Sad in the City
By Sarah Steimer
Years ago, hustling to catch my train, I slipped and bruised my tailbone. Because the slush from a recent snowfall obscured any distinction between the cement sidewalk and the marble floor at the entrance of the station, I didn’t think to slow my pace to adjust for the super-slick surface. The injury kept me inside and has me forever hesitant to travel by foot more than absolutely necessary in the winter.
That also means I’m missing out on what little natural daylight is available during those months, and it’s harder to get the social time and exercise that comes so naturally in warmer seasons. Hunkering down indoors in the winter can have massively detrimental effects on myself and many others — especially those of us who suffer from seasonal affective disorder, or SAD. Research has shown that the best ways to combat the winter blues are to get moving, get social, and get sun.
Unfortunately, our built environment has often fought hard against our ability to get out and about in the winter and access these solutions (I should note that a rubber mat appeared at that train entrance soon after my fall, suggesting I wasn’t the only victim). Cities build pedways and skyways between buildings in an effort to avoid stepping outside. We champion advancements in artificial lighting rather than natural daylighting. And we often shovel snow off of roadways and directly into bike lanes and sidewalks. We don’t embrace winter as much as tolerate it.
“Just looking at the world of planning generally, I think we've often struggled as a profession to deal with winter,” says Jared Patton, an associate planner at the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning. “Many of our plans, and certainly many of our ordinances, frankly, just don't acknowledge that winter exists at all.”
If you’ve seen illustrations of planned buildings, parks, and other facilities, you may have noticed they almost exclusively depict the summertime: Lush green trees surround sketches of high rises, and flowers bloom throughout plaza designs. Rarely is it suggested that you even imagine how these spaces might look and function below 50 degrees.
Yet if we simply acknowledged that winter exists when planning our environments, we’d be far more likely to boost year-round accessibility and improve our mental well-being.
Light it up
Nearly everyone I spoke with about SAD and the built environment referred to research about hospital window views and surgery recovery. The study, published in 1984, found patients with a window view of a natural setting had shorter postoperative hospital stays, received fewer negative evaluations from nurses and took fewer strong analgesics, compared with patients whose windows faced a brick wall.
Mohamed Boubekri, a professor at the Illinois School of Architecture at the University of Illinois, took note of the connection between natural light and positive health outcomes. There’s evidence that light — particularly natural sunlight — can reduce SAD and help our overall mental and physical health. Boubekri has been exploring how light affects us for about three decades now, finding that daylight exposure improves everything from sleep to mood to cognitive performance.
Boubekri’s previous research had focused on light as it related to energy efficiency. Although daylighting could provide massive energy savings, the conversation around limiting energy consumption often focused on technologically driven solutions, such as LED lighting, rather than the use of natural sunlight. To make a stronger argument for daylight in architecture, beyond a building’s power use, Boubekri researched the impacts of natural light on the human body.
“When I was talking about energy efficiency, no one ever bothered to interview me about daylighting,” he says. “But when I started talking about health — and sleep, particularly — people got interested.”
There is historical precedence for architects and city planners acknowledging the impact of sunlight on our health. In fact, Chicago’s courtyard buildings — a response to crowded, slum-like multi-unit housing — are a prime example of architecture responding to health concerns. While jam-packed tenements in places like New York City blocked out the sun and fresh air, Chicago’s horseshoe-shaped buildings allowed for density while also circulating fresh air and sunshine through each unit, helping to fight urban illnesses like tuberculosis and rickets. (Even the British nurse Florence Nightingale was said to be an advocate for natural light in homes and in hospital wards, noting that patients in the sunnier parts of hospital wards were more cheerful than those without sunlight.)
Concerns over the lack of air and light at the street level led to the 1916 Zoning Ordinance of New York City. The resolution established limits in building massing at certain heights and spawned the wedding cake architectural style: The tiered levels are each set back from the one below, allowing more sun to reach the streets.
But despite what we know about the benefits of sunlight on our physical and mental health — and even improved performance among workers and students — few other regulations exist to ensure our access to it. Most lighting standards are related to energy consumption, rather than our own intake of light.
