Inner City Coping with Poverty: Impacts of Environment and Attention in the

Considerable evidence suggests that exposure to “green” environments can enhance human effectiveness and make life’s demands seem manageable. Does this phenomenon extend to poor inner cities, where green space is minimal and life’s demands may be overwhelming? In 145 urban public housing residents randomly assigned to buildings with and without nearby nature, attentional functioning and effectiveness in managing major life issues were compared. Residents living in buildings without nearby trees and grass reported more procrastination in facing their major issues and assessed their issues as more severe, less soluble, and more longstanding than did their counterparts living in greener surroundings. Mediation tests and extensive tests for possible confounds supported the attention restoration hypothesis— that green space enhances residents’ effectiveness by reducing mental fatigue. These findings suggest that urban public housing environments could be configured to enhance residents’ psychological resources for coping with poverty. Whether ‘tis nobler . to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them. To die, to sleep . to sleep, perchance to dream. Hamlet, Act III, scene i 5 AUTHOR’S NOTE: A portion of these findings were presented in invited testimony to the National Urban and Community Forestry Advisory Council (NUCFAC) and at the 28th International Conference of the Environmental Design Research Association in Montreal, May 1997. The data for this study were drawn from the Coping with Poverty archive, a multistudy research effort supported by a grant from NUCFAC to Frances Kuo and William Sullivan. This work was also supported by the Cooperative State Research, Education and Extension Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, under ENVIRONMENT AND BEHAVIOR, Vol. 33 No. 1, January 2001 5-34 © 2001 Sage Publications, Inc. at UNIV NEBRASKA LIBRARIES on October 13, 2008 http://eab.sagepub. com Downloaded from Urban public housing residents face a sea of troubles—an array of troubles sufficient to cause despair, hopelessness, and resignation. And yet without the hopefulness and energy to tackle these troubles, residents are doomed to remain in a course of continued or deepening poverty. As state and federal funding for entitlements reaches new lows in the United States, there is an urgent need to find low-cost ways of helping poor families become selfsufficient. Do environmental designers and environmental design researchers have anything to contribute? Are there changes to the physical environment of public housing that could help give residents the strength to “take arms” against their troubles, and by opposing, potentially end them? This study examines whether the presence of nearby nature might lend urban public housing residents the psychological resources to grapple with the challenges facing them. More specifically, it examines whether natural elements in the public housing outdoor environment—trees and grass—can assist in restoring the very psychological resources likely to be depleted in the struggle against poverty. Does the presence of trees and grass outside a public housing apartment building affect residents’ capacity to tackle the critical issues in their lives? Both theory and evidence on the relationship between contact with nature and effective functioning suggest it might. PREVIOUS WORK ON CONTACT WITH NATURE AND EFFECTIVE LIFE FUNCTIONING Reports of the rejuvenating, invigorating effects of spending time in natural settings have arisen in the writings of philosophers (e.g., Thoreau, 1892/ 1995), naturalists (e.g., Leopold, 1949), landscape architects (e.g., Olmsted, 1865/1968), and urban participants of Outdoor Challenge programs (see R. Kaplan, 1984). Attention Restoration Theory (Kaplan, 1995) provides a potential explanation for why contact with nature might have a rejuvenating effect, resulting in renewed effectiveness. 6 ENVIRONMENT AND BEHAVIOR / January 2001 Project No. ILLU-65-0387. Thanks and credit go to many individuals. William Sullivan assisted in research design and the measurement of green space; Rebekah Coley trained and supervised resident interviewers, Esther Davis and Doris Gayles recruited and interviewed participants; Robert Taylor Homes residents provided interviews; and the management of the Chicago Housing Authority was helpful throughout. