Dissertation

Chapter 8 : CONCLUSION After studying the correlation between increasing placelessness and mental health of the people for a particular type of places i.e. ―compulsive‖ places, which people are obliged to use, it can be concluded that placelessness among the transit facilities is majorly caused because of lack of place identity and sense of place. The lack of building a place identity for these metro stations, therefore, leads to the inability of forming place attachment for their users, which adversely affects their mental health.

Hence, these metro stations lack the spatial attributes which can contribute to the positive well-being of the people. Thereby, using a particular metro station daily, with very less or no sense of place or identity can have adverse effects on mental wellbeing.

This phenomenon of placelessness amongst the transit facilities in the public realm provides a space for designers and architects to intervene in bridging the gap between the research on environmental psychology regarding the mental health of the people and its application to design. They can benefit from the concept of placemaking to moderate the spatial attributes of these transit facilities such that they can contribute to human mental health positively. The presence of informal gathering spaces i.e. third places in the public realm can help people to develop a sense of attachment to the place by creating memories, which in turn contribute to positive mental health.

The third places are the certain kind of ―places‖ which can easily accommodate designs for diversified form and shape, suitable attributes of intimate scales and variability of materials and textures. Flexibility in creating diverse forms leads to higher imageability of these places in the mind of the users and the intimate scale helps people to avoid the feeling of ―being lost‖. Variety of materials and textures within these places adds to the experience of using the space. All these spatial attributes help in achieving the identity and attachment of the place for the users, eventually leading to positive impact on their mental health and well-being.

The interface of the transit facilities with the public realm thus holds the potential to include such gathering spaces that provide its users to ―escape‖ and release their stress, therefore, having a positive effect on mental health.

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