Designing Non-Depressive Urban Built Environment: Case Study of Damietta City, Egypt

Maria, Mona and Ayad, Hani and Raslan, Rania and Tobar, Salwa (2019) Designing Non-Depressive Urban Built Environment: Case Study of Damietta City, Egypt. IS THIS THE REAL WORLD? Perfect Smart Cities vs. Real Emotional Cities. Proceedings of REAL CORP 2019, 24th International Conference on Urban Development, Regional Planning and Information Society. pp. 227-236. ISSN 2521-3938

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Abstract

Maintaining mental well-being in urban built environments with the help of technology in cities is a huge challenging trend, especially with the increasing number of people living in cities. Nowadays, urban life style has raised the risk of anxiety and mood disorders by 21% and 39% respectively. This paper aims at investigating the relationship between several attributes of the urban built environment with mental health and raising the issue of how mental health can be improved through urban design. Basically, mental health depends on human inner feelings and emotions reacting from surrounding environments. The study is based on analysing the individual experience of people and their lifestyle in several neighbourhoods of Damietta City, Egypt by using Hamilton Depression Scale as an instrument to evaluate the severity of depressive symptoms. The attributes of the built environment in those neighbourhoods are investigated using geographic information systems (GIS), on a sample of 445 individuals distributed in four different city areas. The socio-economic characteristics, built-up attributes and results from the depressive symptoms are analysed and compared in the four areas. A positive relationship has been detected between some attributes of the urban built environment and the severity of the depressive symptoms, emphasising the possibility of improving open public spaces and producing psychologically healthy cities.

Item Type: Article
Uncontrolled Keywords: Hamilton rating scale, urban health, mental health, urban built environment, emotions
Subjects: H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor
H Social Sciences > HM Sociology
N Fine Arts > NA Architecture
Depositing User: REAL CORP Administrator
Date Deposited: 28 Jan 2021 11:38
Last Modified: 28 Jan 2021 15:51
URI: http://repository.corp.at/id/eprint/503

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