Towards anxiety alleviating streetscape design: a comprehensive literature review

ABSTRACT

Anxiety, a prevalent mental health issue amongst the urban population, has risen in the past decade. Currently, cities are more than often referred to as ‘anxious’, implying the observed anxiety levels of residents. Residents engage with almost every scale of space in the city as part of their daily activities. However, it is established that one of the most vital everyday urban spaces is the ‘street’. It may further be conjectured that ‘streets’ and ‘streetscape design’ are associated with the anxiety levels of urban residents. This study attempts to explore the plausible association between streetscape design and the anxiety levels of residents through a comprehensive literature review. The search strategy involved databases, namely Science Direct, PubMed, MDPI, and JSTOR, and only high-quality journal’s peer-reviewed articles were included. The data was extracted from 25 shortlisted articles for the review. It concludes with the theoretical framework of the impact of streetscape elements on state anxiety, highlighting the direct and indirect impact through plausible mediators such as safety and personal space. Conclusion also includes an inventory of these elements categorized into positive and negative impactors on residents’ anxiety levels, further intending to guide the design of streetscapes for alleviating anxiety in the future.

KEYWORDS:

• Streetscapes
• urban environment
• mental health
• anxiety
• safety

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Restorative environment: In the field of environmental psychology, the term ‘restoration’ refers to a broad concept that describes the experience of a physiological and/or psychological healing process that is brought on by specific environments and environmental configurations, or restorative environments (Joye and van den Berg 2018).

2. Bounded openness: It refers to the enclosure on the street, it gives the impression of a room rather than an open space, a cityscape with a high degree of enclosure is believed to be more appealing to users. It can be explained as desirability of ‘open but bounded space’(Nasar 1998 cited in Adkins et al. 2012).

Additional information

Funding

The study is part of an ongoing doctoral work at the Department of Architecture and Planning, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Uttarakhand, India. The doctoral scholar receives the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) fellowship through the institute.

Notes on contributors

Sayna Anand

Sayna Anand is a researcher, an urban designer and an architect. She is a member of the “Happiness by Design” research Group at IIT, Roorkee (Department of Architecture and Planning). She is also a member of IUDI (Institute of Urban Designers India) and Council of Architecture. She wants to bring a positive transformation in cities through her research based on alleviating anxiety through streetscape design.

Tina Pujara

Tina Pujara is a professor of Architecture and Urban Design with a specialization in ‘neighbourhood design and happiness’ at the Indian Institute of Technology (I.I.T) Roorkee in India. Her work focuses specifically on the association of happiness with the built environment. Tina has been a recipient of the Swiss Government Excellence Scholarship and was an academic guest researching on urban design at ETH Zurich in Switzerland prior to joining IIT Roorkee.