Is it possible to design spaces that support people in their day-to-day lives and allow them to recover from the stresses and strains of everyday activities?
For over thirty years, this question has animated Bill Sullivan, a professor of landscape architecture and Collaboratory member at the Family Resiliency Center (FRC), to pursue a research agenda in urban design. Sullivan is passionate about translating findings about green infrastructure to those who live in urban areas.
“I am trying to advance our understanding as designers, landscape architects and urban planners about how to create places in which individuals, families and communities thrive, and then share that information with policymakers,” said Sullivan. “What are the characteristics of a strong neighborhood? How can green infrastructure support people and neighborhoods to thrive?”
Sullivan and his collaborators investigate these questions at the individual, family and community levels using an array of qualitative and quantitative methods, including self-reports, cortisol measures, brain activity, heart rate variability, blood pulse volume, skin conductance and temperature, and calculations of greenness derived from both neighborhood mapping and individual perceptions. These approaches offer a variety of ways to measure mental acuity and stress as they test which factors are most important for stress recovery.
Sullivan explained that something as simple as living in a neighborhood that lacks street trees shows a measurable depletion of peoples’ capacity to recover from cognitive fatigue.
“Cognitive fatigue or attentional fatigue seems to underlie and support executive functioning. If you are cognitively fatigued, your executive functioning—the ability to plan, to make decisions, to read subtle social cues, to keep irritability at bay—is diminished,” said Sullivan. “People who live in poverty are constantly solving problems that drain their capacities. And then if you live in dangerous environment, you’re hypervigilant, which is a profound drain on your attention and has negative consequences for executive functioning.”
One of Sullivan’s early projects on aggression and violence showed that people who lived in a place with more vegetation outside their windows were less likely to experience verbally or physically aggressive conflicts. The natural experiment looked at women who were randomly assigned to apartments in the Robert Taylor Homes, a now-demolished public housing neighborhood in Chicago. Those with a view of green outside their apartment windows had significantly fewer altercations with their partner and child than those women whose windows looked out upon barren settings. Sullivan and his coauthors presented evidence that this difference was completely mediated by levels of cognitive fatigue, and subsequent research has demonstrated that people who are attentionally fatigued are more likely to be irritable or aggressive.
Although Sullivan’s work has been motivated by its long-term effects on residents’ lives, the study surfaced the reality that residents of Robert Taylor Homes wanted research to help meet their profound short-term needs as well. How could their investigations have both generational and immediate impact?
Sullivan and his team hired and trained community members to become research collaborators—paid part-time positions that led to full-time employment at the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center. The community-based research collaborators offered feedback on every questionnaire circulated and provided guidance about how the researchers should conduct themselves, especially as they moved through the neighborhoods. Sullivan’s community-based, participatory approach models FRC’s mission to practice research with and by academic, community, provider and student partners.
“These community-based research collaborators influenced every single aspect of the research protocol,” noted Sullivan. “Once we demonstrated that we were willing to engage and offer our time and resources, they became invaluable to us, opening many doors and keeping themselves and us out of trouble. The experience taught me not only how to work in a community that I was clearly not a member of but how to create an interdisciplinary research team that includes people from those neighborhoods to serve as members of the team.”
One new interdisciplinarity team that Sullivan joined is an FRC project with Postdoctoral Research Associate Rachel Jackson-Gordon and FRC Director Jacinda Dariotis. That project will explore how exposure to nature, music and mindful movement can serve as early childhood stress-coping strategies. By promoting emotional regulation, the project aims to prevent disruptive behaviors in early childhood that predict violent behaviors as children age.
“I think there could be a very explicit prevention opportunity here,” said Sullivan about the project. “Past research suggests that kids have similar reactions to green space as adults in a variety of ways. The question now is: Will the recovery from attentional fatigue that is a precursor to lower levels of aggression and violence be available to preschool-aged children? I think it’s going to be fascinating to look at.”
Looking forward, Sullivan hopes that research in landscape design can tap into qualities that are widely shared and uniquely human. From an evolutionary perspective, humanity’s great advantage was not strength or quickness but rather the capacity to gather complex information by reading into landscapes and, it follows, to be comforted by peaceful, non-threatening settings. To that end, every individual, family and community would be better off with more views of green in their lives.
“As we think about the long-term consequences of cognitive fatigue and the conditions that prevent neighborhoods from being green, we also need to fight back against the asinine notion that we should prevent gentrification by only making neighborhoods ‘just green enough,’” said Sullivan. “Some well-meaning people are misled into thinking that a minimum amount of green is a good solution for affordable housing, but ‘just green enough’ only keeps people down. If green neighborhoods result in increased property taxes or rising rents, then as a society we should dedicate ourselves to addressing those challenges. But we should always be advocating for neighborhoods that support families and communities that thrive.”