Sick cities: why urban living can be bad for your mental health

This article does not discuss if some kinds of urban environments  - and architecture -  are less stressful than others.

Are Paris or Rome any better than Shanghai and Cairo?

Are all cities anti-biophilic?

Is living in countryside or a village the only solution?

- Sick cities: why urban living can be bad for your mental health

Of course you are right! Furthermore, suburbs and rural areas, despite their (sometimes) biophilic properties, can also have high rates of disease, e.g. from obesity, car-dependent lifestyles, stress of driving and traffic, poor access to medical care, poor access to healthy food (ironic but true in many rural areas) etc.

The people who are moving to cities are following an age-old dynamic of increasing opportunity for human development -- the kind of dynamic that took penniless immigrants from Russia and Italy and Ireland into New York, say, and converted many of them into middle-class business owners and professionals. (As they used to say, "city air makes you free.") But those cities had qualities we are lacking today -- not only great biophilic qualities, but also "rungs on the ladder" to allow people to self-organize their own activities. Today, for all the sanitation (and sanitization), those rungs are increasingly gone, and people are trapped in sink estates with nowhere to go. No wonder they sometimes erupt in violence, like the Banlieues et al...

But we seem stuck in a primitive conversation about these things, and only bumper-sticker messages get through... "sick cities..."  etc.

Cheers

 

"They have the same Banlieue in Sweden, this was done for centralization, emptying the countryside. They called the Banlieue for Miljonprogrammet, and imported lots of "doctors and engineers" recently, to drive out the native Swedes from the Miljonprogrammet, replacing them with these new people. And this way Sweden became the "France" of Scandinavia." - PermaLiv

Today my mental health suffers just as much in rural Øverskreien at Toten, as in the town of Gjøvik, as the worst examples of failed rural and urban environments, as I can imagine.

Baggensgatan Street at Gamla Stan in Stockholm on 11th October 2015.

Ironically all rural qualities are gone in my ancient mill meadow, as everybody wanted to live in our cultural heritage.

Personally I think it's better people live in living urban environments, so that they can come and visit living rural environments on the countryside surrounding the town,

Unfortunately people at Toten prioritized making a suburban hell out of all urban and rural environments, where all people now are like living dead, with no history, landscapes or identity left.

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Øverskreien has become an extreme suburban wasteland and a rural fiasco, the only wise thing we can do now is to remove all the people and all the shit they left behind, to let it all return to nature.

Wikimedia.