A significant proportion of people today live in towns and cities that grew up around trade, industry and automobiles. Think of the docks of Liverpool, the factories of Osaka, the car obsession of New York’s Robert Moses or the low-density sprawl of modern Riyadh. Few of these places were created with human health in mind. Meanwhile, as humanity has shifted its center of gravity to cities, there has been an alarming rise in diseases such as depression, cancer and diabetes.
This mismatch between humans and our habitat should not surprise us. Starting in the second half of the 20th century, pioneering thinkers such as the American author and activist Jane Jacobs and the Danish architect Jan Gehl began to highlight the inhumane way in which our cities were being shaped, with boring buildings, arid spaces and brutal highways.
His work was widely read by the construction industry but at the same time marginalized. It was an uncomfortable truth that seemed to contradict dominant architectural thinking, with its austere and often hostile aesthetic style. The challenge was that, although Jacobs and Gehl were highlighting very real problems experienced by specific 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 study techniques, such as the use of wearable devices that measure our body’s response to our environment, means that it is becoming much more difficult for the construction industry to continue ignoring the responses from millions of people. to the places he has created.
These neuroscientific and “neuroarchitectural” research methods, once restricted to the laboratory, 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 project EMOTIONAL CITIES The project is currently running in Lisbon, London, Copenhagen and Michigan. Frank Suurenbroek and Gideon Spanjar from Feeling urban landscapes have carried out trials in Amsterdam, and the Institute of Architecture and Human Planning He has done the same in New York and Washington, DC.
This year, the Humanize Campaign has partnered with Ellard to conduct a new international study investigating people’s psychological responses to different building facades. This has been commissioned alongside a study by Cleo Valentine of the University of Cambridge, which examines whether certain building facades can trigger neuroinflammation, establishing a direct link between the appearance of a building and a verifiable health outcome.
Their findings are already informing the work of my studio and many others, such as Danish studio NORD Architects, which drew on the latest research into cognitive decline when they designed their The Alzheimer’s village in DaxFrance. It is a large nursing home that imitates the layout of a medieval fortified city in the “bastide” style. The idea is to create a comforting and familiar design for many of the residents whose navigation skills have weakened with age.
Although these may seem like isolated cases, there are encouraging signs that the construction and building design industries, once so peculiarly resistant to research, are beginning to change. Generative AI has already altered the way architecture works. Once a novelty, it is now an essential tool. If we incorporate neuroarchitectural findings into these AI models, the change could be even more dramatic.
Meanwhile, progressive urban leaders are beginning to link the obsession with economic growth with human well-being. In the UK, Rokhsana Fiaz, 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 convinced more will follow. People will realize the direct contribution of building facades to public health and human prosperity and will begin to spread the word.
I believe that very soon property developers will have to treat neuroscientific findings as key information to be weighed alongside structural load calculations, energy efficiency, lighting and acoustics. And the person on the street will appreciate this change. Not only because it will improve our health but simply because it will make our world much more joyful and attractive.