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 businesses, industry and cars. Think of Liverpool’s docks, Osaka’s factories, New York’s Robert Moses’ automobile obsession or the low-density sprawl of modern Riyadh. Some of these places were built keeping people’s health in mind. Meanwhile, humanity has shifted its center of gravity to cities, causing an alarming rise in illnesses such as depression, cancer and diabetes.

This mismatch between humans and our habitat is not surprising. From the second half of the 20th century, pioneering thinkers such as American writer and activist Jane Jacobs and Danish architect Jan Gehl began to highlight the inhumane way our cities were built, with boring constructions, barren spaces and brutal expressways.

Their work is widely read by the construction industry but at the same time marginalized. This is an inconvenient truth that contradicts mainstream architectural thought, with its rigid and often unfriendly aesthetic style. The challenge was that, although Jacobs and Gehl highlighted very real problems experienced by specific communities, in the absence of hard evidence, they could only rely on isolated case studies and their own narratives. But the recent availability of sophisticated new brain-mapping and behavioral study techniques, such as those using wearable devices that measure our body’s response to our surroundings, means it’s becoming increasingly difficult for construction industry echo chambers to ignore the reactions of millions of people. In places where it is made.

Once confined to the lab, this neuroscientific and “neuroarchitectural” research approach has taken to the streets. Colin Ellard’s Urban Realities Laboratory at the University of Waterloo in Canada has led pioneering research in this area. Funded by the EU emotional city Projects are now underway in Lisbon, London, Copenhagen and Michigan. Frank Surenbrook and Gideon Spanzer Sensing Streetscapes Experiments have been carried out in Amsterdam, and Human Architecture and Planning Institute New York and Washington, DC also followed.

Just this year, the Humanize Campaign partnered with Ellard to conduct a new international study exploring people’s psychological responses to different building facades. It was launched alongside a study by Cleo Valentine of the University of Cambridge, which is testing whether certain building facades can cause neuroinflammation – making a direct link between a building’s appearance and a testable health outcome.

Their findings are already informing the work of my studio and many others, such as the Danish practice NORD Architects, which drew on the latest research around cognitive decline as they designed them. Alzheimer’s Village in DaxFrance. It is a large-scale care home that mimics the layout of a “bastide”-style medieval fortified town. The idea is to create a comfortable familiar design for the many residents whose wayfinding ability has weakened with age.

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

Meanwhile, progressive city leaders began to link the obsession with economic growth with human well-being. In the UK, Mayor Rokhsana Fiyaz of Newham, East London, has identified happiness and health as one of the key performance indicators for her economic strategy. And now that we can measure health in more sophisticated ways, I’m sure more will follow. People will realize the direct contribution of mask making to public health and human prosperity and start spreading the word.

Very soon, I believe, property developers may need to consider neuroscience findings as key information that can be weighed alongside structural-load calculations, energy efficiency, lighting and acoustics. And the street people will welcome this change. Not just because it will improve our health but simply because it will make our world a lot more enjoyable and engaging.