Do Our Cities Make Us Sick? Jenny Roe's Vision for Healthier, Greener Urban Spaces

Graham Dixon
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city skyscrapers with trees in foreground

UVA’s Environmental Institute faculty affiliate, Jenny Roe, has decades of research proving access to green outdoor spaces is crucial to mental health and wellbeing.

Are our cities making us sick? Environmental psychologist Jenny Roe has spent her career studying human interactions with the built environment.

As the Director of the Center for Design and Health at UVA, a role she assumed in 2015 from Scotland, Roe struck an optimistic tone when asked about her work, her hopes for greener, healthier cities, and what the brainwaves of over a hundred seniors taught her about urban happiness.

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Jenny Roe works in bookshop
Jenny Roe works on her new book (Restorative Architecture: The Science of Design for Mental Health and Wellbeing) in the Virginia Tech Library in Washington DC. (Photo contributed.)

“We look at how human interactions with the world shape our health, well-being, and behaviors,” Roe said, describing the focus of environmental psychology, a relatively new field of applied psychology with a seven-decade pedigree. “These can be micro effects - inside the environment of a single workstation in an office - or macro effects, at an urban population scale. I mostly work in the space in between, at the neighborhood scale. My research tries to help policy makers, architects and creative designers, public health practitioners, grassroots community organizations, anyone really, to apply the science of living well within a built environment.”

It was in Strathclyde, Scotland, not far from Roe’s original Edinburgh home, where the first psychologist entered architecture school. “That was David Canter,” Roe explained, “but he left, disillusioned at how science wasn’t being applied to improve the human-centered environment. That science often needs to be translated for architects, planners, and policy people. I've spent the last twenty years trying to translate the research that I and others do in environmental psychology, so it makes sense both to professional practitioners and lay people.”

Roe’s work to translate research for the public includes a well-received book, Restorative Cities: Urban Design for Mental Health and Wellbeing (2021), written with British psychiatrist Layla McCay. Roe publishes regularly and an edited volume of Infrastructure, Wellbeing and Measuring Happiness was released in 2022.

Roe’s first-hand experiences in London over forty years ago were crucial to her finding this field. At the time, she was a practice-based landscape architect. While working on social housing projects, Roe became aware that quality outdoor environments were missing.

“I thought, if we could just make a case for enhancing the quality of the built environment that was based on health and wellbeing, it could be an equalizer,” Roe remembered. “We could level-up inequities by using the environment positively, and by equally distributing quality open spaces and parks.”

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Jenny Roe part of panel discussion
Roe discusses cities and mental health with Finnish architect, Juhani Pallassmaa, and British neuroscientist, Kate Jeffrey, at Moving Boundaries, Nordic X, Helsinki 2024. (Photo contributed.)

The COVID-19 pandemic showed the need for improvement for some communities. As Roe observed in her latest book, barriers to more people-centered streets were temporarily overcome in cities around the world using short-term, 'pop-up' strategies.

“What I’d been arguing for twenty years suddenly became obvious to everyone: we needed better access to high-quality parks,” Roe said. “Especially for people living in tower blocks, because outdoor spaces and gardens were their only venue for social interactions. But parks aren’t equally distributed, and those without access to green spaces fared much worse during COVID-19.”

A historical lack of focus on green spaces deepened the misery of the pandemic. “The effects of isolation and loneliness became a public health emergency,” Roe observed.

This crisis led Roe to make an ambitious call: “I think access to good-quality public spaces is an absolute right. It should be written into the United Nations Convention.”

The success of these public spaces depends on the engagement of the people in the neighborhoods. Roe believes it comes to what she calls “fascination.” Homogenized places hold neither intrigue nor complexity. If there’s no sense of wonder or awe, it can lead to bad mental health outcomes.

“So, I say, if you can only do one thing in your neighborhood, do something that increases fascination, intrigue, richness, depth, and detail. Murals are a good, simple budget example, but it could be anything, really.”

While biophilia (the innate human love of nature) and similar concepts have received new attention, people have long recognized the psychological benefits of nature. Since the 1980s, science has corroborated the innate sense of nature as a healer. A huge amount of research shows the benefits of green space for human cognition and emotional health, productivity, and even resiliency.

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Roe presents at conference
Roe presents at Cities and Mental Health Conference in Lausanne, 2024. (Photo by Alizée Quinche.)

Now, advocates and many city mayors are using this research to improve their cities and, in many cases, address long-standing issues.

“In Restorative Cities, we were trying to distill the evidence for those links through simple infographics and illustrations,” Roe said, “so anyone can quickly see how powerful the benefits are.”

Rigorously measuring the psychology of the public relies on proven and new methods of research.  In one study in a low-income urban community, Roe monitored the cortisol levels of people who were not working for over three days as they moved around in their urban environment.

With high levels of green open space this "stress hormone" spikes upon waking and then declines gradually all day, a normal healthy response. But when the environment is dominated by the gray of concrete, rather than natural green, that fall-off happens much more slowly, resulting in a low, flat cortisol profile, a finding that connects with poor stress regulation and mental health issues.

After the initial monitoring, Roe needed one more piece of information: real-time data from within the participants’ brains.

Roe convinced over a hundred Scottish retirees to go about their lives while wearing headsets which measured their brainwaves.

“We found their alpha-wave activity increased when they spent time in green spaces, something that indicated greater relaxation. In a dense, noisy, urban environment, though, their higher-level beta-wave frequency kicked in, which implies those spaces demand more attention. Those environments can deplete us cognitively, leaving us fatigued and less resourceful.”

Studies of this nature are complex, and one major source of support has been UVA’s Environmental Institute. “They’ve been incredibly generous to me, funding a number of studies that I’ve run,” Roe shared.

Our built environments, Roe believes based on her research, can make us sick. But her research has fueled optimism for a future where data-driven solutions benefit human health, happiness, and well-being.