Healing the Urban Environment: What does it mean to heal a city?

In urban planning, we often speak about making cities more sustainable, resilient, inclusive, walkable, green, smart, or liveable. These are important ambitions. They help us name the pressures cities face and the responsibilities planners carry. Yet they can also make the city sound like a technical system waiting to be corrected. If emissions are too high, reduce them. If traffic is too heavy, optimise it. If public space is underused, activate it. If a riverfront is neglected, regenerate it. 

But cities are not only systems to be improved. They are also environments that people feel, remember, avoid, desire, inhabit, and carry within themselves. A street is never only a street. A bridge is never only infrastructure. A waterfront is never only a scenic spot. These spaces enter people's lives through memory, fear, identity, bodily sensation, family history, cultural association, and everyday routine.

This is the starting point of my current research on therapeutic urbanism. I bring Daoist philosophy in dialog with environmental psychology, through the concepts of ec(h)otoning.

The term ec(h)otoning brings together three ideas: ecotone, echo, and toning. In ecology, an ecotone is a transition zone where different ecosystems meet. In cities, ecotones can be riverfronts, canal edges, bridges, markets, heritage streets, intersections, or any place where different systems overlap. These spaces are rarely simple. They hold movement and pause, memory and redevelopment, local life and tourism, humans and more-than-human life.

The "echo" in ec(h)otoning refers to the memories and invisible histories that places carry. Some of these echoes are collective, such as labour history, heritage, or cultural identity. Others are personal, such as childhood memories, work stress, family responsibilities, or previous experiences of fear and belonging. These echoes are not always visible in the physical form of a place, but they strongly shape how people experience it.

The "toning" refers to tuning. It suggests that healing is not a fixed outcome or a design label that can be attached to a place. Healing is not the same as making a space smooth, calm, or conflict-free. Instead, healing can be understood as a partial and situated process of recalibration between people, place, memory, ecological systems, and more-than-human life.

This idea grew from practice-based fieldwork in Xiaohe Straight Street, a historic canal-side area in Hangzhou, China. The site brings together canal water, bridges, former wharf history, heritage architecture, commercial redevelopment, tourism, residential routines, food smells, traffic, vegetation, sunlight, and more-than-human presence. Rather than treating it only as a heritage street, I approached it as a living threshold where multiple forms of urban life overlap.

The research was conducted through the "Mapping the Invisible Backpack" Citywalk, a Tianmei World Academy learning programme that invited participants to walk, pause, observe, and reflect on how the city affected them. The Invisible Backpack was used as a reflective prompt for exploring what people carry into urban space: memories, emotions, fears, responsibilities, cultural references, bodily habits, and social experiences. It helps make visible the fact that people do not enter public space as neutral users. They arrive with personal histories.

During the citywalk, participants reflected on two contrasting sites. The first was a riverfront resting area along the Grand Canal. The second was a busy intersection at the entrance to Xiaohe Straight Street. At first glance, it might be tempting to assume that the riverfront would be restorative and the intersection stressful. The findings complicated this assumption.

The riverfront did support calm and self-regulation for several participants. People noticed the sound of water, the movement of the river, the breeze, the sunlight, the openness of the space, and the possibility of pausing. One participant connected the riverfront to another riverside place near his workplace, where he often goes when he feels mentally blocked or emotionally burdened. Another described the sound of the river "washing the bank" and the cold wind on his face as the main sensory elements shaping the experience. For some participants, the riverfront allowed a shift from mental compression toward openness.

Yet the riverfront was not simply healing. It also activated vulnerability, fear, and historical weight. Worker sculptures along the canal reminded some participants of labour, suffering, and sacrifice. For one participant, the canal evoked the long history of the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal and a sense of historical heaviness. For another, the sight of a boat triggered difficult memories of early motherhood and family responsibility. A place that supported bodily comfort also produced emotional discomfort.

The busy intersection produced a similar kind of complexity. For some participants, it was overwhelming. The traffic, crowding, honking, smells, and lack of clear places to pause created irritation, disorientation, or a desire to leave. One participant connected her discomfort there to almost twenty years of marriage and family responsibilities. The lively everydayness of the space made her want to escape from daily life.

But for other participants, the same intersection was a place of belonging. Its shops, food, buses, pedestrians, and market-like atmosphere felt familiar, local, and alive. One participant described it as "this is Hangzhou" and "this is my life." Another connected it to memories of small-town life. Another remembered going to the fresh market with parents and grandparents. For them, the intersection's sensory overload did not prevent connection. It produced it.

This contrast matters for planning because it challenges the idea that therapeutic urbanism can be achieved by identifying a fixed set of restorative spatial qualities. Green and blue spaces matter, but they do not affect everyone in the same way. Busy urban spaces may be stressful for some people, but they may also support identity, nostalgia, and belonging for others. The therapeutic quality of a place is not located in the spatial feature alone. It emerges through the relationship between environmental conditions and the Invisible Backpacks people bring with them in that space.

This is where Daoist philosophy became important for the research. Concepts such as wu wei and ziran offer a vocabulary for thinking about planning beyond control and correction. Wu wei is often translated as non-action, but it does not mean passivity. It means action that does not force. It suggests responding to the situation, working with the grain of things, and allowing existing patterns to be noticed before intervention begins. Ziran, often translated as naturalness, invites attention to how things unfold from their own conditions.

Applied to planning, these ideas do not mean that planners should do nothing. They suggest that intervention should begin with listening. Before asking how to redesign a place, we might ask what relationships are already present. What forms of life, memory, use, discomfort, care, and attachment are already unfolding here? What should be protected? What should be softened? What should be left alone? What small changes could help people and place enter into more responsive forms of relation?

Environmental psychology helps explain why sensory and spatial conditions matter for stress, attention, restoration, place attachment, and self-regulation. Daoist philosophy helps reframe planning as attunement rather than control. Together, they support a view of therapeutic urbanism as a process of tuning: a way of sensing thresholds, listening to echoes, and gently recalibrating relationships.

For planners and urban researchers, this has practical implications. Participation cannot only mean consultation after a design proposal has already been formed. It can also mean co-sensing. People need opportunities to walk, pause, notice, compare experiences, and reflect together before a place is translated into design problems and planning solutions. Green-blue infrastructure cannot only be evaluated through ecosystem services. It also needs to be understood as green-blue care: a relationship between water, shade, memory, access, ecological presence, and everyday life. Heritage cannot only be preserved as an aesthetic object. It needs to remain connected to ordinary routines, local memory, and lived meaning.

Healing the city, then, is not about making every place calm or removing all tension, noise, contradiction, or discomfort. Like an ecotone, a therapeutic urban environment may hold overlap, ambiguity, and transition. Its value lies not in eliminating difference, but in creating conditions through which people, places, histories, ecological systems, and more-than-human systems can become more responsive to one another.

In a time of climate anxiety, social fragmentation, and rapid urban transformation, planning needs more than technical solutions. It needs practices of urban attention. Ec(h)otoning offers one such practice: a way of tuning urban futures through sensing, listening, participation, humility, and care.

Author

Adina-Iuliana Deacu is an environmental psychology researcher, systems thinker, designer and social entrepreneur. She is the founder of Tianmei World Academy, a decentralised, cross-cultural network of classrooms established in China in 2015. Her interdisciplinary work connects environmental psychology, urban experience, participatory learning, social design and alternative approaches to business and value creation. Through workshops, citywalks, exhibitions and public conversations, she develops methods that help people examine how memory, culture and lived experience shape relationships with places, organisations and possible futures.