It’s official: Boring cities are bad for your health

Today, a significant proportion of people live in towns and cities that have grown up around commerce, industry and automobiles. Think the docks of Liverpool, the factories of Osaka, the motoring passion of New York’s Robert Moses, or the low-density sprawl of modern Riyadh. Several of these places have been created with human health in mind. Meanwhile, as humanity shifts its center of gravity to cities, there is an alarming increase in diseases such as depression, cancer and diabetes.

This mismatch between humans and our habitat should come as no surprise. From the second half of the 20th century, leading thinkers such as the American writer and activist Jane Jacobs and the Danish architect Jan Gehl began to emphasize that our cities were inhumanely shaped by boring buildings, empty spaces and brutal highways.

Their work has been widely read but also marginalized by the construction industry. It was an inconvenient truth that seemed at odds with mainstream architectural thought, with its harsh and often unpleasant aesthetic style. The difficulty was that while Jacobs and Gehl highlighted very real problems experienced by specific communities, in the absence of hard evidence, they could only refer to isolated case studies and their own rhetoric. The recent availability of new sophisticated brain mapping and behavioral learning techniques, such as the use of wearable devices that measure our body’s response to our environment, means that it is increasingly difficult for the construction industry’s echo chamber to ignore the responses of millions of people. to the places he created.

Once confined to the lab, these neuroscientific and “neuroarchitectural” research methods have now taken to the streets. Colin Ellard’s Urban Realities Lab at the University of Waterloo in Canada has led pioneering research in this area. Funded by the EU emotional cities The project is currently being implemented in Lisbon, London, Copenhagen and Michigan. Frank Suurenbroek and Gideon Spanjar Sensing street scenes Tested in Amsterdam and Institute of Human Architecture and Planning He took the same step in New York and Washington.

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

Their findings already inform the work of my studio and many others, such as the Danish practice NORD Architects. Alzheimer Village in DaxFrance. It is a large-scale care home that mimics the layout of a medieval fortified town in the “bastide” style. The idea is to create a comfortable, familiar design for many residents whose ability to find their way has weakened with age.

Although these may appear to be isolated cases, there are encouraging signs that the once research-resistant construction and building design industries are beginning to change. Generative AI has already changed the way architecture works. Once a novelty, it is now an essential tool. If we incorporate neuro-architectural findings into these AI models, the change can be even more dramatic.

Meanwhile, progressive urban leaders are beginning to link their obsession with economic growth with human well-being. Rokhsana Fiaz, the mayor of Newham in East London in Great Britain, has made happiness and health one of the main indicators of her economic strategy. Now that we can measure health in more sophisticated ways, I’m sure more will follow. People will realize the direct contribution of building facades to public health and human well-being and will start spreading the word.

Very soon, I think, property developers will need to consider neuroscientific findings as key information alongside structural load calculations, energy efficiency, lighting and acoustics. The man in the street will welcome this change. Not only because it will improve our health, but simply because it will make our world more cheerful and attractive.