Kelsey Zlevor on Designing Public Spaces for Mental Health

[00:04] - Kelsey Zlevor: Certain days I would go to the park and certain things would make me feel really good and feel really emotionally supported. And then I would go to the park on other days and feel even more isolated, feel somewhat more ostracized, and realizing that it wasn't the space that was changing. And so that really prompted this question of, could that possibly be true? That who we are and the mental spaces that we are in shape our perception of the external spaces that we're in.

[00:32] - Meghan Stromberg: Planning, at its heart, is about people. And real people live with depression, anxiety, and stress. But they also live with joy, awe, and resilience. For planner and author, Kelsey Zlevor, those experiences aren't just personal, they're professional. Her work asks: What if we treated public spaces like tools for emotional care? What if awe, ease, and observation were as important as bike racks and splash pads?

On today's episode of People Behind the Plans, Kelsey joins me to discuss her research, her new book, Mental Landscapes, and how parks and public spaces can be designed to support people experiencing mental health conditions. I'm Megan Stromberg, APA's Editor in Chief. Let's get started.

Hi, Kelsey. Welcome to People Behind the Plans.

[01:23] - Kelsey Zlevor: Hi. Thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited to be here.

[01:26] - Meghan Stromberg: I know you've been exploring depression, anxiety, and other mental health conditions as they relate to how people experience the built environment. Can you give us a sense of what research exists on this topic? Did you have a lot to work from and build on, or was this new territory?

[01:46] - Kelsey Zlevor: I was finding that there was a lot of research around this idea that we know that green spaces, parks and public spaces in general, reduce rates of depression. I was really interested in what happens or what data exists around our understanding of when those conditions are already present. I want to caveat everything I'm saying that I'm one individual working on this work. There's always things that I'm sure are missing my attention or missing what's in my sphere of influence and what is influencing me. How can these spaces be crafted with design to better support people who are already experiencing the effects of depression, experiencing the effects of anxiety? So a lot of the work I was seeing was really more focused on this idea of proving the value of these spaces for the reduction of certain symptoms.

[02:38] - Meghan Stromberg: We know that green spaces can help alleviate symptoms of mental health conditions, help people feel more at ease. What you're saying is they can also be designed with that intention in the first place.

[02:51] - Kelsey Zlevor: Yes, absolutely. I'm already someone who is experiencing depressive episodes, and I have the great benefit of being able to access parks and public spaces, and even just accessing those spaces in and of themselves sometimes aren't even enough. How can we be asking more of those spaces? We can do that through design.

Going back to your original question, it felt like at the time that I began the research, a lot of the data was around this idea of how those spaces are beneficial for preventing conditions from existing. I was really more interested in how can we think about how those spaces are serving people who already have the conditions in the first place, if that makes sense.

[03:32] - Meghan Stromberg: Yeah, it does make sense. I just heard you mention that you yourself experienced depressive episodes. I wonder if you'd be willing to share your journey and how and if it influenced this area of research for you.

[03:46] - Kelsey Zlevor: I feel like so much of my work started from a very personal place, and therefore, I like to say I am not a unbiased investigator. When I first conceived of this entire project, it was really coming off of a few years of being in the pandemic. I was living in Oregon at the time. I was furloughed from work, so I was on limited hours. I was only working 25 hours a week, but I had been practicing at that point for about six years in parks and public space consulting, so was doing parks work as my full-time job. I was in lockdown, renting a house by myself, really stripped from access to the gym, seeing my friends, all my normal coping mechanisms. In the context of that, I had also been working with health care practitioners, a therapist, and learned that I had been living with premenstrual dysphoric disorder, which is a type of cyclical depression that is correlated with the menstrual cycle. I was really trying to make sense of that diagnosis. It was really challenging, and I was really struggling with, what does this mean for me professionally? What does this mean for me personally?

From all of that, I became obsessed with this question of what does it mean to do parks and public space work through this lens of mental health and doing that really intentionally and really explicitly. I was finding that a lot of the ways that we were approaching the work, not just at the firm I was at, but just broadly across the profession, was very focused on, what do people want to see in this space and what do they want to be able to do? I started realizing for myself, I was visiting this park right near my house in Eugene pretty much every day that the weather was good during pandemic and during lockdown. And I started realizing that certain days I would go to the park and certain things would make me feel really good and feel really emotionally supported. Then I would go to the park on other days and feel even more isolated, feel somewhat more ostracized, and realizing that it wasn't the space that was changing because I was going there pretty much every day, as much as it was me that was changing, and that internal landscape that was changing. 

