Balance in the Lomma Harbour Housing Project : health aspects in theory, planning and design - the Lomma harbour housing project case

Abstract

Our knowledge regarding the importance of the outdoor environment to our health is constantly increasing. Playground qualities have been shown to have an influence on the development of physical and mental abilities in children. We know that garden therapy facilitates the recovery and rehabilitation of people suffering from burnout syndrome. The outdoor environment has become an increasingly decisive factor in the choices people make regarding where to live and work. The landscape is becoming a competitive factor in the attempts made by companies and local authorities to attract well-educated, mobile manpower and housing. City planning that fails to appropriately integrate green spaces into our work, housing and everyday environments will likely result in lower productivity, poorer public health and associated increases in social expenditures. Research on environmental perception has increased our knowledge of how environmental qualities, e.g. green areas, affect people’s well-being. The distance from green areas to your home can largely explain your well-being. Also short relaxing views, called ”micro-pauses”, have been shown to have positive effects. Frequent opportunities for recreational experiences of ”non-demanding” natural elements, e.g., water, stones, earth, plants and animals, seem to facilitate the emergence of creative, innovative environments. The brain’s capacity to deal with large amounts of information in higher consciousness is highly limited. Processing of impressions such as office work, driving a car in traffic, etc., requires a great deal of mental energy. Impressions from nature, however, such as rustling in a bush, a butterfly flying over a meadow, etc., require very little mental energy. That kind of attention is located in the limbic system and brainstem. Information taken in via our vision, hearing, sense of touch and smell is largely processed subconsciously, likely partly in accordance with innate genetic memory functions from millions of years of human evolution. Stays in green environments seem to facilitate processing of information in higher consciousness. Thus, such stays may help to prevent burnout caused by prolonged and high workloads and stress. Researchers have come to conclude that eight general characteristics of the outdoor green environment correspond to people’s basic needs and demands: “Serene”, “Wild”, “Lush”, “Space”, “Culture”, “The Common”, “The Pleasure Garden”, and “Festive/centre”. In a recent study of southern-most Sweden that was carried out on a regional scale, the first five of the characteristics have been elaborated using GIS landscape data and have been compared with data from a large social health questionnaire (n=25,000 persons) covering the same area. The study showed that the quality of green areas expressed as the number of valuable characteristics in your neighborhood (within 300 m) is highly correlated with your well-being, your frequency of moderate physical activity and whether or not you are overweight, that is, your BMI (ibid.). The results were controlled for social economic differences. Epidemiologic studies seldom show associations as strong as those revealed in this case. This is valuable evidence for our profession as landscape architects. The eight characteristics can be seen as resources for housing, recreation, tourism and establishment of business parks, where the outdoor environment is an important attraction both for companies’ employees and for their customers. They can be seen as indicators for use in impact assessment in planning projects. The eight characteristics can be handled as quality criteria. If they are lost in development projects, authorities can require that developers use compensation measures to mitigate negative impacts, renovate impaired resources, or replace qualities and recreational functions that are severely damaged. In a recently finished Interreg-project “Landscape as a Resource for health and development” (http://www.sundskap.se/index_sv.htm), impact analyses of health and recreation have been used in a development plans in the Öresund Region in a partnership between Sweden and Denmark. Mitigation and compensation measures are being created to achieve environmental quality goals.

Keywords

well-being; health; balancing; compensation; green area factor; landscape characteristics

Published in

Publisher: London Science Publishing Ltd

Conference

IFLA World Congress 2010

SLU Authors

• Skärbäck, Erik

  • Department of Landscape Architecture, Planning and Management, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
    

UKÄ Subject classification

Social Sciences
Landscape Architecture
Economics and Business

Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/31692