1.2 Buildings, housing and design features

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You might have thought that the ‘open deck’ set up has some advantages as it has a direct view of the outdoors and more natural light in the corridor. There are benefits of being able to see nature from your home, which you will learn about in a later section. The left-hand corridor arrangement, however, has surprising well-being benefits. Weich and colleagues (2002) found that people living on closed corridors knew their neighbours better and had better mental health overall, than people living in flats with an open deck. Generally, housing that makes it easier to interact with neighbours is associated with lower levels of loneliness.

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You may have thought here about how living on a higher floor could give a better view and sense of space. Or you may have thought about the ease of getting in and out of the flat, especially if lifts are not reliable. For parents with young children, it has been consistently found that this latter issue is more important. Freeman (2008) found that women with young children who lived on higher floors in multi-occupancy buildings had worse mental health than those on the lower floors. They explain this pattern in terms of isolation and access to facilities. Being higher up a building makes it harder to get out to the playground or socialise. Some urban planners have tried to address these issues. In Vienna, for example, many apartment blocks have been built with small play areas that are observable from inside the flats.

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You probably thought here that the quieter noise would be better for well-being, and the research supports that view. A study carried out in Australia found that intrusive noise at home increased people’s experiences of both anxiety and depression, having the biggest effect of any housing feature. Natural light, on the other hand, was found to affect people’s levels of depression and loneliness (Bower et al., 2021). There is also some evidence that quality of housing also plays a role in people’s well-being, such as living in a home that is well repaired, or has mould (Beemer et al., 2021).

There is not, however, a completely straightforward relationship between the quality, size or tenure (whether people rent or own their home) of a person’s home and their well-being. This is because people’s relationship to their homes is complicated and depends on lots of other factors in the person’s life. People spend different amounts of time at home and use home space in a wide variety of ways. Bower et al. (2021) for instance found that in the COVID-19 pandemic people talked about how they had suddenly noticed lots of issues with their homes that they usually did not notice. Living in a noisy flat, for instance, is a different experience if a person spends most of their time out of the house at work, socialising, at the gym, or elsewhere.

Control is also thought to be an important factor in how much people are impacted by the features of their homes (Evans et al., 2003). This could perhaps explain why noise can have such as an effect on mental health and well-being. The definition of ‘noise’ is an unwanted or unpleasant sound; it is inherently an experience of being out of control of the auditory environment.

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There is quite a lot of evidence that access to – or even views of – nature can play an important role in people’s well-being. Globally, it’s been found that people living in places with more green space (e.g. parks) have better mental health. People who spend more time in their local green spaces have also been found to report better mental health and ‘vitality’ (feeling well and vigorous) than people who used the green spaces less (van den Berg et al., 2016). As with the neighbourhood findings above, however, there are a few possible explanations for these relationships. Firstly, richer areas of cities tend to also be greener, so these studies could be picking up the social gradient in mental health. Secondly, it could be that people who are healthier and happier are more likely to have the energy to be active and use their green spaces, so it’s not clear that green space causes an increase in well-being from these studies.

Other studies have tried to pinpoint these relationships more precisely. In a classic study, Ulrich and colleagues (1984) compared the recovery rates of hospital patients in the US who had a view of nature from their window with those who did not. They found that patients with a nature view had shorter hospital stays and required fewer painkillers than those who had a view of a brick wall. This is better evidence, because in other ways the patients were very similar, so the study isolated the impact of the view of nature. You will learn a bit more about the research on nature and well-being in Section 2.