Longing for More than People: A Cultural and Historical Dialogue for Understanding Loneliness and the Built Environment

Abstract

As loneliness is a concern for many, both due to its associations with adverse health outcomes and due to its, by definition, negative connotations for the individual, it is important to identify ways to address it. The built environment may be one such way. The aim of this conceptual paper is to present a dialogue for understanding associations between the built environment and loneliness. This dialogue, developed through iteratively examining points of convergence and divergence between fundamentally different perspectives, synthesizes the theoretical basis from which the literature departs, providing the reader with a heuristic view to foster greater conceptual understanding. The first of these perspectives emphasizes how the built environment may influence loneliness through the narratives and architecture of places; in the second perspective, the relationship is construed as reciprocal, and historical and biographical atmospheres of places merge with individual understandings; and, finally, a third perspective emphasizes how people themselves influence perceptions of the built environment through shared memories with other people and certain rituals. Through the presentation of these three perspectives, we will argue that loneliness is related both to other people and, through various pathways, to aspects of the built environment.