Many types of contamination can be recognized. Some persist over time and are cumulative, while others develop in the moment and can be reversed immediately. The environmental pollution, the pollution of the air, the contamination of the soil, the contamination of water and noise pollution are some of the most common types of contamination.
This time we are going to focus on visual pollution, which appears when the visualization of a landscape or the environment is made impossible by the overabundance of posters, antennas, cables and other non-architectural elements. This pollution is common in large cities, although it can also arise in small towns and rural areas.
If dozens of billboards and electricity poles are installed in a street, and also in buildings you can see mobile phone antennas (cell phones) and chimneys, visual pollution is generated. People can no longer clearly see different details of the environment because their visualization is hampered by these pollutants. The situation can cause anxiety, excitement, and a sense of chaos.
In short, we can say that visual pollution occurs when humans install too many artificial structures in a given place, to the point of making it difficult to correctly perceive the natural landscape. This begins, needless to say, with the creation of settlements such as towns and cities, the starting point of the process of alteration of the planet that characterizes us so much.
While some people seem to live comfortably in an environment where visual pollution reigns, others experience various negative symptoms, in addition to those listed above, such as headaches, stress, bad mood, attention problems, nervous system disorders and a marked deficit of efficiency in their daily tasks.
When we saturate a landscape with colors and elements, we not only make visualization and spatial orientation difficult, but we also generate in the individuals who must move in it a much greater mental effort to decode their environment, and it is then that the wear and tear that leads us begins. to the aforementioned health disorders.
While people with vision problems turn to glasses to read small texts, for example, there is no resource that can help us reduce the impact that saturation caused by visual pollution causes on our brain.
Visual pollution can also constitute a risk for motorists. When visual stimuli are excessive and even block traffic signals, drivers may not be able to focus their attention on the road and cause accidents.
Currently there are initiatives that seek to reduce visual pollution with the aim of ordering public space and highlighting urban or natural attractions. Among the most common measures are the removal of billboards and the prohibition of fixing new non-architectural structures.
It is not necessary to be an expert in the field to know that today’s life is characterized by an excess of information and that much of it is presented in the form of advertising. Although we spend a large part of our day on the Internet, we are far from a reality in which the material world has lost importance or, from the point of view of advertisers, effectiveness. For this reason, the streets continue to be a suitable place to put up billboards.
It is important to note that there are urban regulations that have been specifically designed to avoid the placement of dangerous or overloaded elements on public roads, and it is the task of local governments to carry out the pertinent follow-up to ensure that no one violates them.