“A Psychological Cage: Urban Gorge’s impact on mental health”

“A Psychological Cage: Urban Gorge’s impact on mental health”

PEOPLE WALKING THROUGH NATURAL GORGE

"LOOKING UP" STANDING IN AN URBAN GORGE

PEOPLE WALKING THROUGH AN URBAN GORGE

Hippocrates, In 400 B.C, noticed the relation of Airs, Waters and Places on health, he was like a magician with medicine in his time. He describes swamps and marshy places as unhealthy and sunny breezy hill sides as healthy places.(1) Thus the concept of influence of place on health cannot be said to be new. And this concept is very much relevant in today’s urban context where Hippocrate’s ‘place’ can be the ‘built environment’ enveloping an urban individual with its presence and sprawl everywhere, on land or in sky. These built forms are actually the elements which form the cities today and they are the indispensable part of one’s surrounding environment or ‘sense of place’. And due to the untamed growth in urban areas there are some portions of this huge mass which is very compact in design. Areas which are not planned by the governing authorities(2) and still exist in form of unauthorised or squatter settlements and here comes the occurrence of ‘Urban Gorges’ or may be just very compact and dull looking spaces within the living city which can be a visual cousins to the ‘Canyons’ which are created by the rivers cutting the soft crust of Earth. And these conditioned built forms are said to affect the individual’s health and is believed to be linked with poor mental health.(3)

“We shape our buildings and thereafter they shape us”(4)

Studies suggests that an average individual living in a developed world spends up to 85% of their life inside an artificially built environment inclusive of buildings, streets, compact housing, transportation or travelling from one built environment to another.(5) Gorge like structures within build environment of city and they impact the mind set of individuals.(6)The comfort level of these narrower streets (urban gorges) have been studied in questionnaire surveys When asked to rank the degree of mental discomfort from 1 to 5, The data shows 40% perceived the street as having no claustrophobic feeling, 44% suggested a low claustrophobic

feeling, and the remaining 12% agreeing the street was moderately claustrophobic. Hence it can be concluded that there is a direct effect of these narrow built forms on human mind. Studies have highlighted how such these enclosed structures can impact on both mental and physical health through reduction in visual attractiveness, increased anxiety among residents and increased social disorder. Further, contemporary theory suggests that streets with ratios narrower than 1:1 tend to have a negative claustrophobic feeling.(7)These included landscaping, planting trees, better waste management and greater street lighting. Participant observation and data gathered from interviews suggest that these measures impacted most positively on people with mental illness when they addressed issues.(8)

From above study there is a clear outcome that urban gorges have a negative impact on an individual’s mind and behaves like an enclosed psychological cage for the people. The urban regeneration programme was not designed to be a mental health population intervention but still, there is a large literature on the effect of place per se on health, attention has been paid to whether aspects of urban regeneration programmes can influence public health, particularly mental health.(9) An urban regeneration programme in an English town may have contributed to a decrease in rates of anxiety and depression. Urban regeneration being a method to rebuild, revive already built up places by physical intervention. And this physical intervention can help to create new

areas and treat these urban gorges and reduce their claustrophobic effects on individuals and make the urban settlements a comfortable place for the human mind.

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1 Hippocrates (original text written 400 B.C.E).

On Airs, Waters, and Places. In:

http://classics.mit.edu/Hippocrates/airwatpl.1.1.html

2 Housing Supply System in Unauthorized Settlements in Delhi:

Process and Outcomes

Sohail Ahmad, United Nations University - Institute of Advanced Studies, Japan

3 The impact of the physical and urban environment

on mental well-being H.F. Guitea, C.Clarkb, G.Ackrillc.

4 Churchill W. Winston Churchill quote. In: www.winstonchurchill.org

5 Samet JM, Spengler JD. Indoor Environment and Health: Moving Into the 21st Century. Am J of

Public Health 2003

6 Dalgard O, Tambs K. Urban environment and mental health. A longitudinal study. Br J Psychiatry

1997;

7 Alexander, C. (1977). A Pattern Language

8 Jackson RJ, Kochtitzky C. Creating a Healthy Environment: The Impact of the Built Environment on

Public Health. Washington DC; 2001.

9 Can urban regeneration programmes assist coping

and recovery for people with mental illness?

