How crowded a place feels

The urban researcher Piret Veeroja surveyed 1,908 private renters in Australia in mid-2020, as the first lockdown restrictions were easing. Renters in shared arrangements reported loneliness and isolation 3.7 to 18.3% above other household types, and worry and anxiety 8.5 to 13.2% above. When the regressions were run, the strongest contributors were the pandemic-related mental and financial variables rather than the housing conditions. Only accumulated housing problems held as a housing measure, and only in the worry model.

The environmental health researcher Vusumuzi Nkosi measured the physical side across eleven years. In two low-income Johannesburg neighbourhoods surveyed between 2006 and 2016, with 3,121 households answering across the period, 57.6% of dwellings were overcrowded against international guidelines, and the share did not move. The odds ratio for diarrhoea in extremely overcrowded dwellings was 2.57, with a confidence interval of 1.15 to 5.75. Respiratory symptoms rose too, and fever or chills reached 1.49 and 1.60 for moderate and extreme overcrowding.

Nkosi also reports that what people said about their own crowding did not match the objective measure of it.

The housing researcher Alfred Michael Dockery makes that the whole argument. Australian indicators of household crowding count occupants against available space. Crowding is something else: the psychological response to a sense of excessive density. The two regularly diverge, and funding requirements, the mix of housing stock and the rules for allocating families to public housing all use occupant density. This is a policy analysis of how Australia measures, not a study of a sample of people.

2 small studies try to catch the experience directly. The environmental scientist Zhaoxi Zhang put a wearable camera, an Empatica wristband and a GPS logger on 26 people in Salzburg and used image recognition to detect crowds, seating, vehicles and bikes in the first-person video, then matched those against skin conductance and skin temperature. The architecture researcher Fereshteh Sadeghpoor had 16 adults aged 20 to 30 walk three streets in an EEG headset: one dominated by greenery, one by cars, one pedestrianised. Stress was highest on the car street and lowest on the green one. Sadeghpoor’s conclusion is that the greenery did more to lower stress than removing the traffic did.

Nkosi ran eleven years of panel data. The 1,908 renters in Veeroja’s survey answered once, in mid-2020, which is both what makes the finding interesting and what makes it hard to generalise. Zhang worked with 26 people and Sadeghpoor with 16.