trail’s end
A DOSE OF NATURE TO EASE URBAN ILLS
R
esults from the explosion of research into the benefits of nature suggest that green spaces in cities shouldn’t be considered an optional luxury.
Rather, they’re a crucial part of a healthy human habitat. Daily exposure is essential. If you don’t see it or touch it, then nature can’t do you much good. Proximity matters. But every little bit of nature helps. This means we need to build nature into the urban
system, and into our lives, at all scales. Yes, cities need big, immersive destination parks. But they also need medium-sized parks and community gardens within walking distance of every home. They also need pocket parks and green strips and potted plants and living, green walls. As world-renowned city planner Gil Peñalosa once put it: cities need green in sizes S, M, L, and XL. Other- wise the human ecosystem is incomplete. The modern example was set in 2005 by Lee Myung- bak, a daring mayor of Seoul, South Korea, who demol- ished five miles of elevated downtown freeway to restore daylight to the ancient waterway that ran beneath it. Liberated from the concrete shadows, the Cheonggye- cheon River now flows through a thousand-acre ribbon of meadows, reeds, landscaped nooks, and mini-marshes. The summer this area opened, seven million people came to stroll, lie on the grass, or dangle their feet in the stream’s pools. Birds, fish, and insects not seen in years appeared, too. With new bus services, cars that once clogged the free- way disappeared and the city found a new biophilic soul. Soon after, the freeway-demolishing mayor was elected president of his country. New research takes the proximity argument further.
Extreme intimacy—not just looking at nature, but actually touching or working with plants and dirt—is good for us in ways we never imagined. Biologists have discovered that the bacteria found naturally in soil boosts serotonin and reduces anxiety in lab mice, and they suspect that it has the same effect when breathed in or ingested by humans.
64 · LAND&PEOPLE · SPRING/SUMMER 2014
This alchemic discovery is fascinating, but we already knew that the act of gardening heightens the biophilic benefits of nature—in part because gardening demands more focus than simply observing nature. The evidence is out there: people who do “green” volun-
teer work stay healthier and happier over time than people who do other kinds of volunteer work. One study in Alameda, California, found that retirees who do environ- mental work were half as likely as non-volunteers to show depressive symptoms after 20 years, while people who did other forms of volunteering only had their risk lowered by 10 percent. Every time a slice of urban land is transformed into a community garden, the salubrious effects flow through the brains and bodies of the people who work it and those who just pass by. Meanwhile, all of these green insertions double as
environmental system interventions. Plants and water work as urban air conditioners. (During Korea’s sweltering summers, temperatures along Seoul’s reborn river are now about 6.5 degrees Fahrenheit lower than in surrounding neighborhoods.) Vegetation cleans the air of toxic par- ticulates. It makes oxygen. It captures and stores carbon. City efforts to manage storm water by creating bioswales (or semi-wild, curbside water-catchment zones) can also create micro-wildernesses that shrink the city’s ecological footprint while easing the urban mind. So we know that nature in cities makes us happier and
healthier. We know it makes us friendlier and kinder. We know it helps build essential bonds with other people and the places in which we live. If we infuse cities with natural diversity, complexity, and, most of all, opportunities to feel, touch, and work with nature, we can win the biophilic challenge. Quite simply, biological density must be the prerequisite for architectural density.
excerpted from happy city: transforming our lives through urban design by charles montgomery. published in november by farrar, straus and giroux, llc. copyright © 2013 by charles montgomery. all rights reserved.
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