Moss, Mold, and the Mental: A City Snapshot

It does not rain often in the city. But when it does, the rain does not ponder. The thick pattering soon turns the flat concrete roofs into small ponds because of dead leaves or plastic clogging the drains. The street cats seek refuge under cars, in ruins, or house entries, sometimes meowing until a human companion lets them in. The doves squat under bridges and on the nearby school’s window sills. As a tenant opens the door for a street cat, gusts of rain enter with the furry. The strong thunder lets the neighbor's dogs howl. The tenant shivers. Not from the cold, but from the storm’s rumble, reminding her nervous system of previously witnessed sounds of destruction and death; of exposure to the sky and the violence it may have in store from neighboring countries.

The Mental and the City

(More-than-)Human beings experience cities very differently. For some, they can’t be loud and buzzing enough; for others, a busy street or a subway ride may be of unbearable mental or physical strain. While cities surely offer several advantages (such as more jobs, social networks, and entertainment), they also expose their citizens to a variety of environmental stressors. Among these are noise, light, smell, air, soil, water, and electromagnetic pollution (Hellbrück and Kals, 2012; Toronyi, 2021; Tota et al., 2024). The highly unequal access to and lack of green urban spaces, as well as the overall disconnection to a more-than-human world, only exacerbate the stressors experienced in cities (Anguelovski et al., 2020; Braubach et al., 2017; Haase et al., 2017; Kua and Sia, 2016; McAllister et al., 2022). Then again, (sonic) warfare, conflict, and extreme weather events, among other crises, directly affect the mental health of urban residents, leaving a vast amount of citizens with anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), or, at times, with traumata that last for generations (Arafat and Hossain, 2026; Tota et al., 2024). 

In other words, city environments and urban upbringing can affect and trigger new and existing mental health issues (Costa E Silva and Steffen, 2019; Okkels et al., 2017). However, while city designs and planning keep favoring so-called ‘neurotypical’ and ‘mentally healthy’ citizens, critical urban scholars and activists increasingly look at how the neurodivergent community and those grappling with mental disorders perceive their urban environments; and how we can live up to the community’s spatial justice and right to the city (McAllister et al., 2022; Sarraf, 2025; Toronyi, 2021; Vanolo, 2023). 

After a few days of rain, the sun is back over the city. Some roofs have fully dried off; others are covered with sparkling green moss or short grasses. During the rainy days, the ‘cat rescuer’ had spent the days inside. So did the cat with her. But the tenant stays inside also during the sunshine. The outside is too loud, too bright. Some days, she forgets the passing of time by glaring for hours at the walls in her shadowy yard. They are green from moss, lichen, and mold. Sometimes a yellow flower peeks through the rough and crumbling walls. Last week, she lost another job. Three months before, another. She couldn’t make it outside. Just the idea of it was too dreadful.

Mold and Housing Inequality

Certainly, urban environmental stressors are coupled with at least as many socioeconomic ones. These can include finding a, staying in, and ‘feeling at’ home (Gotby, 2025). They can also include finding and staying in a job (or managing several at once), to name a few. In this context, the urban neurodivergent community and those suffering from mental disorders experience more difficulties accessing housing and face a higher risk of housing instability and homelessness (Newman and Goldman, 2009; Padgett, 2020). Vice versa, poor housing conditions, including mold or toxins exposure, inadequate sanitation or heating, overcrowding, too high rents, or eviction threats, can trigger mental health issues, such as anxiety, depression, or sleep issues (Bentley et al., 2025; Mason et al., 2024; Padgett, 2020). 

The tenant stares at the mold in her kitchen and above her bed. The landlord had painted over it before she moved in. However, the rain gave the thick, damp mold enough nourishment to eat through the white paint of her one-bedroom apartment. In the kitchen corner, the tenant sticks her finger into the black, moldy coating on the wall. To her dread and simultaneous exhilaration, the finger vanished almost fully in the damp wall. 

‚This moldy thing must be feeling soo stuffed to the gills!‘ She chuckles, indulging in this imagination of her moldy companion. Then chuckles again, catching herself having such an imagination in the first place. This morning, she got a letter from the landlord. The bills are due. And he also wants to renovate. In short, she has to leave the apartment before July, in no less than two months. 

Diagnoses and Public Stigma

Diagnoses of neurodivergence and mental health disorders can have a devastating effect on the person receiving it, while for others, they can be of enormous relief, finally delivering an explanation for why they ever felt off (Aftab, 2024). Some feel the need to talk their everyday challenges out loud and share them publicly, others just prefer silence, preferring not to give their mental companion such power and spotlight (Degerman, 2026). 

