Chapter 1 : INTRODUCTION

Chapter 1 : INTRODUCTION

Improving your health can be as simple as choosing to walk to work or to take the stairs instead of the escalator. There's no doubt in the fact that built environment plays an essential part in supporting our actual well-being. We, humans, are creatures not apart from our surroundings and we should note that our relationship with the environment is not limited to physiological exchanges. As we interact physically with the environment, we also have an emotional and psychological relationship with it. For instance, in residential areas, if the built environment surrounding us includes the green landscapes, it can help in improving our relationships with the surrounding communities and developing stronger bonds thereby reducing the stress and conflicts. At any moment, we are impacted by the environment and the information we achieve of it and impact on it conversely. Through this study, I aim to explore the various factors of the built environment that affects mental health by understanding the relationship between the two, as a part of environmental psychology.

Environmental psychology has been an emerging field that focuses on paying equal attention to the user of the environment as much as the environment that surrounds us. It highlights the importance of reading the environment in terms of the assumptions made to the user and designing it for human activities by considering the environment and the user together. Environmental psychology not only focuses on the relationship between the people and their surrounding built environment, but it involves paying equal attention to the various factors that determine the relationship between the two. The built environment affects the way its users behave, hence it becomes crucial for the designers to organize their built environment. What a user does and why, and the thoughts and feelings that accompany those actions are linked to the way our mind perceives the surrounding environment and its interaction with the designed environment. (Moser and Uzzell, 2003)

The researches done in the field of environmental psychology have shown the application gap between this field and architecture and urban planning. In my research, with the help of the previously done researches in the field of environmental psychology, I aim to explore how, we as architects, can benefit from those studies and apply our knowledge to achieve a better design that helps human