ASCUP 2015 - ASEAN Student Conference on Urban Psychology

ASEAN Student Conference on Urban Psychology (ASCUP) is presented by the Psychology Faculty of Universitas Indonesia. Following the major themes promoted by Psychology Summit in 2015, Cities and Wellbeing, the topics that will be discussed in ASCUP include urban issues and psychological well-being of people living in urban areas. We invite psychology students (or other related disciplines) all over ASEAN to submit papers to be presented in ASCUP 2015. The 15 best abstracts will be selected for oral presentation and the others will be selected for hard copy poster presentation.
THEME: Cities and Wellbeing
ASCUP will set up four major sub-themes as discussion topics, but are not limited to:
Social Responsibility
"Do I live individually apart from my community? What do I hope to achieve from being ignorant? These are questions that should be answered by urban citizens to improve their attitudes toward their community."
One discussion of urban psychology is social responsibility, people's behavior that begin to ignore the value of awareness torward their sourroundings. In other words, the participation of the individual in living side by side in a society only to the extent of self-interest and ignoring the common interest. Milgram explains this occurs due to adaptive behavior because of the large stimulus in urban area communities. Stimulus in urban environment itself is the number of interactions that insert into the individual (eg, humans, vehicles, buildings, sound, etc.). As a result, urban communities tend to pay attention to what suits his needs and not paying attention to what is useless against him. This is commonly referred to as the individualistic nature of society. This resulted in, the difficulty of building urban regularity, loss of cultural mutual help, to increasingly high crime.
Urban Deprivation
"The poor move to big cities with large hopes to upgrade their financial income but face the opposite. The harsh reality of city life is there’s no mercy for the weak, cities systematically drag the unfortunate into poverty, educational problems, health problems, etc."
The flow of people to move in town bring several impacts. In addition to making populations grow, they also carry the outflow of people who do not have the skilled ability to come to urban areas. In addition, the lack of peoples skills who moved to the city resultes in them losing competitiveness over opportunities in the urban population. Even some of the cases mentioned they chose the profession as beggars and perpetrators of crime. It certainly can affect the convenience of living in urban areas.
Environmental Stress
"The density of cities challenges city inhabitants to indulge in severe competition. Hundreds of hours are spent every week on the road struggling through traffic. Various types of pollutions that is derived from city density completes the misery. Are there any possible solutions to counter these problems? Is environmental stress inevitable?"
One of the factors that cause public inconvenience is the poor condition of the urban environment. An uncomfortable environment will result in increased stress levels of society. Evans and Cohen (1987) states that there are four main causes of environmental stress. Stressor consists of noise, crowding, heat (heat) and air pollution. In addition, other factors such as inadequate public facilities, rubbish, etc. can also cause the city to decrease the welfare of society. It is one of the serious problems if we are going to discuss the interaction between humans and the environment.
Humans and the environment is a unity which affect each other and can not be separated from one another. When one stressor is present in the environment, such as air pollution, it will have an impact on human beings. Air pollution in major cities today as much as approximately 70-80 percent comes from the transportation sector and air pollution from motor vehicles. If this threshold is exceeded it will cause health problems in humans (Hadriani, 2014). In addition to health problems, air pollution also affects the social, economic, education, and agriculture and plantations. In the economic aspect, the World Bank found the impact of air pollution on the Indonesian economy was 1.8 trillion and in 2015 will reach 4.3 trillion (Sigana) and in the social aspect, air pollution can impede daily activities of citizens. Stressor led to stress in humans will have an impact on mental health and can reduce the well-being of the person.
Public Spaces
"We always meet each other on a daily basis at public spaces. However, we rarely recognize the importance of public spaces in our life. How do urban citizens define public spaces? And how do public spaces affect their lives?"
Public space has great access to the surrounding environment, a meeting place for the users of public space and the behavior of people who use public spaces from each other to follow the local applicable norm. (Scurton in Studyanto, 2009). Public space is a place for recreational activities. Recreation is one of the things that humans need for recreation that is expected to be able to restore individual actors either whole body, mind, and spirit (Kellly in Mulanto, 2010). However, the public space still recieves less attention. This is evidenced by many open green spaces which is one part of the public space, still used for the construction of malls. For example, in South Jakarta area there are two large mall that occupies land that should be reserved for green open space. The sad fact is other than as a green space area, the land is also used for water catchment areas (Desyani, 2013).
Public open space will affect how individuals release pressure in life. Based on its function, the public space is a human need, especially in urban areas that have a higher life stress (Mulanto, 2010). The concept of space itself is not only in the city center but can be developed into an open space in a densely populated residential areas. In addition, the open space is a manifestation of fear and anxiety. In the absence of open space, a sense of belonging among residents of the city to the surrounding environment can not be formed. Through this, we can establish an intervention against urban communities that have activities together so as not to dwell on their own environment.