Logan Voss
The five senses are essential for every developing child and adult, and we all must learn our limits. Cities are often built for entertainment, sights, and social interaction. However, cities can overwhelm the senses, causing overstimulation and increased sensitivity to things like noise, light, and even visuals. Here’s how to reduce visual pollution in your community.
What Is Visual Pollution?
Visual pollution is characterized by disorganization, sloppy order, or deterioration of human-made, artificial landscapes. Design organization is a problem for many areas.
Plenty of cities flourish with well-defined areas of popular attractions, billboards, and other stimuli. However, many have accumulated too much to the point it has negatively altered the natural landscape.
Many cities attempt to balance their aesthetics carefully, but it doesn’t always work well. Too many buildings and attractions create clutter, severely disrupting a neighborhood’s ambiance. Things like buildings and billboards need to be limited.
Although some cities may organize their designs better, that doesn’t mean they don’t have areas to fix. Instead of adding more artificial landscapes, there needs to be a push for limiting artificial areas and embracing more of the natural environment.
Limit How Businesses Advertise
Most cities, college towns, and smaller municipalities have too many billboards. Even though it’s nice to see advertising, it can become too much, leading to further deterioration of a town. So, cities need to limit how much a business advertises in town and encourage them to promote their products in other ways, such as through social media.
By going digital, towns limit the need to update and build more billboards to advertise businesses. Also, drivers and pedestrians won’t be distracted in high-traffic areas, especially along intersections and highways.
Add Buildings That Fit
A building must fit in a space to work for a town’s design. Without a proper evaluation of a new home or office building design, towns create an eyesore, generating a severe visual problem. Additionally, poor maintenance plays a part as some material types aren’t durable.
Instead of only considering the height of a future building or its potential use, you should look over the materials architects plan to use. A good, sustainable town will benefit from using stainless steel for its fabrication project. It’s a durable material that bends and twists into any design you want.
Educate the Town
While you look toward updating the town center, focus on the reason to do so, and find designs that work with your city. Educating yourself and the architects on visual pollution can help modify plans to include more of the natural surroundings.
Including more of the natural landscape during city planning creates more opportunities for residents to enjoy the town without feeling overwhelmed by strange architecture or distracting billboard designs. Present this list of ways to limit visual pollution in your community to your building planners for a better outlook on the design and flow of your town.
