Exploring the Urban Design Approach for Promoting Mental Wellbeing in Campus Open Spaces

Multiple studies have confirmed that human interaction with their surrounding environment affects mental wellbeing. Urban design is concerned with shaping the environment, and thus can contribute to promoting mental wellbeing. Global attention is now focused on mental health, especially among university students, who are more prone to mental health challenges. Thus, urban spaces, especially campus open spaces, are increasingly recognized as more than just physical environments as they influence emotional states, cognitive functions, and social behaviors of students. Designing campus open spaces that have the capacity to promote mental wellbeing is now of greater importance than ever. The research investigated the urban design approaches for mental wellbeing, including place-making, responsive environments, and restorative environments approaches to explore the correlations between urban space design and the corresponding perceived mental wellbeing by the urban space users, highlighting the need for further research in this area. The study used a checklist and structured questionnaire for the assessment process that took place at the Faculty of Engineering campus, Ain Shams University in Cairo. The study contributed towards identifying the different correlations between mental wellbeing dimensions and urban space design and qualities. The results revealed that enhancing physical design parameters and perceptual qualities in urban spaces doesn't guarantee improved mental wellbeing perceptions, proving that there are other aspects of the surrounding environment that impinge mental feedback on the urban space users and that are not integrated in the urban design literature and, thus, require further contributions with other sciences such as Environmental Psychology and Biogeometry.