It’s Official: Boring Cities Are Bad For Your Health

A significant proportion of people today live in towns and cities that have grown up around trade, industry and cars. Think Liverpool’s docks, Osaka’s factories, New York’s Robert Moses’ car obsession, or the low-density sprawl of modern Riyadh. Few of these places were created with human health in mind. Meanwhile, as humanity has shifted its center of gravity to the cities, there has been an alarming increase in diseases such as depression, cancer and diabetes.

This discrepancy between humans and our habitat should not come as a surprise. From the second half of the 20th century, pioneering thinkers such as the American author and activist Jane Jacobs and the Danish architect Jan Gehl began to highlight the inhuman way our cities were formed, with boring constructions, spaces barren and brutal roads.

His work has been widely read by the construction industry but simultaneously marginalized. It was an inconvenient truth that seemed to contradict mainstream architectural thinking, with its austere and often unsympathetic aesthetic style. The challenge was that, although Jacobs and Gehl highlighted the very real problems experienced by specific communities, in the absence of hard evidence, they could only rely on isolated case studies and their own rhetoric to make a point But the recent availability of sophisticated brain mapping and behavioral study techniques, such as the use of wearable devices that measure our body’s response to our surroundings, means that it has become much more difficult to echo chamber of the construction industry to keep ignoring the answers of millions of people. to the places he created.

Once restricted to the laboratory, these neuroscientific and “neuroarchitectural” research methods have taken to the streets. Colin Ellard’s Urban Reality Lab at the University of Waterloo in Canada has led pioneering studies in the area. Funded by the EU Emotional cities The project is now running in Lisbon, London, Copenhagen and Michigan. Frank Suurenbroek and Gideon Spanjar of Sensing Streetscapes they performed trials in Amsterdam, and the Institute of Human Architecture and Planning followed suit in New York and Washington, DC.

Just this year, the Humanize Campaign partnered with Ellard to lead a new international study investigating people’s psychological responses to different building facades. This was commissioned alongside a study by Cleo Valentine at the University of Cambridge, which examines whether certain building facades can lead to neuroinflammation – drawing a direct link between the appearance of a building and a verifiable health outcome .

Their findings have already informed the work of my studio and many others, such as the Danish practice NORD Architects, which drew on the latest research surrounding cognitive decline while designing its Alzheimer’s Village in DaxFrance. This is a large-scale nursing home that mimics the layout of a medieval fortified town in the “bastide” style. The idea is to create a comfortable and familiar design for many of the residents whose wayfinding abilities have weakened with age.

Although these may be isolated cases, there are encouraging signs that the construction industry and building design – once so particularly resistant to research – are beginning to change. Generative AI is already changing the way architecture works. Once a novelty, it is now an essential tool. If we inserted the neuro-architectural results into these AI models, the change could be even more dramatic.

Meanwhile, the city’s progressive leaders are beginning to link the obsession with economic growth to human well-being. In the United Kingdom, Rokhsana Fiaz, the mayor of Newham in East London, has made happiness and health one of the main performance indicators for his economic strategy. And now that we can measure health in more sophisticated ways, I’m sure more will follow. People have to understand the direct contribution of building facades to public health and human prosperity and start spreading the word.

Soon, I believe, the real estate developers could have treated the neuroscientific results as key information to be weighed with the calculations of structural loads, energy efficiency, lighting and acoustics. And the person on the street welcomes this change. Not only because it will improve our health, but simply because it will make our world much happier and more engaging.