Publish at November 19 2025 Updated November 19 2025
Today, our cities concentrate the majority of human (70%) and intellectual activity. They offer an abundance of information, technologies and opportunities for encounters; but they also modify our bodies, our senses and our attention. The desire to learn, and even more to learn together, is both stimulated and hindered.
Distance from the living is not just an ecological fact: it shapes our inner landscapes and our ways of relating to one another.
Screen time is now at record levels.
These figures reflect an urbanization of the gaze: the denser the environment, the more time spent in the world via screens. Excessive screen use fragments attentional availability and alters mental equilibrium. Adolescent girls who spend more than four hours a day in front of a screen are at increased risk of anxiety or depressive symptoms (Public Health Agency of Canada, 2025).
In the act of learning, this dispersion translates into a decline in curiosity, and a reduced ability to contemplate, listen and co-elaborate. The omnipresent digital becomes both a tool for accessing knowledge and a filter that reduces the sensory diversity of reality.
Environments shape our ocular gestures. Eye-tracking studies have shown that, in urban landscapes, the gaze moves rapidly, scanning artificial surfaces, while in a natural environment it lingers longer, revealing a calmer attentional state.
The Nature Gaze experiment (Tavares et al., 2024) demonstrates that, even on a 45-minute walk in the city, the simple act of consciously directing attention to trees or foliage increases the sense of mental restoration. So nature is not just a setting, it educates our gaze.
In the city, fixations are brief, eye micro-movements more numerous; perception is continuous, action-oriented. In nature, on the other hand, the gaze is free to drift - a condition for contemplative learning, capable of wonder. This difference influences the desire to learn: in an environment saturated with urban signals, attention becomes strategic; in a living environment, it becomes relational.
European research on access to quiet areas shows that, in large cities, the majority of inhabitants do not have a space where the average noise level remains below 55 dB(A) within a 400 m radius of their home (European Topic Centre on Air Pollution, Transport, Noise and Industrial Pollution, 2021). In other words, silence - a prerequisite for attentional restoration - is becoming rare.
Constant mechanical noise masks the sounds of life: birdsong, rustling leaves, the wind. A European study has confirmed that anthropogenic noise reduces acoustic diversity and the presence of birds in urban environments (Rhodes et al., 2023). This sensory impoverishment affects motivation to learn: it deprives the mind of an environment capable of nourishing the imagination and sensitive memory. Attention, saturated, can no longer rest, and with it the relationship to slowness, essential to reflective and collective learning, is extinguished.
Built-up density distances residents from spaces where living things freely manifest themselves. Peña et al (2023) found that only 31% of bird species "use" urban environments, compared with 49% that avoid them. Less observable diversity means fewer opportunities for identification and shared conversations about living things.
Research shows that familiarity with the objects of commercial culture goes far beyond knowledge of living things. For example, Balmford et al (2002) showed that British children were more likely to identify Pokémon characters (78% success rate) than common wild animal species (53%).
Other studies confirm the high recognition of commercial logos: Fischer et al. (1991) already observed that children aged 3 to 6 recognized up to 91% of the logos studied. Conversely, according to Stagg (2022), knowledge of plants depends closely on their place in everyday experience: the more relevant a plant is perceived to be in a person's life, the more it is recognized and identified. Conversely, in the urban societies of high-income countries, where direct contact with spontaneous or cultivated plants is diminishing, familiarity with the plant world tends to diminish - a phenomenon described as plant blindness, i.e. a form of blindness to the presence and diversity of living vegeta.
The city teaches familiarity with the commercial sign, not with the trace of living things. Learning together presupposes shared sensitive references: sounds, smells, landscapes. If these disappear, the collective loses its shared anchorage. The commercial environment tends to isolate rather than link consciousness. Yet the desire to learn together is based on a shared experience of the environment: a breathable, sonorous, inhabited space.
Yet big cities are not just a place of impoverishment. They encourage networking, rapid access to knowledge and the emergence of learning communities. Training platforms, coworking spaces, educational third places and shared gardens are micro-environments where life reappears.
