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Greenspace in Housing Areas Main menu
Greenspace in Housing Areas Main menu
Greenspace in Housing Areas Main menu
Greenspace in Housing Areas Main menu
Greenspace in Housing Areas Main menu
Greenspace in Housing Areas Main menu
Greenspace in Housing Areas Main menu
Greenspace in Housing Areas Main menu
Greenspace in Housing Areas Main menu
Greenspace in Housing Areas Main menu
Greenspace in Housing Areas Main menu
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Social Aspects of Housing in relation to Greenspace Planning copyright 2001, Anne R. Beer Quality of Life in Overvecht's Housing Areas - the role of Greenspace
Why is it important to consider the provision of greenspace in housing areas? This Discussion Paper introduces a few of the findings from research by those environmental psychologists, social scientists and others who have addressed the problems associated with identifying environmental needs in the vicinity of the home. In particular it relates to housing where the main built form is blocks of apartments at medium to high density. The intention is to summarise available information so that it helps the decision-making process for Overvecht's Greenplan. The information is for the inhabitants and their children to use as they work with the professional teams involved in the process of regenerating their external spaces, particularly the greenspaces. It is hoped that the ideas presented here help those involved at each stage of the process to work out why a particular layout, design or management solution might be preferable in one location rather than in another. It is important that all those in the Overvecht District of Utrecht City involved in improving local open space and particularly greenspace know enough about people's likely requirements of the spaces around and near their dwellings - so that they are in the position to justify asking for adequate expenditure on the external environment. The aim here is to help to answer such questions as:
A well designed external environment in the vicinity of the home, one which supports the many different activities which individuals, families and groups want to do to make their daily life comfortable and tolerable, is intrinsic to the success of any "place" in the city which can be considered as a "home" environment. Improving greenspaces does not in itself solve social problems, but it can make the lives of inhabitants less stressful, with all the benefits which that can bring in terms of increased levels of social inclusion. Quality of
Life and Greenspace
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sub-menu The need for a change of approach People have feelings about the place they call home Since the 1960s research has shown consistently that the feelings which occupants have about their home are strongly influenced by their reactions to the outdoor spaces which they pass through as they approach or leave their home, take time to relax or play, or pursue a hobby elsewhere. This factor is ignored far too regularly by urban designers and architects. In making site layout and design decisions in relation to renewing Overvecht's local open space and greenspace, we cannot just think about what the "places" around and between the housing blocks look like - that is the easy option so often adopted with devastating results in the past. A "place" is about more than appearance or even the objects and facilities in it; it is something that people understand in a wide variety of ways and to which they give various meanings - all these have an impact on people's feelings and reactions to as well as use of those spaces immediately outside their home. For instance, in the Spring the impression of Overvecht is of high rise housing set in a magnificent well treed parkland landscape; however, as the very recent District survey of the inhabitants' attitudes to greenspaces has shown, this type of landscape setting does not work for its users and indeed alienates them. The problems that the local people experience in relation to this "architect's dream landscape" are only revealed through in-depth interaction with the users. Observation of often very empty landscapes that make up Overvecht's greenspaces only emphasises the sense of alienation which the local people feel for their immediate landscapes. As a good example, over a warm weekend in early May 2001, when the Willemina Park in Utrecht was bursting with people, the Park de Gagel, which is of a larger size and has over 25000 people living within a kilometre, was virtually empty. What matters when designing the spaces immediately around and near the home is what they are like as places to be in In working out a future for Overvecht's greenspaces, it is suggested that instead of concentrating just on landscapes that "look good", we need to put the emphasis on thinking what the new "places" we make will be like for the inhabitants. It will be important to attempt to understand how the spaces will work to support how local people live, play and even work within Overvecht. What will the new "places" be like to visit? How will they work as "places" to move through as the inhabitants go to the shops, schools, offices, bus stops, train station, parks, etc.? Anyone who finds it hard to believe that the external spaces of housing areas have a strong impact on how inhabitants feel about where they live has only to consider what it would be like for themselves:
Individually these may be comparatively minor matters - but put together they create an alienating home environment. In such circumstances local inhabitants can feel no sense of pride and, without being able to feel pride in the home and its setting it is unlikely that any inhabitants will develop that sense of belonging to a "place" which the social scientists have recognised is crucial to a successful housing area. Without a sense of belonging, community feelings rarely develop. Financing greenspace It cost money to make and change greenspaces and other open spaces, but it costs society even more if whole communities become destabilised and an area of a city becomes known for its level of social exclusion. While improving the outdoor environment will never solve social exclusion issues by itself, allowing the external areas of housing schemes to remain hostile places can accelerate the rate of deterioration. In Overvecht the social conditions have not disintegrated. On some measures, however, there are signs of decline (increased crime, youth