A City That Can Save Us: Urban design and psychology at centre of 2023 Zeidler-Evans Lecture
On Oct. 23, McMaster University’s Faculty of Health Sciences hosted the 2023 Zeidler-Evans Architecture of Health Lecture at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design in Toronto.
Nearly 150 guests attended this year’s lecture, which was delivered by Robin Mazumder, an environmental neuroscientist and postdoctoral research fellow at the Technical University of Berlin. In his lecture titled “A City That Can Save Us”, Mazumder discussed how urban design impacts psychology.
“I am an environmental neuroscientist, which I would define as the science of how the world outside of us affects the one inside,” said Mazumder in his lecture’s introduction.
“I’m particularly interested in what our inner world means for the ‘world’ world; how the feelings in our bodies leads to their action, from smiling at a stranger to pushing someone out of the way to get on a subway train. You don’t need neuroscience to understand that the state people meet you in can dictate the outcome of the interaction. Feeling informs how we see problems and their solutions.”
Mazumder spoke about the link between urban living and mental and physical illness. Acknowledging the “complexity of psychogeography,” Mazumder defined urban planning as a political act and discussed the different health outcomes based on geography, highlighting the association between illness and living close to a highway, as well as health and financial prosperity among those who live in areas with dense sound-muffling green space.
Before pivoting his career to neuroscience, Mazumder was an occupational therapist (OT). His training and the OT framework now informs his work and his consideration of how an environment determines disability or illness.
To wrap his lecture, Mazumder urged that to create a city that can save us, we need to save the city – or the world.
“We need to stop creating solutions that require the colonization of other planets, a real endeavour that may be interesting, but inherently contingent on the exploitation of our resources to the point of our unnecessary departure from the face of this planet,” he said.
“I have hope.”
The lecture was followed by a moderated discussion led by Nahlah Ayed, of CBC Radio’s IDEAS.
The Zeidler-Evans Lecture series is held in collaboration with McMaster University’s Faculty of Health Sciences and is sponsored by the family of John Evans, the first dean of the university’s Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine, to honour Eberhard Zeidler, the architect of the McMaster University Health Sciences Centre. Every year, the public lecture is given by an expert who specializes in the relationship between architecture, physical space and health.
“I am delighted that the Evans family is honouring Eb Zeidler with this annual lecture focused on the dynamics between health and physical space,” said Paul O’Byrne, dean and vice-president of the Faculty of Health Sciences at McMaster.
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