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

A large percentage of people today live in towns and cities that grew up around trade, industry, and the automobile. Think of the docks of Liverpool, the factories of Osaka, Robert Moses’ New York obsession with cars, or the low-density sprawl of modern Riyadh. A few of these places were created with human health in mind. At the same time, as humanity shifts its center of gravity to cities, there has been an alarming rise in diseases such as depression, cancer and diabetes.

This mismatch between humans and our environment should not come as a surprise. Since the second half of the twentieth century, pioneering thinkers such as American author and activist Jane Jacobs and Danish architect Jan Gehl have begun to highlight the inhumane way in which our cities are shaped, with their boring buildings, barren spaces, and brutal highways.

Their work has been widely read by the construction industry but at the same time marginalized. It was an inconvenient truth that seemed to contradict mainstream architectural thinking, with its austere and often unfriendly aesthetic. The challenge was that although Jacobs and Gill were highlighting very real problems plaguing particular communities, in the absence of hard evidence, they could only rely on isolated case studies and their own rhetoric to prove their point. But the recent availability of cutting-edge new technologies for brain mapping and behavioral study, such as the use of wearable devices that measure our bodies’ response to our surroundings, means it has become increasingly difficult for the construction industry echo chamber to continue to ignore the responses of millions of people. To the places he created.

Once confined to laboratories, these research methods in neuroscience and “neural architecture” have taken to the streets. Colin Ellard’s Urban Realities Lab at the University of Waterloo in Canada has led pioneering studies in the area. Funded by the European Union Electronic cities The project is now being implemented in Lisbon, London, Copenhagen, Michigan. Frank Sornbrock and Gideon Spanjar Streetscape sensing Trials were conducted in Amsterdam, and Institute of Architecture and Human Planning New York and Washington, DC, followed suit.

Just this year, the Humanity campaign partnered with Ellard to conduct a new international study looking at people’s psychological responses to different building facades. This was commissioned alongside a study by Cleo Valentine at the University of Cambridge, which is examining whether certain building facades can trigger neuroinflammation, drawing a direct link between a building’s appearance and a testable health outcome.

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

Although these may seem like isolated cases, there are encouraging signs that the construction and construction design industries – once particularly resistant to research – are beginning to change. Generative AI has already changed the way architecture works. This tool used to be new, but now it has become an essential tool. If we introduce neural architecture findings into these AI models, the shift could be even more dramatic.

At the same time, progressive city leaders began to link the obsession with economic growth with human well-being. In the UK, Roxana Fayyaz, mayor of Newham in east London, has made happiness and health one of the key performance indicators of her economic strategy. Now that we can measure health in more sophisticated ways, I’m convinced more will follow. People will recognize the direct contribution of building facades to public health and human flourishing and begin to spread the word.

I believe that very soon property developers may have to treat neuroscience findings as essential information to be weighed alongside calculations of structural loads, energy efficiency, lighting and acoustics. The person on the street will welcome this change. Not only because it will improve our health but simply because it will make our world more interesting and attractive.