Suggestions from a qualitative case study

ROB WHITLEY and MARTIN PRINCE

Transformation of city square

Potsdamer platz    --             - --From city gate to city heart

Berlin's First ever Traffic lights

chocolate bombers

Breached BERLIN WALL at Potsdamer platz

Potsdamer Platz was not a city heart to start with. In 1735 a town gate was inaugurated. Berlin was a royal town then home to the Prussian  King, King Freidrich Wilhelm. The gate was constructed on the new town wall which separated the rural area from  the new western town quarters. Here the road from the town Potsdam  to Berlin ended and both people and chariots had to queue up on their way into the city. Consequently, small shops, cafés and restaurants were built in front of the gate to care for the waiting travelers' needs. In the 19th century, when Berlin became the fastest growing metropolis in Europe, the final station of the first Prussian railroad and many apartment houses were constructed around Potsdamer Platz, which eventually made the Potsdam Gate the most overcrowded of Berlin's town gates. But it was not until 1866, when the old town wall was torn down, that the history of Potsdamer Platz as a suburban place came to an end. The importance of potsdamer platz grew distinctly from a city gate to an area with a metropolis character.

The place flourished and then in 1939 the Great War came. Hitler’s Nazi Germany was at war with the world for the second time in the history of Germany and the world itself. The Second World War lasted from 1939 to 1945 till the Japanese surrender, but Berlin’s fate was written. As was the case in most of central Berlin, almost all of the buildings around Potsdamer Platz were turned to rubble by air raids and heavy artillery bombardment during the last years of World War II.  And from here started a tale very dramatic which transformed the place’s importance once again.

Post World War when the Germany was a trophy won by the Allied forces (Great Britain, U.S.A, France       U.S.S.R) all the partners in victory distributed the cake among them and Germany was divided in four parts and the similar was done to the cake’s topping which was Berlin too was divided and each part under direct control of one of the forces from the Allied. The allied forces fought the Nazis and were vigilant against the evil force which rose in Europe. The common enemy brought them together but actually there were some basic differences among them. The Great Britain, United States of America and France were superpower democracies and yet their bother in arm U.S.S.R under the strict rule of Joseph Stalin was quite like being dictated and was in a very different political and social structure from the rest of the allied forces. This caused the great Berlin blockade where the U.S.S.R closed all rail routes to West Berlin which was to be shared among rest of the allied  this caused a complete cut off of West Berlin from the West Germany.

This was seen as a method of evacuating West Berlin from the rest of allied forces by the U.S.S.R and to gain complete control over rest of Berlin. But due to Cold War situations the allied forces could not bear the shame of losing West Berlin over to the Soviets and hence they planned for an air lift which came to be known as The Berlin Air Lift where bomber planes from U.S.A, Great Britain and France dropped food and other utility over to the West Berlin and hence proclaiming the territory once again which was thought to be slipping away from their hand.

On 13 August 1961 Berlin wall came up. This was a step from the soviet influenced GDR govt. of East Germany which enclosed West Berlin inside wall made up of concrete and this was the irony although it was West Berlin which was walled around but the people in east Berlin felt like jailed. They were jailed inside free East Berlin where they could not get such freedom as they could receive from West Berlin which had a free connection from rest of West Germany a more soft heart state one can say in comparison to East Germany.

Potsdamer Platz regained its importance from the fact that after a period of around two decades on 9 November 1989 the Berlin of the Germany saw the first breach of the Berlin Wall from this very place. And from the very fact that the Death Strip (which was the distance between two berlin wall portions was left free of any construction so as to ease shooting of people trying to escape East Germany) was approximately half a mile wide and all of a sudden by the fall of Berlin wall the new city of Berlin was left with a huge grain less part of land in the heart of the city. This was a land centred geographically in Berlin and was all vacant and all ready for development.

For this new development the Berlin Senate (city government) had a very easy task all they have to do was to throw away a design competition for designers who could present schemes for developing a site from complete zero which is supposed to be the ideal and easiest situation for any development. And hence it was done,  Munich-based architectural firm of Hilmer & Sattler won the competition. The Berlin Senate then chose to divide the area into four parts, each to be sold to a commercial investor, who then planned new construction according to Hilmer & Sattler's masterplan. During the building phase Potsdamer Platz was the largest building site in Europe. While the resulting development is impressive in its scale and confidence, the quality of its architecture has been praised and criticised in almost equal measure

And hence Potsdamer Platz was transformed into a city heart from a city gate…