A significant part of people today live in cities that have grown up around trade, industry and motorization. Think of the Liverpool docks, the factories of Osaka, the car obsession of Up-to-date York’s Robert Moses, or the sprawling development of modern-day Riyadh. Few of these places were created with human health in mind. Meanwhile, as humanity has moved its center of gravity to cities, there has been an alarming raise in diseases such as depression, cancer and diabetes.
This mismatch between humans and our habitat should come as no surprise. Since 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 in which our cities are shaped: tedious structures, barren spaces and brutal expressways.
Their work was widely read by the construction industry and, at the same time, marginalized. It was an uncomfortable truth that seemed to contradict mainstream architectural thinking, with its austere and often unfriendly aesthetics. The challenge was that while Jacobs and Gehl highlighted the very real problems experienced by specific communities, in the absence of strenuous evidence they could only rely on isolated case studies and their own rhetoric to make their case. However, the recent availability of up-to-date, sophisticated brain mapping techniques and behavioral research, such as the exploit of wearable devices that measure our body’s response to its surroundings, means that the construction industry’s echo chamber is becoming increasingly complex to ignore the reactions of millions of people to the places it has created. .
Once confined to the laboratory, these neuroscientific and “neuroarchitectural” research methods have taken to the streets. Colin Ellard’s Urban Realities Laboratory at the University of Waterloo in Canada conducted pioneering research in this field. Funded by the EU Emotional cities the project is currently underway in Lisbon, London, Copenhagen and Michigan. Frank Suurenbroek and Gideon Spanjar Sensing streetscapes conducted trials in Amsterdam and Institute of Architecture and Human Planning he followed suit in Up-to-date York and Washington.
Just this year, the Humanize campaign partnered with Ellard to conduct a up-to-date international study to explore people’s psychological responses to different building facades. This was commissioned alongside research by Cleo Valentine from the University of Cambridge, which examined whether certain building facades could lead to neuroinflammation, showing a direct link between a building’s appearance and testable health outcomes.
Their discoveries are already influencing the work of my studio and many others, such as the Danish practice NORD Architects, which based its office design on the latest research on cognitive disorders. Alzheimer’s Village in DaxFrance. It is a gigantic nursing home that mimics the bastide-style layout of a medieval fortified city. The idea is to create a comfortably familiar design for many residents whose wayfinding ability weakens with age.
While these may seem like isolated incidents, there are encouraging signs that the construction and design industry – once extremely resistant to research – is starting to change. Generative AI has already changed the way architecture works. Once a novelty, now it is an necessary tool. If we combined neuroarchitectural findings with these artificial intelligence models, the change could be even more dramatic.
Meanwhile, progressive city leaders are beginning to link their obsession with economic growth with human well-being. In the UK, Rokhsana Fiaz, mayor of Newham in east London, has identified happiness and health as one of the key performance indicators of her economic strategy. And now that we can measure health in a more sophisticated way, I’m sure there will be more and more of them. People will realize the direct contribution that building facades make to public health and human well-being and will start spreading the word.
I believe that developers will soon need to treat neuroscience discoveries as key information to be weighed against structural load calculations, energy efficiency, lighting and acoustics. And the person on the street will welcome this change. Not just because it will improve our health, but simply because it will make our world so much more happy and engaging.