The work of Felappi et al (2024) shows that the presence of a body of water or plant diversity in an urban park enhances cognitive restoration and user well-being. The living environment, however small, acts as a catalyst for social bonds and cooperation. Hybrid environments - combining digital and sensory elements - also offer powerful leverage.
Educational research shows that "immersive learning" or "learning by walking" approaches reactivate curiosity and dialogue. The city, if it opens up to times of silence, greenery and shared attention, can once again become a collective learning environment.
The desire to learn depends not only on the content, but also on the attentional environment. In a world of screens and noise, motivation becomes fragile; cognitive fatigue, constant. Conversely, environments that encourage contemplation, slowness and co-presence increase readiness to learn.
The ecology of attention (Citton, 2014) invites us to recognize that knowledge is also born of the quality of our view of the world. Re-anchoring learning in the living world, even in an urban context, means restoring perceptive diversity: allowing pauses in silence, sensory walks, collective experiences of nature. By learning to see and feel together, urban communities can reinvent the desire to learn.
References
Public Health Agency of Canada (2025). Recreational screen time and mental health among Canadian children and youth. Ottawa: Government of Canada.
Balmford, A., Clegg, L., Coulson, T., & Taylor, J. (2002). Why conservationists should heed Pokémon. Science, 295(5564), 2367-2367.
Citton, Y. (2014). Pour une écologie de l'attention. Paris : Seuil.
Felappi, J. F. (2024). The Role of Green Infrastructure Quality for Healthier and Biodiverse Cities A One Health Approach for Reconciling People and Wildlife Needs. Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universitaet Bonn (Germany).
Fischer, P. M., Schwartz, M. P., Richards, J. W., Goldstein, A. O., & Rojas, T. H. (1991). Brand logo recognition by children aged 3 to 6 years: Mickey Mouse and Old Joe the Camel. JAMA, 266(22),
Kumar, S., et al. (2023). Screen time and lifestyle differences between urban and rural adolescents in India. Journal of Public Health Research, 12(3).
Luquezi, A. (2025). Assessing accessibility to quiet and green areas at the city scale. Landscape and Urban Planning, 242, 106936.
Pena, J. C., Ovaskainen, O., MacGregor-Fors, I., Teixeira, C. P., & Ribeiro, M. C. (2023). The relationships between urbanization and bird functional traits across the streetscape. Landscape and Urban Planning, 232, 104685.
Rhodes, M. et al. (2023). Anthropogenic noise reduces avian diversity in urban habitats. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, 11, 1252632.
Montana, J., Ferguson, C., & Marshall, T. (2023). Large-scale social surveys on people and nature relations: Report on the state of the art in the UK.
Stagg, B. C., & Dillon, J. (2022). Plant awareness is linked to plant relevance: A review of educational and ethnobiological literature (1998-2020). Plants, People, Planet, 4(6), 579-592.
Toigo, S., Wang, C., Prince, S. A., Varin, M., Roberts, K. C., & Betancourt, M. T. (2025). Screen leisure time and mental health in Canadian children and youth. Health Promotion and Chronic Disease Prevention in Canada, 45(7/8). https://www. canada.ca/content/dam/phac-aspc/documents/services/reports-publications/health-promotion-chronic-disease-prevention-canada-research-policy-practice/vol-45-no-7-8-2025/temps-loisir-ecran-sante-mentale-enfants-jeunes-canadiens.pdf
Tavares, L. et al. (2024). The Nature Gaze: Eye-tracking experiment reveals well-being benefits derived from directing visual attention towards elements of nature. People and Nature, 6(3), 715-729.
European Topic Centre on Human health and the environment. https://www.eionet.europa.eu/etcs/etc-he/products/etc-he-products/etc-he-reports/etc-he-report-2025-3-access-to-quiet-green-areas-in-european-urban-centres-direct-service-contract-no-3506-ro-regind-eea-59966-no-4100-r0-regind-eea-60379
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