Trusted Urban Places

Abstract

We draw on insights from ecological psychology, explorative architecture, and psychiatry to provide an analysis of basic trust in relation to urban places. We use the term basic trust to refer to the attitude of certainty we express when we act in skilled, often unreflective, habitual ways in the living environment. We will argue that the basic trust of people living in cities should be understood in relation to what we will call trusted urban places. Trusted urban places can be understood similarly as what Giovanna Colombetti and Joel Krueger have called “affective niches” that provide affordances for amplifying, dampening, and sustaining affective states. The basic trust of people living in cities, we will argue, depends upon people moving through and engaging with trusted urban places. In urbanism and architecture, it is barely recognized how the city affords places of affective significance that the person incorporates into their bodily way of existing. Persistent exposure to urban stressors can disturb basic trust in one’s living environment, resulting in a person no longer being at home in the world. We provide examples in which people, as a consequence of the repeated exposure to stressors, no longer move through and engage with trusted urban places, and the impact this has on their basic trust. Our aim is to understand how the urban environment can contribute to the path from stress to anxiety and mood disorders, and how a person can regain their openness to possibilities for regulating their emotions skilfully.