#6 EMPOWER INDIVIDUALITY :
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Architecture is just one tool of the urban planner, but it is essential in propagating mental health benefit to a city’s residents… design should be… built in collaboration with those who will live and work in their buildings and environments… and participatory design strikes at the heart of how architecture can foster effective mental health-promoting features of design… -[King, 2017]
to create an adaptable surrounding simply means giving your users options and choices in order to create an environment best suited to their needs; be this through the manipulation of daylight, temperature, views, noise levels, freedom for movability and the rejection of static spaces.
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Our current failure as architects to provide healthy workspaces, (due to generic design assumptions), has contributed to an explosion of mental health illness, with over 15 million work days lost a year in the UK alone [Public Health England, 2016]. Contrastingly, in Sweden “the relationship between participation and health is regarded as so important that new legislation has been instituted,” [Lindholm 1985, p. 22] and as a result architectural design has to include more human content and be more meaningful to its users; a technique that not only improves wellbeing but can even reduce rates of coronary heart disease; for the enablement of users “implies not just using their experience, but creating and fostering an environment where they can feel empowered to express their ideas” [Gregory, 2003, p. 66]. Empowerment improves self-respect, which in turn leads to higher self-esteem. It could be said, therefore, that our “participation in and control of the significant events that shape our lives may be even more important than the circumstances in which we find ourselves” [Lindholm 1985, p. 24].
With environments becoming more technically complex, the opportunity for individual control is decreasing. Historically, humans were involved in the collective process of building their own shelters, an experience that not only demanded social cooperation but also resulted in a very personal, functional space tailored to the individuals wants and needs for, “hands which work with loving feeling imprint a kind of soul into a building” [Day, 2004, p.200]. However, modern means of building design and construction often completely destroy such ancient democratic methods of participation, by which users of a space gained a sense of control and management within their own lives through crafting, labour and verbal input; even though such participation has been proven to lower rates of disease [Lindholm 1985, p. 22]. As architects of the ‘avant-garde psychiatric unit’, methods need to be introduced in order to promote participatory design at both a macro and micro level, and therefore foster positive behavioural changes in mental wellbeing at an urban scale. Occupiers are to become King!
The ‘avant-garde city’ will be designed in a collaborative way where those destined to use the systems will play critical roles in designing them. At conception, the birth of the city will be a result of democratic analysis: community noticeboards, street polls, a community living room, design workshops, open offices, idea markets, interactive exhibitions, crowdsourcing, 1:1 prototyping etc. [P!D, 2019]. During the lifespan of the city, spaces will constantly adapt and evolve as a result of the ever-changing physical and mental needs of the inhabitants.
As exemplified in Figure 7 (see following page), the need for the empowerment of individuality must be combined with the acknowledgement of ‘empathetic sensitivity’ [refer to #2] when considering the city as the microcosm of the ‘avant-garde psychiatric unit’. Fortunately, this combination of proposals are in turn both the solution and the quandary to the nature of inclusive design, for, as previously stated, a generalised architectural solution cannot embody the complexity and specific nature of different mental disorders, and as a result can often overlook more issues than it attempts to fix. As such, the ability
The overriding form of the city will represent a hive of synergetic individualism. 9
