Having lived in cities for most of life, I have developed an innate aversion for cities. I gave up the $$ and the addiction of intellectual city life in exchange for the foliage. Triumph of The City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier is enlightening but the subtitle is very misleading. That triumph comes with an immense cost and hope we comprehend this before creating those charter cities.
Older post here after reading Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopgramatist Manifesto by Stewart Brand -
"Yes, Brand's argument did convince that charter cities are in-fact green. But there are two crucial factors missing - First, people currently living in slums are not planning to do so for ever but they do so on the hope someday they will be able to get out of it. That's the hope that keeps them going. Charter cities might take that dream away. Question is what happens then?
Secondly, what are the neural implications of living in a slum? What happens to our brains sans Biophilia? Thanks to neural plasticity, wouldn't that change who we are? I don't have the answer to those two questions but I think those needs to be answered before falling in love with slums."
Now this excellent paper on cognitive effects on dwelling in a city answered my question; abstract - here:
"More than half of the world’s population now lives in cities, making the creation of a healthy urban environment a major policy priority. Cities have both health risks and benefits1, but mental health is negatively affected: mood and anxiety disorders are more prevalent in city dwellers and the incidence of schizophrenia is strongly increased in people born and raised in cities. Although these findings have been widely attributed to the urban social environment, the neural processes that could mediate such associations are unknown. Here we show, using functional magnetic resonance imaging in three independent experiments, that urban upbringing and city living have dissociable impacts on social evaluative stress processing in humans. Current city living was associated with increased amygdala activity, whereas urban upbringing affected the perigenual anterior cingulate cortex, a key region for regulation of amygdala activity, negative affect and stress. These findings were regionally and behaviourally specific, as no other brain structures were affected and no urbanicity effect was seen during control experiments invoking cognitive processing without stress. Our results identify distinct neural mechanisms for an established environmental risk factor, link the urban environment for the first time to social stress processing, suggest that brain regions differ in vulnerability to this risk factor across the lifespan, and indicate that experimental interrogation of epidemiological associations is a promising strategy in social neuroscience."
Older post here after reading Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopgramatist Manifesto by Stewart Brand -
"Yes, Brand's argument did convince that charter cities are in-fact green. But there are two crucial factors missing - First, people currently living in slums are not planning to do so for ever but they do so on the hope someday they will be able to get out of it. That's the hope that keeps them going. Charter cities might take that dream away. Question is what happens then?
Secondly, what are the neural implications of living in a slum? What happens to our brains sans Biophilia? Thanks to neural plasticity, wouldn't that change who we are? I don't have the answer to those two questions but I think those needs to be answered before falling in love with slums."
Now this excellent paper on cognitive effects on dwelling in a city answered my question; abstract - here:
"More than half of the world’s population now lives in cities, making the creation of a healthy urban environment a major policy priority. Cities have both health risks and benefits1, but mental health is negatively affected: mood and anxiety disorders are more prevalent in city dwellers and the incidence of schizophrenia is strongly increased in people born and raised in cities. Although these findings have been widely attributed to the urban social environment, the neural processes that could mediate such associations are unknown. Here we show, using functional magnetic resonance imaging in three independent experiments, that urban upbringing and city living have dissociable impacts on social evaluative stress processing in humans. Current city living was associated with increased amygdala activity, whereas urban upbringing affected the perigenual anterior cingulate cortex, a key region for regulation of amygdala activity, negative affect and stress. These findings were regionally and behaviourally specific, as no other brain structures were affected and no urbanicity effect was seen during control experiments invoking cognitive processing without stress. Our results identify distinct neural mechanisms for an established environmental risk factor, link the urban environment for the first time to social stress processing, suggest that brain regions differ in vulnerability to this risk factor across the lifespan, and indicate that experimental interrogation of epidemiological associations is a promising strategy in social neuroscience."
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