This week’s guest lecture by Cecil Konijnendijk delved into the importance of social connections for our health, and the roles that urban forests can play in strengthening these connections.
In seminar, we built upon this discussion by talking about how to design spaces to promote social interaction, and thereby improve health. Students broke into small groups to redesign one of UBC’s public open spaces, resulting in a range of proposed improvements.
As a guide to understanding the many forms of scientific literature presented throughout the course, this was accompanied by a brief introduction to evidence development and appraisal.
Although we were only able to watch a small portion of the William Whyte’s Social Life of Small Urban Spaces video during seminar, you can view the entire piece on Vimeo. The work done by Frances Kuo in inner-city Chicago is described in greater detail in her article “The role of arboriculture in a healthy social ecology”, which is an optional reading for this week.
Hi! Just wondering if the readings prior to the readings quiz will also be on the midterm or just the readings after the readings quiz. Thank you!
The midterm will be comprehensive, covering everything you’ve learned from Weeks One through Six, but will focus more heavily on lecture and seminar content than on readings.
Quick question, throughout lectures and readings something that is reoccurring is the idea of
“risk” being in a urban space is beneficial. I was just wondering how is this beneficial? I would think this would make people not want to go, in fear of being hurt.
There is a great deal of evidence that indicates that learning how to properly assess and approach risk is a critical component of childhood development, and a growing body of research is focused on the unique role natural spaces may play in fostering this capability.
On the other hand, safety concerns may prevent people from accessing nearby nature, and this may be particularly true among women and older adults. Cecil Konijnendijk’s guest lecture in Week Six delves into this latter topic in detail.
Figuring out how to balance the needs of different users and designing spaces that are tailored to the health concerns of specific communities is definitely a challenge, and one that we’re asking you to take on as part of Assignment Two!
It is probably because humans are hunter-gatherer (as well as great migrator) in the past, our ancestors must explore unknown environment at some points in order to perpetuate. Thus, this risk-taking behaviour is an evolutionary remnant.
My opinion on encouraging social interaction (e.g. via space for cultural activities) within urban green space (UGS) is we have to be careful that social interaction is not the only desirable function of UGS. For instance, UGS can also be a tranquil place for people to take a rest undisturbed. Also, if the UGS is part of an ecological restoration area, excessive social interaction maybe undesirable. Careful consideration of what the surrounding community needs most is very important. On top of social interaction, we also need to encourage human-plant interaction (e.g. via the interpretive trail, gardening space). Otherwise, the greenspace will lose its meaning as being a representative of nature. However, social interaction and plant-human interaction is not mutually exclusive if careful design is done. All these examples I mentioned is saying that despite social interaction is desirable in general, it is not a must to be a top priority in UGS design in my opinion.
Cecil Konijnendijk’s lecture on how urban fosters can work to foster human connections was both interesting and important in a world that is increasingly isolationist. The negative health impacts of isolation are severe and concerning, however, I wonder what makes them worse than smoking 15 cigarettes/day? This is a shocking fact and I’m interested to learn what exactly makes isolation worse than this.