Cities and Mental Life
Abstract
While climate change can induce mental states such as anxiety, fear, stress, and depression, which affect our existence, other wicked problems such as vast social and economic inequalities that manifest in the urban environments do also. This phenomenon appears to be well entrenched in many cities today. In turn, through expanding our taxonomy to include wicked and saving technologies, we can employ these terms to enhance our understanding of situations in the urban sphere that manifest as distinctly harmful mental states. Common examples include homelessness and home-related issues, traffic, and extreme loneliness. Due to passive acceptance of such situations, some people might assume that these unfortunate realities are metropolitan places' inherent characteristics. However, viewing them as merely circumstantial provides a way to change how we perceive cities' possibilities, meaning that we can upgrade our position on such matters. This chapter lays the groundwork for that undertaking. It identifies some of the wicked technologies in play, and in turn, marks them as ones that could benefit from specialized study to discover means that can mitigate harms and change the unwelcome conditions surrounding them.
Recommended Citation
Epting, S. R. (2021). Cities and Mental Life. Saving Cities, pp. 17-25. Springer.
The definitive version is available at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85833-9_3
Department(s)
Arts, Languages, and Philosophy
Keywords and Phrases
Housing; Mental life; Mental states; Social inequity; Transportation; Zoning
International Standard Book Number (ISBN)
978-3-030-85832-2; 978-3-030-85833-9
Document Type
Book - Chapter
Document Version
Citation
File Type
text
Language(s)
English
Rights
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG, All rights reserved.
Publication Date
18 Sep 2021