That really prompted this question of, Could that possibly be true? That who we are and the mental spaces that we are in shape our perception of the external spaces that we're in.

[06:13] - Meghan Stromberg: Thinking about that park in Eugene, did you come up with some ideas of how it could have been designed differently, or did you not quite get that far in your thinking during that time?

[06:24] - Kelsey Zlevor: One of the things that I, and I appreciate you asking this because I feel like I haven't gotten a chance to talk about this very much in the work. But one of the most transformative experiences for me in that park was literally just the ability to go and lay down on the ground outside pretty much every day, and to lay there after work and just do nothing, to cloud gaze, to sky gaze. And that, I remember being one of the most, I think, profound experiences during the pandemic for me of just learning to disconnect from the Internet, being able to daydream, being able to even get some of that healing and relaxation from the outdoors and being in a public place while doing that. I had this meditation that I would do. Being able to sink in, really physically relax and be really present in a public space was a ritual that I was doing for months.

That was actually what cleared open some of the space for me to conceive of this project and even start putting all of the pieces together because I had that space outside that was not in my house where I could really decompress and relax and be able to be creative from that space.

[07:41] - Meghan Stromberg: I can totally picture it, and it brings a couple of things to mind. I have a hybrid work schedule. I'm not spending as much time in public spaces as I did before. For me personally, being around other people, even if they're strangers, is energizing to me. I can see the appeal of having this restful meditative state by yourself, but in the presence of others.

The other thing that you mentioned is time without technology. So thinking about how we might have experienced parks when we were younger versus how everybody experiences the world now. I think about even standing around and being bored for 20 seconds, I'll pick up my phone and look at it.

Can you talk a little bit about the role of technology in public spaces and parks in particular, and especially when someone is dealing with symptoms of a mental health condition?

[08:37] - Kelsey Zlevor: My research did not suggest that more technology is improving anyone's depression or anxiety. Pretty much everyone I interviewed said something to the effect of, I'm going to these parks in public spaces while experiencing my symptoms, specifically to get away from my computer, to get away from my phone, to really disconnect from those things.

It's certainly not to say we're anti-technology completely. I think what ends up being helpful, and what I've heard from folks, is any type of technology I think that can help us better relate to and develop deeper relationships with our natural environment can be really beneficial. I think of things like Merlin, which is the app by Cornell that helps people identify bird song. I think of the apps like Strava that are helping people track their runs. Things like that that are deepening our sense of what we do outside and how we understand it. 

I think there's this rising interest in how do we create these outdoor spaces that also include older folks, include adults, include teenagers, that being a huge demographic as well, also because depression in teenagers is really skyrocketing. And so thinking about, how are we creating spaces that aren't just jungle gym, splash pad for kids under the age of eight?

And so that is very much on my mind from an economic standpoint. How are we creating spaces for people to gather where they don't have to spend money, they don't have to subscribe, maintain a subscription to a place. I call it democratic spaces, where any person of any socioeconomic or educational background can be there for free. That, I think, is really critical as well.

[10:26] - Meghan Stromberg: One of the outcomes of this research that you've done is a book called Mental Landscapes, which I've read, and I want to dig into it a little bit more. But what do you hope that book and the guidance that's within it will do for planners and other designers, or anybody, really?

[10:43] - Kelsey Zlevor: I see it as two-fold. I think the first piece is, I really just hope that people feel seen by it who have been looking to be seen. I hope it just is a resource for anyone who's looking to understand these things better.

The second piece, though, specifically with practitioners and planners and people in our field, is I think it's felt really challenging to even know how to approach these topics because there's been no framework, there's been no inroad to know how to talk about this stuff in a way that is, one, respectful and appropriate.

I know we've talked about this a little bit before, but this work is so qualitative as opposed to quantitative. Because of that, I think there's a tendency to be fearful of it or to not want to touch it. There's a perception that we're opening a can of worms when we're talking to people about their emotions and how they want to feel. That's at least what I've found in doing the work, that there's this hesitancy or this discomfort in how we have the conversations because we don't know where we're going with it or how to really deliver once we open up that conversation.

