Abstract
This study aimed to understand how people respond to different urban neighbourhoods. We explored whether participants’ mental health and wellbeing, judgements of resident wealth, family SES and sentiments reflected in descriptions of place features predicted in situ sense of threat and trust. Forty-six student participants walked in groups through 2 urban neighbourhoods, separated by a park, in the North West of England, noting responses at pre-determined stops. Significant differences existed in participants’ sense of trust and threat between the 2 neighbourhoods along with differences in perceived resident wealth and sentiments expressed. Participants’ levels of persecutory ideas and their sense of residents’ wealth predicted in situ trust in both neighbourhoods while level of personal resilience predicted the extent of threat felt in the more deprived neighbourhood. Demonstrating the value of the method, these findings have implications for the governance of urban neighbourhoods whereby obvious cues signalling a harsh environment need to be minimised to create more positive psychological responses to places.
Highlights
The experienced city and the urbanicity effectThe ‘perceived’ city is an experiential tapestry woven from physical characteristics, uses and abuses of space, a sense of the resident community and many more abstract features combining to elicit context-sensitive thoughts, feelings and sensations
The fact that our psychological responses are so closely bound up with the contexts in which we find ourselves is summarised in the so-called ‘broken window theory’ where it is argued that inferences about both trust and threat are drawn on the basis of the physical and social environment
In a study exploring the effects of dwelling as well as passing through, Nettle, Pepper, Jobling, & Schroeder [33] compared the level of social trust and Understanding feelings of threat and trust in urban neighbourhoods differing in deprivation paranoia of residents of two contrasting neighbourhoods
Summary
The ‘perceived’ city is an experiential tapestry woven from physical characteristics, uses and abuses of space, a sense of the resident community and many more abstract features combining to elicit context-sensitive thoughts, feelings and sensations. These psychological responses enable us to use rules of thumb to make speedy judgments about the places we visit or pass through. The role of individual mood and in situ emotional reactions in the making of these heuristic judgements is likely to be critical, as it is these adaptive responses to place that inform our basic survival choices to fight, flee or dwell. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript
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