It’s Legal: Boring Cities Are Bad for Your Health

Most people today live in towns and cities that grew because of trade, industry, and automobiles. Think of the docks of Liverpool, the factories of Osaka, the traffic of Robert Moses of New York, or the slow growth of modern Riyadh. Few of these places were created by human health. Currently, as people shift their gravitation to cities, there has been an alarming rise in diseases such as depression, cancer, and diabetes.

This disconnect between people and where we live should come as no surprise. From the second half of the 20th century, thinkers such as the American writer and activist Jane Jacobs and the Danish architect Jan Gehl began to show how our cities are made inhuman, with boring buildings, empty spaces and rough roads.

Their work was widely read by the construction industry but at the same time they were stopped. It was a harsh reality that seemed to go against the popular view of architecture, with its elegant and unappealing style. The problem was that, although Jacobs and Gehl were showing real problems that the community was facing, without hard evidence, they were able to rely on special education and their rhetoric to make a point. But the recent availability of brain mapping and behavioral learning techniques, such as the use of wearable devices that measure how our body responds to the environment we live in, means that it is increasingly difficult for the construction industry to continue to ignore the responses of millions of people. to the place he made.

Once applied to the lab, neuroscientific and “neuroarchitectural” research methods have gone to the streets. Colin Ellard’s Urban Realities Laboratory at the University of Waterloo in Canada has led pioneering studies in this area. EU currency EMOTIONAL Cities The project is taking place in Lisbon, London, Copenhagen, and Michigan. Frank Suurenbroek and Gideon Spanjar Sensing Streetscapes held trials in Amsterdam, and Human Architecture and Planning Institute it has followed suit in New York and Washington, DC.

This year, the Humanize Campaign has partnered with Ellard to conduct a new global survey exploring people’s emotional responses to different architectural designs. This is presented together with research from Cleo Valentine at the University of Cambridge, which is looking at whether certain building facades can cause neuroinflammation-drawing a direct connection between the appearance of buildings and health outcomes.

Their findings are already informing the work of my studio and many others, such as the Danish practice NORD Architects, which adopted recent research on the lack of knowledge in their design Alzheimer’s Village in DaxFrance. This is a residential complex that takes the form of a “bastide” walled town from the past. The idea is to create a design that is comfortable for many people whose ability to find their way has weakened with age.

While this may seem like a strange phenomenon, there are encouraging signs that the construction and engineering industries – which were once largely unconnected to research – are beginning to change. Generative AI has already changed the way construction works. Once a novelty, it is now an essential tool. If we combined the findings in these AI models, the changes would be very impressive.

Meanwhile, progressive city leaders have begun to link the passion and growth of the economy to human well-being. In the UK, Rokhsana Fiaz, the mayor of Newham in East London, has made happiness and health one of the most important indicators of his economy. And now that we can measure health in more sophisticated ways, I believe more will follow. People will realize the direct contribution of building facades to public health and social development and start spreading the word.

In the near future, I believe, product manufacturers may need to see the findings in neuroscience as important information to be evaluated together with the calculation of the amount of design, energy consumption, lighting, and acoustics. And the person in the street will be happy with the change. Not only because it will change our health but because it will make our world more interesting and interesting.