A large part of the population today lives in cities and towns that have grown in commerce, industry, and automobiles. Think Liverpool’s docks, Osaka’s factories, New York’s Robert Moses’ car obsession, or the sprawl of modern Riyadh. Few of these places were created with people’s health in mind. Meanwhile, as humanity has shifted its center of gravity to cities, there has been an alarming increase in diseases such as depression, cancer and diabetes.
This disparity between people and our habitat should not surprise us. From the second half of the 20th century, pioneering thinkers such as the American writer and activist Jane Jacobs and the Danish architect Jan Gehl began to highlight how our cities are shaped inhumanely, with boring buildings, empty spaces and brutal streets.
Their work was widely studied by the construction industry but at the same time looked down upon. It was a negative reality that seemed to go against conventional architectural thinking, with its rigid and often unfriendly aesthetic style. The challenge was that, although Jacobs and Gehl were highlighting real problems experienced by certain communities, without hard evidence, they could only rely on independent studies and their own words to make their point. But the recent discovery of sophisticated new brain mapping and behavioral learning techniques, such as the use of wearables that measure our body’s reactions to our surroundings, means that it is becoming increasingly difficult for the construction industry to continue to ignore the responses of millions of people. in built areas.
Once confined to the lab, these neuroscientific and “neuroarchitectural” research methods have taken to the streets. Colin Ellard’s Urban Realities Laboratory at the University of Waterloo in Canada has led pioneering studies in the area. The EU-funded EMOTIONAL Cities project is now active in Lisbon, London, Copenhagen, and Michigan. Frank Suurenbroek and Gideon Spanjar of Sensing Streetscapes conducted experiments in Amsterdam, and the Human Architecture and Planning Institute followed suit in New York and Washington, DC.
Just this year, the Humanize Campaign formed a partnership with Ellard to conduct a new international study investigating people’s psychological responses to different architectural facades. This is supported by Cleo Valentine’s research at the University of Cambridge, which examines whether certain building facades can lead to neuroinflammation—drawing a direct connection between the appearance of the building and the health outcome being tested.
Their findings have informed the work of my studio and many others, such as the Danish practice NORD Architects, who drew on the latest research on dementia as they designed their Alzheimer’s Village in Dax, France. This is a large maintained home that imitates the architecture of a fortified town in the medieval “bastide” style. The idea is to create a design that is comfortingly familiar to the majority of citizens whose navigation skills have weakened with age.
While these may seem like rare cases, there are encouraging signs that the construction and architecture industries—once unusually resistant to research—are beginning to change. Generative AI has already changed the way architecture works. Once a novelty, it is now an important tool. If we connect neuro-architectural findings to these AI models, the transformation can be even more dramatic.
Meanwhile, progressive city leaders are beginning to link concerns with economic growth and human well-being. In the UK, Rokhsana Fiaz, mayor of Newham in 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 complex ways, I’m sure more will follow. People will see the direct contribution of building facades to public health and human prosperity and start spreading the word.
In the near future, I believe, building developers may have to treat neuroscientific findings as important information to be weighed alongside calculations of building load, energy efficiency, lighting, and acoustics. And the man on the street will welcome this change. Not just because it will improve our health but because it will make our world more interesting and interesting.
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