Design for Distress

Data show many Americans are uneasy about climate change, as seen in a Yale University and George Mason University survey that found 40% of participants “somewhat worried” and 26% “very worried,” while an American Psychiatric Association poll discovered that 33% are “somewhat anxious” and 34% “extremely anxious.” One response to these apprehensions was the establishment of the Climate Psychiatry Alliance, a grassroots affiliation of professionals focused on the mental health ramifications of global warming. This organization is likely to benefit individuals with interest in and access to counseling, and its purpose makes me wonder if other professions could also help lessen our eco-distress.

To address Americans’ climate unease it is important to know where they live, and in 2019 more than 82% resided in cities and urban areas, settings that are commonly associated with ecological disruption, resource consumption, high pollution, elevated stress, and other ills. However, William Meyer makes a persuasive case against the belief that “urbanization and environmental quality are necessarily at odds”; to the contrary, he asserts that if urbanized locations are well governed and well designed, they can and do have a positive impact on the natural world and the human condition. In terms of good governance, my preference is for the open, collaborative, and distributed model that is proposed in the book A New City O/S.

As for good design, utopian thinkers have long asked how people and nature could coexist in harmonious balance, an ideal that in recent decades has been explored through landscape, green, clean, sustainable, biophilic, agrarian, environmental, and ecological urbanisms. All of these frameworks are conceptually promising, and though it would not be easy, if their features were joined to the planning and development principles of New Urbanism, with its concern for “human-scaled places where people can live healthy and happy lives,” we just might manage to address both climate change and the fear it causes.