problems, a relatively fast turnover of tenancies, accumulation of litter, etc.). This is compensated for by the fact that many inhabitants really like living in Overvecht and want to stay there; in particular they mention their liking for the presence of so many green areas and trees. The recent survey of over 600 inhabitants' opinions about greenspaces, which is reported in the Key Issues section of this report, produces evidence for this - in general local inhabitants just want to be able to use their greenspaces and feel a real pleasure in where they live - in the greenest part of of the city of Utrecht. For this reason, the information contained here is intended to help to justify claims for proper financial provision to cover design and maintenance, as well as to present ideas which will help to make the area a more interesting and secure place for those who live there. To justify expenditure on the external areas of a city on the grounds of what an area will look like, has never been a successful strategy in mass housing developments. All the evidence from housing area design is that as soon as money becomes tight it is too easily diverted from what financial decision makers see as such "non essential" areas as the external spaces. This factor perhaps explains the woefully inadequate quality of so much open and greenspace within social housing estates throughout Europe. In Overvecht, however, the original designers did at least manage to get the grass and tree elements planted and some play spaces made and they produced an estate which in general "looks" all right to outsiders. But to the inhabitants it is a boring landscape and they find it an alienating experience to use their outside spaces. The problem here is not about changing the overall landscape, but about the need to introduce additional elements and spatial structures, thereby making richer, more fascinating local spaces, which will enable the inhabitants to appreciate and enjoy their "home" landscape. Quality of
Life and Greenspace
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sub-menu There are immense social and financial costs to society as well as to individuals, if we fail to create places which support daily life needs and patterns in and around the home We can call the places which people construct to support their way of life a "habitat". Describing suitable human habitats is not easy, as humans survive in an immense variety of conditions, even if they do not always thrive in them. Unlike other animals, people can construct elaborate habitats to support their needs, even in the most hostile physical conditions. So much so that it is often easy for designers to get carried away with high-tech solutions to housing and its immediate surroundings - forgetting that what makes most people feel comfortable in such settings is far more important than what impresses the passer-by and the "professional design" visitor. Perhaps it has been that very adaptability which has allowed those involved in the planning process (the politicians, the planners, the developers, the financiers and others) to be involved in the construction of so very many unworkable human habitats in cities, habitats which so obviously have not supported the users' daily needs from the start and instead have come to alienate their users. The social as well as financial cost to society of failed housing schemes has been immense and yet for some inexplicable reason we have persisted in repeating the same patterns of housing - the same mistakes from country to country and decade to decade; and in this time when the Compact City is all the rage, yet more unusable new environments are being constructed in the name of high density development. For this reason, it will be important when Overvecht's housing is renewed over the coming decades, that the role of the external areas and greenspaces are properly understood. A successful housing area is one where people feel control over their own home environment and its immediate surroundings, whether it is in private or public ownership Two authors who were writing almost 20 years ago about what had gone wrong with the way we plan high density social housing sites are: Newman (1976) and Coleman (1985). They both studied in-depth the alienation that results if individuals feel they have no control over their environment. In addition, Clare Cooper Marcus in Housing as if people mattered (1986) and People Places (1990) has gathered together a whole range of information from the USA and Europe detailing what went wrong in and around high density social housing areas. Her books suggest approaches and solutions which might lead to more user friendly site designs if applied in Overvecht. These studies and those that developed from them had a profound effect on regeneration of high density housing in the UK where in most instances, the social problems associated with the mass housing estates of the 1960s and 1970s are far worse than those now found in Overvecht. In Overvecht we need to think about how we might produce a more acceptable housing "habitat" through applying the ideas presented both by these researchers and here in this report - so that the types of environmental settings support people's daily needs, rather than create difficulties and barriers for human activity. Quality of
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sub-menu Identifying some of the environmental features which can aid the development of a more successful human habitat in the immediate environs of the home - settled, safe and secure living areas It is suggested that the key to why we need to be concerned about each part of the city as a supporting habitat for human life is that it is to everybody's advantage if populations do not feel alienated from their immediate environments. In Overvecht surveys show that this alienation is all too obvious (see Key Issues section) and needs to be reversed. We need to try to identify what can help Overvecht's housing areas to become a more 'settled' area of the city. Settled areas of cities are normally identified as having less turnover of population - a feature often observed in those areas of a city which have a reputation for being safer and more secure. Such areas normally also show less evidence of vandalism and the people who live there often exhibit more pride in their immediate environment. In addition, the cost to the District and City of looking after such settled areas is likely to be lower in the long term, because of the lower maintenance requirements.