Movement and community
Two other oft-cited solutions for SAD — or many other forms of emotional distress — are physical activity and social interaction. Here again, the world we’ve built compels us to stay inside and avoid both.
“Most parks are designed for two or three seasons, and then they sit there empty in the winter,” says Patrick Coleman, founder of the Winter Cities Institute. “How can we better utilize that public space, this public investment? How can we create safe gathering places outdoors, like in our downtown public space, to make it more comfortable for people to be outdoors in the winter?”
The cold season in Chicago lasts a little longer than three months — from about December 2 to March 9 — when the average daily high temperature is below 43 degrees (although anyone living here would wager that it can last far longer). But even a quarter of the year is a long time for the outdoors to be inhospitable.
Some planners are better at designing spaces for all seasons. Maggie Daley Park, for example, was built to include a ribbon skating rink for use in winter months. But a review of plans for upcoming parks in the city, such as updates to Jackson Park, barely makes mention of winter or shows illustrations of cold-weather features.
Coleman, who’s worked as a consultant for architecture and engineering projects, says he’s won a number of jobs simply by asking about how the facility will be used in the winter. “People would say, ‘You know, we've talked to six firms and you're the only one who mentioned it.’”
Nordic countries report some of the highest levels of happiness among their citizens, while also being some of the coldest places to live. They don’t keep their spirits up by staying indoors; instead, they commune outside. In his book Happy City, Charles Montgomery explores the importance of reducing isolation in cities to improve the feelings of satisfaction, pointing to places like Copenhagen as masters of gathering. Montgomery quotes statistics that show the number of people hanging out on the streets of Copenhagen more than tripled between 1968 and 1995 after the city pedestrianized many of its spaces. And the Danes don’t stop going outside in the winter, as Coleman notes.
“They have developed this huge biking culture year-round,” he says. “They have a huge outdoor patio culture year-round. The restaurants and bars will even provide blankets for people because they want to be outdoors. They just enjoy being outside.”
Denmark ranked No. 2 in the 2022 World Happiness Report.
More planners and architects are starting to think about how to design for winter cities. Edmonton, Alberta, is a leader in winter city planning, and its design guidelines are widely considered the gold standard, serving as a resource on everything from streetscapes to recreation and beyond. In 2018, the nonprofit organization 8 80 Cities chose three U.S. cities to participate in a two-year Wintermission program. The goal was to combat social isolation and increase levels of physical activity in winter for all residents, resulting in the development of the Winter Cities Toolkit. Chicago played host to a Winter Cities Symposium in February 2020. And while not everyone specifically calls out the role the built environment plays in addressing SAD, the references to combating isolation and inactivity suggest it would play a major role in reducing the toll winter can take on mental health.
“Winter affects so much of our lives,” Coleman says. “We can examine every aspect of that and find little interventions and improvements that we can make, that will make life better.”
It might be a big lift to change an entire city’s architecture to better accommodate sunshine, reduce high winds or otherwise soften the blow of winter’s extremes (although Boubekri suggests this could change: “My own students are more and more interested in this connection between the built environment and health in general.”). But there are small environmental changes that can drive improvements to how we experience the winter.
Patton points to the basics like snow removal and improved access to public transportation, along with more playful features that could draw people outside during the winter, such as Christmas lights, deciduous trees that block the wind or areas to enjoy a bonfire. Public art can draw people outside as well, and pockets of color in public spaces have been shown to change people’s perception of the temperature.
“Communities do a really good job of this up until Christmas,” Patton says. “And then everybody forgets that it's nice to be outside in the winter. But having things like ice skating or renting cross country skis or outdoor concerts or things like that gives people a nudge that it's okay to be outside and get to spend time with your neighbors in the winter. Make it so people can get places and then give them something to do.”
The built environment can serve as either a deterrent or catalyst for comfortably navigating the winter months. The pandemic, when many people were drawn to spend more time outdoors in any season, may have helped spur more awareness of the connection between our environment and mental health. Should those adaptations stick, we could be living more like the Danes: happily sipping a coffee in the winter sun — and definitely not careening through a train station on our rear ends.