The Suburbs and Mental Health: My Column

I believe we are overthinking it, the way we are attributing a person's mental state to the architecture around them. I find it hard to believe that the suburban lifestyle has any more of a detrimental (or positive) effect on people than a rural lifestyle or an urban lifestyle. There are going to be good things, there are going to be not-so-good things. People have their inner struggles regardless of the architecture around them. Ginny put it well in her post - "architecture is just the backdrop." Sure, after all these years of studying architecture, we are inclined to think that architecture is in the forefront of people's minds - but it just might be a backdrop for certain people. Yes - it dictates many things in people's lives, the built environment shaping how they move through their day. But does this deeply impact someone's mental health? Perhaps in certain cases architecture does effect someone's overarching mental state, but not at the scale and frequency we are acting like it does. People everywhere grow tired of monotonous daily routines. People everywhere have inner struggles. Maybe a person living in the suburb pictured below is worrying about different everyday things than the person living in Stuyvesant Town (also pictured below), but I don't think mental health and something like a "mid-life crisis" discriminates based on the built environment around you.

Typical suburbia

Stuyvesant Town (NYC)