The relationship between height of tall buildings and mental health of citizens(case study: Saeediyeh complex of Hamedan)

This study addressed the relationship between high-rise buildings (as part of the urban environment) and mental health (one of the three major aspects of health: physical, psychological, and social), investigating citizens’ points of view on the high-rise Saeedieh Condominium in Hamadan, Iran. The research sought to capture the influence mechanism and to help reinforce the insight of designers of such buildings into and their concern for features of the built environment from citizens’ perspective that can inadvertently affect their mental health. In recent decades, construction of high-rise buildings has been appealed to widely as a method of construction, replacing the horizontal growth of cities. However, it seems that vertical urbanism has paid little attention to citizens’ psychological aspects in urban spaces. Height is an intrinsic part of high-rise buildings and their most important formal feature, with a significant impact on citizens and their eventual perceptions and emotions, which makes it significant to scrutinize its influence. One of the most important issues is the impact of high-rise buildings on citizens’ mental health. Mental stresses constantly threaten human mental health, in part due to inappropriate urban environments and residences. This increases the significance of examining the urban environment to reduce the existing stresses. The purpose of this paper was to present better ways of designing high-rise buildings considering their impact on citizens’ mental health as well as to identify how the influence works. Therefore, the main questions of the study are as follows. What relationship is there between high-rise buildings and citizens’ mental health? How can height affect citizens’ mental health? In the present study, a qualitative approach was taken using the method of Grounded Theory. After in-depth interviews made in person with citizens, the transcripts were summarized and encoded in the three open, axial, and selective stages, and the grounded model was finally extracted by the MAXQDA data analysis software. The participants in the interviews included 24 citizens, 13 men and 11 women aged 17-65 years. Theoretical consecutive purposive sampling was used, where sampling would continue until adequacy (saturation) was achieved for theorization. It should be noted that saturation was achieved as felt by the researcher with comments from 8 men and 8 women—a total of 16 participants—, but the interviews continued, amounting to 24 with 8 additional ones, which served to ensure the achievement of saturation (although no changes were made in the eventual data). The findings demonstrated that high-rise buildings cause mental pressure in citizens due to issues such as improper enclosure, physical-visual consequences, sub-climate generation, landscape restrictions, social difficulties, overlook, urban area heterogeneity, and negative environmental effects and citizens’ long-term involvement in emotional reactions resulting from the mental pressure affects their mental health. With a frequency of 73, the issue of improper enclosure was found to be the most popular among citizens in the set of situational issues, playing a major role in the emergence of the interactive issues and the consequential ones as a result. It was followed by the issues sub-climate generation (with a frequency of 57), physical-visual consequences (with a frequency of 55), landscape restrictions (with a frequency of 30), urban area heterogeneity (with a frequency of 25), overlook (with a frequency of 22), and social difficulties (with a frequency of 12), in that order.