Biophobia and Urban Restorativeness

Agnès Patuano

doi:10.3390/su12104312

Abstract

Natural areas are now known to be important resources for the health and wellbeing of urban dwellers, through, for example, the opportunities they provide for cognitive and emotional restoration. However, urban populations have also been found not to engage with these spaces and to display some form of biophobia which may hinder them from perceiving any of these benefits. This concept of biophobia is thought to entail both our innate physiological responses to the perceived danger from non-human threats such as spiders and snakes and our cultural attachment to material comfort. The word is often used with derogatory connotations, even if it is part of an evolutionary mechanism honed over thousands of years to keep humans alive. This review presents the current state of knowledge on urban biophobia as well as evidence of instances in which built and mixed urban environments were found to be more restorative than natural ones for the urban population, in order to assess any connection within the two. A series of recommendations for further research but also for the practical implementation of natural areas in cities capable of attracting a wide variety of people regardless of their fears or preferences are also formulated. Only by investigating the psychological and physiological responses of urban dwellers to their daily environments can we hope to design interventions which will remain relevant for the modern world.

Highlights

As the benefits of engaging with nature become more well known, the evidence basis for them continue to grow [1,2,3]
The first part of this paper presents the health benefits of natural environments such as they are described in the literature, looking first at the theoretical basis for them to their limitations as they pertain to biophobia
Many of the dissonances between the theoretical and actual appreciation of nature are linked to the evolutionary assumptions which underlie theories of restoration such as the ones presented in introduction, Attention Restoration Theory (ART), PET and Prospect-refuge

Summary

Introduction

As the benefits of engaging with nature become more well known, the evidence basis for them continue to grow [1,2,3]. Green spaces have for example been linked to improved relaxation and psychological restoration of cognitive and emotional functions, improved social capital, improved functioning of the immune system, improved fitness and reduced obesity, and to the reduction of anthropogenic noise buffering, exposure to air pollution and urban heat island effect [1]. These benefits have been shown to be important for vulnerable or deprived populations [4], they are broadly thought to be universal to every human being. We live in an increasingly urbanised world, positive perceptions of built urban environments are scarcely investigated [2,9,10]

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