Even if there is a diagnosis, sometimes overlapping ones, none look the same, are experienced the same: Autism equals not autism, schizophrenia not schizophrenia, PTSD not PTSD, borderline syndrome not borderline syndrome, depression not depression. The list is long. All lie on a vast spectrum, in line with “the broad commonwealth of earthly life“ (Abram, 2024: 342). 

However, no matter how the neurodivergent community and those suffering from mental health disorders experience or address their diagnosis, the subject remains exposed to public stigma and discrimination, disenfranchisement in policymaking, or, as we saw, to uninhabitable living conditions (Corrigan and Penn, 2015; Filer, 2019; Shorter, 2017; Telles-Correia et al., 2018). 

Once, there was a tiny tree breaking the asphalted ground in the tenant’s beloved shady yard. But her neighbor cut it. How angry and sad she got! She was blindly mad at him but did not find the courage to say anything. The incident left her ruminating for days. First, because of the lost young tree, then about her discouragement not to confront the neighbor and her social anxiety; her anxiety about anything and everything!

An Abacterial Binary

From a personal perspective, the beauty of my neurodivergent loved ones or those marked by a mental disorder helped me create my own definition of love and acceptance – and of seeing the city. I also witnessed how it is particularly those of my fellow people who require the more-than-human world more existentially to calm their nervous systems in overstimulating city environments; who are particularly equipped with the sensitivities to see, hear, smell, touch, cherish and emphasise with their more-than-human urban inhabitants; who are humble enough to experience “those moments of imaginative overwhelm wherein we lose ourselves in […] the graceful, collective swerves of a flock of starlings, or while watching a spider spinning its web“ (Abram, 2024: 345). 

Until today, the topic has left me wondering: is there anyone who can actually be said to perceive their urban environment ‘in default mode’? Are we not all perceiving on a wide spectrum? Without disregarding the actual (and often tremendous) challenges experienced by people with neurodivergence or mental disorders, in my opinion, this artificial, ‚abacterial‘ binary between the ‚neurtotypical’, the ‘mentally healthy’ and the ‚rest’ remains an increasingly moldy thing to grasp - a bit slimy and, most of all, destructive to our health and what we call a ‚home‘. 

Not only inside the apartment, but also on the walls of the ruins of the adjacent nine-story building, black mold has proudly expanded its territory. However, it is closely accompanied by the green and grey lichen, which seems to have found all the more grip on the ruin’s bullet-ridden walls, its abandoned balconies, and broken windows. Whose memories must be living there, bouncing between the empty rooms that were once full of bustle, music, fights, and laughter?

Moss on urban asphalt

What does ‚mentally fitting in’ mean in the first place? Apart from the definition provided by ours truly, the ‘Capitalocene’ (Haraway, 2016), where the ‚fit-ins‘ represent those who feed into the capitalistic system based on their ‘productive’, able, market-curbing performance with the ‘right’ looks, sexual orientation, age, nationality, race, class, and gender (to name a few possible factors for discrimination in the Capitalocene). Similarly, Gotby (2025) speaks about the so-called „surplus population“, a term coined by Renwick and Shilliam (2022), in the context of the UK’s housing system. The notion refers to those people perceived as ‘disposable’, comprising “those who are not working or those in low-waged, precarious, and unskilled work” (Gotby, 2025: 67) and thus cannot (or not any longer) satisfy the Capitalocene’s thirst for constant accumulation and commodification. The discriminating and selectively disvaluing force of the Capitalocene also affects the more-than-human: as long as plants, animals, rocks, water bodies, winds, or the sun provide resources, they’re in the game. Otherwise, discarded. Rip it off, please, this ugly moss on the asphalt road!

The hope of this semi-fictional urban snapshot is therefore to nudge our seeing of the city beyond neurotypical-neurodiverse binaries, beyond stigmatizing policies, and an urban design for those ‘fitting in’. Instead, it calls for spatializing the emotions, sensations, mental overstimulation, and stress; for the neurospicy, those with mental disorders and the more-than-human living in the city; for the loud and silent ones, for those navigating cities - excited, exhausted, excluded – day in day out. 

About the author:

Bruna Rohling is a PhD candidate at ETH Zurich. Trained as an urban planner, she researches the urban humanitarian governance of forcibly displaced people in times of polycrisis, focusing on Beirut, Lebanon. Apart from her PhD project, Bruna hopes to make the city experiences of the neurodiverse community and our more-than-human fellow critters more visible, especially by combining creative with academic writing.

References

Abram D (2024) On the Origin of the Phrase ‘More-Than-Human’. In: Rodríguez-Garavito C (ed) More Than Human Rights: An Ecology of Law, Thought and Narrative for Earthly Flourishing. New York: NYU Law, pp. 341–347.

