satisfying parks like Sugarhouse and Liberty in Salt Lake City—can put us at ease, stress tolerant to issues that may later arise.

Urban planners, architects and landscape architects benefit from tuning into their own dynamics of stress and calm, a tool allowing insight as to what may or may not work. Diversity courses and experiences inform on cultural, ethnic, and geographical differences. Schmidt et al. suggests a predominantly white culture is more likely to be concerned with psychological aspects of stress in reacting to crowding—predictability, control, and behavioral freedom—while Blacks and Hispanics from Riverside and San Bernardino, Cal. were more attentive to physical aspects of an environment when reacting with stressful behaviors and perceptions. Sensitivity to diverse cultures and “congenial environments” probably seems basic to the urban planning and creation field, but gaining specific insight, whether through peer reviewed research or commissioned participatory action research is critical. We have entered an era where smart urban planning must be concerned with congenial density.

In Communicating Nature, Julia Corbett discusses the impact of early experiences with natural environments in conceptualizing and relating to nature as adults. Numerous studies have focused on Nature Deficit Disorder, as well as nature’s impact on the average individual in terms of natural calming properties. Flower beds and occasional saplings that garnish the downtown exteriors as conceived through the 80’s didn’t cut it. Recognition of the positive impacts of nature in built environments seems to parallel the fashionable arrival of atriums. Beautiful as opposed to token and neglected atriums substantially affect utility and experience.

A 2006 Urban Land article discussed recent California police station innovations, emphasizing plazas, green building, windows, an inviting design, and especially a departure from previous generations of police stations designed and located specifically to intimidate. Though background stress is difficult to assess and quantify, the majority of suburbanites knew instinctively when they fled to the suburbs in the ‘60’s, and downtown areas of major cities were hunkering down in the face of race riots and civil unrest, that some sources of background stress would be unmanageable. Race riots and civil unrest are themselves upshots of unmanageable stressors of inequity and substandard living.

Consider the 1939 Sears Art Deco department store in my hometown Houston, Texas. In the mid 60’s, Sears armed itself with an ‘intimidating’ exoskeleton, masking its beautiful urban design with boxiness and windowlessness. What are your thoughts?