I'm hoping that this book is an invitation, is a pathway into how we can be asking these design questions and facilitating around some of these discussion points and areas of interest in a way that are leading people to solutions or to answers, that it becomes clear that we can have this conversation in a really fruitful and generative way.

[12:24] - Meghan Stromberg: Besides your own experience, you talk to a lot of people about their experience of symptoms of depression and anxiety and other mental health conditions while they're in public spaces. That was a big part of your work. One of the things I really liked about the book is how those conversations show up and gave me, as a reader, a sense of what we're actually talking about here and what these experiences were like. I wonder if you have a quote from the book that you could share with us that would help listeners understand what we're talking about.

[12:56] - Kelsey Zlevor: Actually, I have two that come to mind. The first one is around this idea of awe. The four amendments that I designed around, or that the book is really focused on, are the sense of ease, sense of observation, sense of affinity for nature, and a sense of awe.

Awe was an interesting one because I think that is an example of a design element where people have a hard time understanding like, oh, how do we measure that? How do we think about that? I thought that this quote really sums up why this is important. I interviewed someone who said, "I go to parks for their sense of prospect. I can be part of something larger in a public setting. Depression-induced amotivation isn't something to vilify, but it is not my conduit to community. Serendipity is an awakening experience."

I love that quote because it also gets at what came up in a lot of these interviews, which is people sharing their symptoms with me, and this motivation, this desire to self-isolate being a really common occurrence for folks. I love how in that quote, and frankly, in a lot of people that I interviewed, there's so much self-awareness about knowing that these are the symptoms that I have. I know it's not good for me, and so how is it possible to make other decisions?

Then the other quote that I have that is around affinity for nature, is I interviewed someone who very generously shared their story with me who had gone through inpatient hospitalization for pretty severe bipolar. And so part of that interview, they said, "The first time I got out of the psych ward for bipolar, I went running by myself in the forest. Halfway through the run, I got scared and ran back. I realized that the run helped put off a bit of mania and anxiety because when I got back from running, I did hallucinate. I was stretching and I was watching the sidewalk melt downwards. I remember crying because it was like, 'I'm so sick of this.' But then I was relieved that I was at least outside because I could just go back up to looking at the sky and go back to stretching to ground myself and feel a breeze."

[15:01] - Meghan Stromberg: Oh, wow. 

[15:03] - Kelsey Zlevor: Yeah. I was so struck by that quote because it really got me thinking about, obviously, this lived experience that I certainly have never had that's incredibly intense and very specific. And thinking about how would our designs and how would some of these public spaces shift if we were designing from a place of helping people self-soothe through these really complex and difficult episodes? I think even on a broader scale, how much would that reduce the times we call 911? How much would that reduce the number of times that people get hospitalized if they felt like their environment was supporting them through some of these episodes? That quote has always really stuck out to me.

[15:44] - Meghan Stromberg: Tell me more about the four elements that you just mentioned.

[15:48] - Kelsey Zlevor: I had gone through 30 interviews, over 30 interviews with folks, and I had started coding all of the transcripts to understand what were people really saying and what were the big buckets. The four things that came out are what I call the design amendments.

I very specifically use the word amendments. Often in our field, we use the term design principles, and a principle implies this universal truth. I'm a pretty big stickler for words and definitions. I knew I didn't want to use the word principles, if only because so much of doing mental health research is realizing that everyone is having a very unique experience, and so not one thing will be true for every person across all of time and space. The amendments are meant to be this suggestion for what we can do to amend a space.

With that, the four design amendments are a sense of ease, so being comfortable, being invited to linger and rest in the space.

The second amendment is a sense of observation, and so being able to observe other people, or I like to say being a part of a space without having to actively contribute to its rhythms. Being able to be that bystander and getting that social energy through osmosis without having to necessarily be the one that's actively in the center of things.

Then the third amendment is a sense of affinity, which is affinity for nature. If folks are familiar with the term biophilia, very similar. However, biophilia felt a little too complex of a word. And so affinity, just this idea that I like to say life gravitates towards life. We are inherently and biologically evolved to want to interact with plant species, with animals, with water. 

Then the last amendment is a sense of awe. That serendipity, that novelty, that sense that the world is bigger than ourselves and we are interconnected into that sense of mystery is being really important for folks.