Aftab A (2024) What a psychiatric diagnosis means – and what it doesn’t mean. Available at: https://psyche.co/ideas/what-a-psychiatric-diagnosis-means-and-what-it-doesnt-mean (accessed 9 April 2026).

Anguelovski I, Brand AL, Connolly JJT, et al. (2020) Expanding the Boundaries of Justice in Urban Greening Scholarship: Toward an Emancipatory, Antisubordination, Intersectional, and Relational Approach. Annals of the American Association of Geographers 110(6): 1743–1769.

Arafat SMY and Hossain S (2026) War, socio-political conflict and Geopsychiatry. Geopsychiatry 3: 100043.

Bentley R, Mason K, Jacobs D, et al. (2025) Housing as a social determinant of health: a contemporary framework. The Lancet. Public health 10(10): e855-e864.

Braubach M, Egorov A, Mudu P, et al. (2017) Effects of Urban Green Space on Environmental Health, Equity and Resilience. In: Kabisch N, Korn H, Stadler J and Bonn A (eds) Nature-Based Solutions to Climate Change Adaptation in Urban Areas: Linkages between Science, Policy and Practice: Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp. 187–205.

Corrigan PW and Penn DL (2015) Lessons from social psychology on discrediting psychiatric stigma. Stigma and Health 1(S): 2–17.

Costa E Silva JA and Steffen RE (2019) Urban environment and psychiatric disorders: a review of the neuroscience and biology. Metabolism: clinical and experimental 100S: 153940.

Degerman D (2026) What mental health campaigns get wrong about silence. Available at: https://psyche.co/ideas/for-some-with-mental-illness-its-not-always-good-to-talk (accessed 9 April 2026).

Filer N (2019) The Heartland: Finding and losing schizophrenia. London: Faber & Faber.

Gotby A (2025) Feeling at Home: Transforming the Politics of Housing. London, New York: Verso.

Haase D, Kabisch S, Haase A, et al. (2017) Greening cities – To be socially inclusive? About the alleged paradox of society and ecology in cities. Habitat International 64: 41–48.

Haraway D (2016) Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene. In: Haraway D (ed) Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, London: Duke University Press, pp. 30–57.

Hellbrück J and Kals E (2012) Umweltbelastungen, Stress und Gesundheit. In: Hellbrück J and Kals E (eds) Umweltpsychologie: Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, pp. 33–46.

Kua EH and Sia A (2016) Green Environment and Mental Health in the City. In: Jorgensen PM, Okkels N and Kristiansen CB (eds) Mental Health and Illness in the City: Singapore: Springer Singapore, pp. 1–20.

Mason KE, Alexiou A, Li A, et al. (2024) The impact of housing insecurity on mental health, sleep and hypertension: Analysis of the UK Household Longitudinal Study and linked data, 2009-2019. Social science & medicine (1982) 351: 116939.

McAllister K, McBeth A and Galway N (2022) Autism spectrum condition and the built environment. Cities & Health 6(6): 1164–1178.

Newman S and Goldman H (2009) Housing Policy for Persons With Severe Mental Illness. Policy Studies Journal 37(2): 299–324.

Okkels N, Kristiansen CB and Munk-Jørgensen P (2017) Review of Urban Mental Health. In: Okkels N, Kristiansen CB and Munk-Jorgensen P (eds) Mental Health and Illness in the City: Singapore: Springer Singapore, pp. 1–13.

Padgett DK (2020) Homelessness, housing instability and mental health: making the connections. BJPsych bulletin 44(5): 197–201.

Renwick D and Shilliam R (2022) Squalor. Agenda Publishing.

Sarraf M (2025) Autism in urban planning: in search of a theoretical framework. Cities & Health 9(1): 160–175.

Shorter E (2017) History of Urban Mental Illness. In: Okkels N, Kristiansen CB and Munk-Jorgensen P (eds) Mental Health and Illness in the City: Singapore: Springer Singapore, pp. 1–9.

Telles-Correia D, Saraiva S and Gonçalves J (2018) Mental Disorder-The Need for an Accurate Definition. Frontiers in psychiatry 9: 64.

Toronyi D (2021) Hidden geographies: design for neurodivergent ways of hearing and sensing. Cities & Health 5(1-2): 133–137.

Tota M, Karska J, Kowalski S, et al. (2024) Environmental pollution and extreme weather conditions: insights into the effect on mental health. Frontiers in psychiatry 15: 1389051.

Vanolo A (2023) Autistic cities: critical urbanism and the politics of neurodiversity. City 27(1-2): 190–208.