Future Forms for Healthy Development: Eliminating the Gap Between Nature and the Built Environment
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Today children are spending less and less time outdoors interacting with nature and more and more time indoors leading sedentary lifestyles in front televisions and computers. Consequently, two-thirds of American children cannot pass a basic physical fitness test, which includes running and doing sit-ups and push-ups, among other things. Along with physical health issues, such as obesity, children are also suffering from mental health disorders, such as Attention Deficit Disorder and depression, more than any other generation ever has. Though not believed to be the sole factor, a growing body of research exists directly linking the amount of time children spend outdoors interacting with nature to their mental, physical, and emotional health and development.
Happening simultaneously as this growing body of research is more and more people moving to urban areas. By the year 2030, 60 percent of the entire world’s population is predicted to live in urban areas. According to the 2000 census, over 79 percent of the people in the United States already do. This migration to urban areas is problematic because most of these spaces do not currently have the amounts and types of nature necessary to promote healthy development.
This thesis will investigate the importance of nature on human development and methods of integrating nature into cities in order to create a design methodology that seamlessly integrates nature into built form, which, when implemented, will reduce the negative effects that living in cities, and therefore devoid of nature, has on humans. This design methodology will then be demonstrated through the design of an urban educational school located in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Document number: ucin1306503148
Permalink: http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1306503148
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Future Forms for Healthy Development: Eliminating the Gap Between Nature and the Built Environment by
Krieger, Emily A.
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Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at etd.ohiolink.edu.
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University of Cincinnati and OhioLINK.
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