A significant proportion of the population today lives in cities that have developed around commerce, industry and automobiles. Think of the docks of Liverpool, the factories of Osaka, the automobile 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 increase in diseases such as depression, cancer and diabetes.
This mismatch between humans and our habitat should come as no surprise. Beginning in the second half of the 20th century, pioneering thinkers such as American author and activist Jane Jacobs and Danish architect Jan Gehl began to highlight the inhumane way our cities were being shaped, with boring constructions, spaces barren and brutal highways.
Their work was widely read by the construction industry while being marginalized. It was an inconvenient truth that seemed to contradict mainstream architectural thinking, with its austere and often hostile aesthetic style. The challenge was that although Jacobs and Gehl were highlighting very real problems faced by specific communities, in the absence of concrete evidence they could only rely on isolated case studies and their own rhetoric to assert their point of view. But the recent availability of sophisticated new brain mapping and behavior study techniques, such as the use of wearable devices that measure our body’s response to our environment, means that it is becoming increasingly difficult for construction industry echo chamber to continue to ignore the responses of millions of people. to the places he created.
Formerly confined to the laboratory, these neuroscientific and “neuroarchitectural” research methods have now taken to the streets. Colin Ellard’s Urban Realities Laboratory at the University of Waterloo in Canada has carried out pioneering studies in this area. The EU-funded project EMOTIONAL Cities the project is currently underway in Lisbon, London, Copenhagen and Michigan. Frank Suurenbroek and Gideon Spanjar of Detect streetscapes carried out tests in Amsterdam, and the Institute of Architecture and Human Planning followed suit in New York and Washington, DC.
Once again this year, the Humanize campaign partnered with Ellard to conduct a new international study into people’s psychological reactions to different building facades. This study was commissioned alongside a study by Cleo Valentine of the University of Cambridge, which examines whether certain building facades can lead to neuroinflammation, establishing a direct link between the appearance of a building and a testable outcome on health.
Their findings are already informing the work of my studio and many others, such as Danish firm NORD Architects, which drew inspiration from the latest research on cognitive decline to design their Alzheimer Village in DaxFrance. It is a large-scale retirement home that mimics the plan of a medieval ‘bastide’ style walled town. The idea is to create a design that is familiar and comforting to many residents whose orientation skills have weakened with age.
Although these cases may seem isolated, there are encouraging signs that the construction and building design industries, once so uniquely 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 integrated 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 to human well-being. In the United Kingdom, 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 sophisticated ways, I’m confident others will follow. People will realize the direct contribution of building facades to public health and human prosperity and will start spreading the word.
Very soon, I think, real estate developers may have to treat neuroscientific findings as key information to be weighed against calculations of structural loading, energy efficiency, lighting and acoustics. And the person on the street will welcome this change. Not only because it will improve our health, but simply because it will make our world much more joyful and engaging.