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

A significant proportion of people now live in cities that have developed around trade, industry and cars. Think of the docks of Liverpool, the factories of Osaka, the automobile obsession of New Yorker Robert Moses, or the low-density sprawl of modern Riyadh. Few of these places were created with human health in mind. As humanity has shifted its focus to cities, there has been an alarming rise in diseases such as depression, cancer and diabetes.

This disproportion between humans and our living space should not come as a surprise. Beginning in the second half of the 20th century, thought leaders such as American author and activist Jane Jacobs and Danish architect Jan Gehl began to highlight the inhumane ways in which our cities were designed with boring buildings, barren spaces, and brutal highways.

Her work was widely read and simultaneously marginalized by the construction industry. It was an inconvenient truth that seemed to contradict mainstream architectural thinking with its austere and often unfriendly aesthetic style. The challenge was that, although Jacobs and Gehl highlighted very real problems in particular communities, in the absence of hard evidence they could only rely on isolated case studies and their own rhetoric to make their point. But the recent availability of sophisticated new brain mapping and behavioral science techniques, such as the use of wearable devices that measure our body’s response to our environment, means that it is becoming increasingly difficult for the construction industry’s echo chamber to continue to monitor the reactions of millions of people ignore to the places it has created.

Once confined to the laboratory, these neuroscientific and “neuroarchitectural” research methods have now found their way onto the street. Colin Ellard’s Urban Realities Laboratory at the University of Waterloo in Canada has conducted groundbreaking studies in this area. The EU-funded EMOTIONAL cities The project is currently running in Lisbon, London, Copenhagen and Michigan. Frank Suurenbroek and Gideon Spanjar from Perceiving streetscapes have carried out tests in Amsterdam, and the Institute of Human Architecture and Planning has followed suit in New York and Washington, DC.

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

Their findings are already being incorporated into the work of my office and many others, such as the Danish office NORD Architects, which based its design on the latest research on cognitive decline Alzheimer’s village in DaxFrance. This is a large nursing home that imitates the layout of a medieval fortified town in the “bastide” style. The idea is to create a comfortingly familiar design for many residents whose ability to navigate has diminished with age.

Although these may seem like isolated cases, there are encouraging signs that the construction and building design industry – once particularly research-resistant – is beginning to change. Generative AI has already changed the way architecture works. Once a novelty, it is now an essential tool. If we integrated neuroarchitectural insights into these AI models, the change could be even more dramatic.

Meanwhile, progressive city leaders are beginning to connect the obsession with economic growth with people’s well-being. In the UK, Rokhsana Fiaz, the mayor of Newham, east London, has made happiness and health one of the key performance indicators of her economic strategy. And now that we can measure health in more sophisticated ways, I’m confident more will follow. People will recognize the direct contribution of building facades to public health and human prosperity and begin to spread the word.

I believe real estate developers will soon need to consider neuroscience as key information to weigh alongside static load calculations, energy efficiency, lighting and acoustics. And the people on the streets will welcome this change. Not just because it improves our health, but simply because it makes our world much happier and more appealing.