- understanding the way that the mind reacts to places can help in the decision- making about how to design environmental settings near the home A common characteristic identified by psychologists is that humans need a continual supply of information about their environment to survive and thrive. However, as the environmental psychologists S. and R. Kaplan (1982) pointed out in their book, Humanscape - environments for people, information alone is not enough for people to be satisfied with the place where they live. People also have to care about the place they call home, if they are going to make the effort to gather the information that is presented to them through the environment. It has been shown that in fact people are strongly motivated, not only to use information, but actively to seek it and to seek reasons to use it - in other words they get pleasure from something that is interesting to them. This drive to know more is balanced by a need to control the quantity of information absorbed. As Kaplan (1982) said, 'people crave new information and are at the same time repelled from information too far from what they can comprehend and deal with". In Overvecht the social surveys undertaken in recent years back this up - again and again local inhabitants say how boring, uninteresting, featureless and lacking in things to do and places to go to the areas around and near their homes are. These responses are a major feature of the inhabitants' replies to questions about what the external areas of Overvecht should be like in the future (see Key Issues section) and the very structurelessness of the open spaces makes it difficult to understand the place easily.
- recognising the need to feel in control of the home environment and its immediate surroundings To feel at ease in any environment, particularly near the home, people need to understand and make sense of their surroundings - they need to feel in control of these spaces and to anticipate what is likely to happen there - to know what is acceptable. In contrast, spaces further from the home are those needing a special reason to visit - they are the "somewhere different" to go to. Somewhere where those using such a "place" have the opportunity to make decisions about doing different things - going to different places - even deciding to go to places that are a bit "scary" or to avoid them. It is these other places near the home which provide somewhere where the environmental psychologists would say people can experience the excitement of learning about the relatively new - the different.
- understanding why people want something interesting to see around their home Environmental psychologists have shown us that we are stimulated by being fascinated or interested - in the context of dense housing areas this fascination can be provided by something as apparently simple as the ever changing scene from the home or garden, or within nearby parks and countryside. Seasonal changes: the colour of plants, the presence of birds, animals and insects, as well as the view of other known and unknown people passing by, and of people involved in a play/ sport activity, can all provide a never ending interest in the home environment. We can get bored if there is nothing new in a situation - in relation to housing areas this can mean that residents do not use the spaces provided and this in turn means that those spaces are relatively empty and so become perceived as unsafe to use. These observations are supported in Overvecht by looking at the inhabitants' list of the Key Issues in relation to greenspaces - they find the local parks and larger open spaces very uninteresting places to visit and they are often fearful of using them and the external spaces adjacent to their homes. Local inhabitants feel that they have no control over who is in these spaces. It has been suggested by psychologists that people have an in-built desire for involvement with their environment and that much motivation and emotion is information-based; perhaps this is one of the reasons why people are so aware of their home environment and so fascinated by it.
Various psychologists (see Maslov) have indentified the essentials of a satisfactory human life:
Quality of
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sub-menu Creating environments which support human needs It is suggested that in the regeneration of the outdoor spaces in Overvecht we need to create environments which support these very basic needs - which the present spaces do not. Here, in our consideration of Overvecht's greenspaces and their role, we can take it that the first two basic needs (food and shelter) are taken care of already by the provision of social welfare in the Netherlands. However, the way that the external environment operates and is perceived and understood by the local inhabitants is a factor in creating the settings which meet the other basic needs.
To help us work out what to do to change the external environment of Overvecht we need to ask questions such as: What will it be like to:
In redesigning Overvecht we need to make the outside spaces that people use on a daily basis fit for habitation, just as the indoor accommodation is already being improved, but equally important is to make the external areas liveable spaces, so that the local inhabitants feel that they belong to them. In developing ideas for
the regeneration of Overvecht it is also important to
recognise that the factors which affect habitability are
often governed by what happens outside the site: These factors are only really affected by planning actions which deal with areas much larger than an individual district - in Utrecht they are tackled through the city's environmental policies. Despite this, constructive and imaginative thinking at the local level can do much to limit the impact on Overvecht's users of these externally created problems - that is, once the problems are themselves recognised. In Overvecht when we deal with the question of liveability, we will need to remember that we begin to enter the difficult realm of psychology. People's reaction to any given "place" is not just about a so called "real-world" as constructed by the designers, but it is also about how the individuals and groups perceive, understand and give meaning to those places; it is about the environmental attributes and qualities of those places, as well as the actions of others involved in using those spaces. Quality of
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sub-menu Many factors, not only the physical environment, influence people's perception of the quality of life in their area of the city Research throughout the 1980s and 1990s indicated that the following factors strongly influence how people perceive the quality of their lives. In relation to Overvecht it is interesting to consider just how many of these could be influenced by the way in which the area is re-planned and designed.
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