2.2 Relationships, connections and community
An important mechanism proposed for the relationship between places and well-being is that places that better facilitate strong relationships, connection and community lead to better well-being. Some of the research you learned about in the previous section implicitly highlighted this, for instance that designs which enable people to talk to their neighbours more easily seem to be better for mental health.
One way that researchers have tried to understand the relationship between relationships and well-being is by looking at what kinds of environments lead people to be lonelier. Loneliness is feeling that a person’s relationships are not sufficient to meet their needs. There is not an objective measure of loneliness, a certain number of relationships or type of connections that mean that a person is or is not lonely. The quality of relationships is more important than quantity. Some people can feel lonely despite having many friends while others can be content in relative solitude.
The relationship between places and loneliness is similarly subjective and variable. When reviewing all the published studies that looked at relationships between the built environment and loneliness published in the twenty-first century, Bower and colleagues (2023) found that there was no one kind of place that could prevent loneliness in everyone. There were, however, lots of ways in which built environments influenced loneliness and the quality of people’s relationships. One example was that people living in smaller apartments were found to be lonelier, a relationship explained by the fact that smaller homes made it harder to host friends and family. On a larger scale, having access to better amenities and transport was found to be positive for loneliness, due to the fact that people were able to access activities and facilities out of the home more easily.
One conclusion it would be possible to draw from this research is that it’s crucial to build places that enable people to interact as much as possible with those around them. It’s not quite this simple, however, as there are also some negative impacts of contact with others. Early work in this area was carried out by Altman (1975), who suggested that people feel crowded when their sense of personal space and territory is violated, and that this is made worse if they feel watched by others. He suggested that people respond to feeling crowded by withdrawing, and if this is not possible, they can become distressed. These needs change and shift, meaning that the design of housing also needs to be flexible and allow for people to both find privacy and be sociable.
You may have noticed that the research above is not solely about the architectural features of the buildings. Also involved is how people live in the buildings, and the level of control they have over the space. These physical, social and psychological components of the experience of living in a particular place all inter-relate and interact with each other in complicated ways.
It is clear from these examples that the relationship between the environment and people’s experience is hard to pin down. One concept that is often used to understand the relationship between the physical environment and psychological experience is ‘affordance’. This is a concept from the psychologist Eleanor Gibson, writing in the 1960s and 1970s. ‘Afford’ means ‘make possible’ and it can be helpful to think about the relationship between the built or physical environment and people’s lives. Complete Activity 5 to learn more about this idea.
Activity 5: Affordances of water
Think of a body of water such as the one above. Now list all the possible ways that a person could interact with this water. What kinds of activities could they do? How might they feel or react to the water?
Discussion
You may have listed the following activities: swim, wash, drink, or potentially even drown. All of these are valid answers and notice how different they are. These are all activities that the presence of a body of water makes possible (or affords) for a person who encounters the water.
Let us take the example of a person washing in the water. Notice that there is nothing inherent in the water or the person that makes the outcome of washing inevitable. The way the person uses the water is what matters. At the same time, the ability of the person to wash is dependent on the water existing and being in this place. The final outcome – person washing – is dependent on both the person and the environment, it happens because of the way that these two come together in a particular place and for a particular purpose. This sense of contingency is what the concept of affordance captures.
This is why it is a useful idea for understanding the relationship between people and their environments. There is nothing inevitable about how a person will feel or think when they are in a particular place. Building environments in particular ways, however, can make some experiences more likely, easier to have – more possible – than other kinds of built environments. Having a shared landing space in a building, for example, makes it easier and more likely that someone will bump into their neighbours and over time build up a relationship with them. This in turn can mean that they feel less lonely and more connected. The landing space affords more interaction than a long corridor where people do not stop in the same place. It does not guarantee this outcome, however, and the evidence seems to suggest that no architectural feature can guarantee a psychological outcome.
As well as the kinds of relationships that places can afford for the residents, there is also evidence that the meaning attributed to places and the people who live in them plays a role in well-being. You will learn about this in the next section.