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Frances E. Kuo, Human-Environment Research Laboratory, University of Illinois, 1103 S. Dorner, Urbana, IL, 61801. Electronic mail may be addressed to f-kuo@uiuc.edu at UNIV NEBRASKA LIBRARIES on October 13, 2008 http://eab.sagepub. com Downloaded from Attention Restoration Theory. Kaplan notes that many settings, stimuli, and tasks in modern life draw on a critical resource for effective functioning: the capacity to deliberately direct attention, or pay attention. The information-processing demands of everyday life—traffic, phones, conversations, problems at work, and complex decisions—all take their toll, resulting in mental fatigue. In contrast, natural settings and stimuli such as landscapes and animals seem to effortlessly engage our attention, allowing us to attend without paying attention. For this and a number of other reasons (see Kaplan, 1995), nature provides a respite from deliberately directing one’s attention. As a consequence, Kaplan suggests, time spent in nature allows us to recover from mental fatigue and leaves us with enhanced effectiveness and a sense of rejuvenation. Empirical work. A review of the literature reveals 16 studies bearing on these proposed effects. In 14 of these 16, one or more of the predicted effects was statistically significant. Chronologically, these are Kaplan (1984); Mang (1984), described in Study 1 of Hartig, Mang, and Evans (1991); Cimprich (1990), described in Cimprich (1993); Hartig (1990), described in Study 2 of Hartig et al. (1991); Canin (1991); Gilker (1992), described in Tennessen and Cimprich (1995); two studies in Kaplan (1993); Macdonald (1994); the first study in Hartig, Boeoek, Garvill, Olsson, and Gaerling (1996); Lohr, Pearson-Mims, and Goodwin (1996); Ovitt (1996); Miles, Sullivan, and Kuo (1998); Taylor, Kuo, and Sullivan (2001; this issue); and Taylor, Wiley, Kuo, and Sullivan, 1998. One of the compelling features of this body of work is the persistence of positive findings in spite of low power. Of the 14 studies with positive findings, few involve strong manipulations: Only 5 involve extended exposure (> 30 min) to a truly natural setting, and 5 studies involve surrogates of nature (e.g., pictures, views, interior plants). Most (10) of the studies involve field settings in which there was no experimenter control over conditions. Although the use of such settings has the benefit of strengthening external validity and generalizability, the lack of control in such settings also increases within-condition variability, decreasing power. And finally, almost half of these studies employ relatively small samples, with condition ns as low as 13 to 20 in 3 studies and 9 to 12 in 3 others. Each of these factors— weak manipulations, lack of experimental control, and small sample sizes— undermines the capacity to detect effects of nature. Under these conditions, the presence of null findings is unsurprising, and the persistence of positive findings may point to a large, robust effect. According to the principles for calculating power (Howell, 1982), studies with high within-condition Kuo / COPING WITH POVERTY 7 at UNIV NEBRASKA LIBRARIES on October 13, 2008 http://eab.sagepub. com Downloaded from variability and low sample size will only reliably find effects if the effect size is large. The diversity of methodologies employed in these studies makes the persistence of positive findings particularly compelling. Correlational, quasi-experimental, and experimental designs have been employed; comparisons have been made both within and between subjects; and comparisons have been made along different dimensions (e.g., naturalness of setting, frequency of contact with nature, total time spent in nature). Because different research designs guard against different confounding variables, the variety of research designs in this body of work helps offset the frequent lack of experimental control, strengthening the case for internal validity. The diversity of operational definitions employed in this body of studies also speaks to the generalizability of these findings. The independent variable, nature, has been examined in a wide range of forms, including wilderness, urban parks, views of urban nature, interior plants, and images of nature. Outcome measures have been similarly diverse. Exposure to nature has yielded reliably superior performance on objective measures ranging from standard neuropsychological measures of attention to simple laboratory tests of cognition and “real world” cognitive tasks such as proofreading. Positive findings have also been obtained with a variety of self-report measures indexing attention, effectiveness, and effectiveness-related constructs (e.g., job strain). Nonetheless, it should be noted that 2 of the 15 studies depart from the pattern of significant positive findings. One study found a systematic negative relationship between nature and effectiveness (Larsen, Adams, Deal, Kweon, & Tyler, 1998), and another obtained only null findings (Study 2 in Hartig et al., 1996). Although it is unclear at present how the anomalous negative finding might be explained, the null finding might be attributed to the small sample size (9 Ps per condition) and weak manipulation employed (12 minutes of nature or urban slides, interspersed with questions about the slide-viewing conditions). On the whole, then, the empirical literature to date provides reasonable confidence in the restorative effects of nature on attention and effectiveness.