[17:50] - Meghan Stromberg: Getting back to the book, those four amendments are present there and explained in more detail and discussed. But the book itself is really easy to follow. The sections make sense. And throughout, there are these illustrations of people who seem to be really experiencing these emotional states. And that, coupled with the quotes, really brought me in. So tell me a little bit more about how you put the book together and why you did it the way you did. And I really did like those illustrations.

[18:20] - Kelsey Zlevor: I did the illustrations. [laughs] So that was a lot of work towards the end. That was the most heaviest lift, I would say, as part of the book. I was really committed to the color and the imagery, and that was all very intentional. There's a tendency for folks to be like, oh, I don't know if this is just going to be a big bummer. One of the best compliments I ever got at a talk I gave with other landscape architects, I had someone at the end of a session say, "I was really nervous that this presentation was going to really bum me out." He's like, "Somehow you managed to make this really fun and full of so much levity and brightness. I wasn't expecting that." 

So that was very much the ethos that I built the book around. I wanted to make it something that people could pick up and not be afraid that they would come away feeling heavier for having learned about it. There's this tendency to, especially, I think in American culture, Western culture, that, oh, negative emotions or heavy emotions, are these things to be avoided and are these things that we should tiptoe around.

And so I wanted the book to feel very inviting and feel very accessible to folks. Wanted it to feel like someone in high school could pick it up as much as someone in their 60s who's been practicing in the field for 30 years.

Also, that was the vision behind why I chose to self-publish. I had a really clear sense of what I wanted it to look like and feel like, and I didn't want to be talked out of it. I think I was really committed to this vision that I didn't want it to look like a textbook, and I didn't want it to look like a white paper, and I wanted it to look like this hybrid workbook. Thank you for picking up on that because I feel like that was all a very intentional part of the process.

[20:10] - Meghan Stromberg: Yeah, and you just mentioned workbook. At the end, there's an area to record your own observations and to use it as a field guide.

[20:18] - Kelsey Zlevor: Absolutely. Yeah, I think of it as field notes, like last three pages, where everything that I talk about in the book, you can actually put into practice and try and embody for yourself, like what it feels like and what it means to do the work and think about the work.

[20:32] - Meghan Stromberg: Are there some things that you recommend planners, whether they're park planners or not, some takeaways that they can be thinking about based on your research, just to maybe see things a little bit differently or even make some changes in a built environment that could make for more inclusive space for people who are experiencing mental health symptoms?

[20:53] - Kelsey Zlevor: I've been even expanding my own thoughts around how this is applicable. It's parks, it's public spaces. I had someone recently asking about what does it mean to apply this to streetscape design? When we think about the public realm, there's so many different iterations of what that means and where this can apply. I even think about interior design. When we think about libraries and community health centers. There's a lot of places where I think this work can be applied.

One of the things I like to recommend is we can all be experts of how we know we feel in a space and begin to use that as an internal compass. We're all humans, too. We all have an innate understanding, I think, of what is good or not good design. Sometimes it's just a matter of touching into, I think, that sense of our humanness and what we feel, the impulse that we want to meet in a moment and asking, does the built environment serve us in that or does it not? If it doesn't, that's, I think, the portal where we can then begin asking questions about what we can do differently.

[21:57] - Meghan Stromberg: Well, thank you, Kelsey. This has been such a great conversation. Not a bummer.

[22:01] - Kelsey Zlevor: Not a bummer. Good. [laughs] That makes me so glad to hear. That's a big part of the work.

[22:07] - Meghan Stromberg: Thank you so much, Kelsey, for being on People Behind the Plans and sharing your book, Mental Landscapes, with us. We'll look forward to seeing how your research evolves. I know that this is something that you're really passionate about, but it is a bit new, a new way to think, and I think that's exciting.

[22:23] - Kelsey Zlevor: Thank you for having me. It's been really enjoyable to have this conversation.

[22:27] - Meghan Stromberg: For me, too. Thanks.

Thanks for listening to another episode of People Behind the Plans, an APA podcast. You can find Kelsey Zlevor's work and book at mentallandscapes.com. If you want to hear more great conversations with experts from across the planning landscape, subscribe to the APA Podcast so you'll never miss an episode. You can find People Behind the Plans on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, or wherever you get your podcast. You can also find our entire library of episodes at planning.org/podcast.