A significant portion of people today live in towns and cities that grew up around trade, industry and cars. Think of the ports of Liverpool, the factories of Osaka, the car obsession of New York's Robert Moses, or the vastness of modern Riyadh. Few of these places were created with human health in mind. Meanwhile, as humanity has shifted its focus to cities, there has been an alarming increase in diseases such as depression, cancer and diabetes.
This mismatch between people and our living environment should come as no surprise. From the second half of the 20th century, pioneering thinkers such as American author and activist Jane Jacobs and Danish architect Jan Gehl began to emphasize the inhumane way in which our cities were formed, with dull constructions, barren spaces and brutal highways.
Their work was widely read by the construction industry, but at the same time was marginalized. It was an uncomfortable truth that seemed to contradict mainstream architectural thinking, with its austere and often unfriendly aesthetic style. The challenge was that even though Jacobs and Gehl highlighted very real problems facing specific communities, in the absence of hard evidence they could only rely on isolated case studies and their own rhetoric to make a point. But the recent availability of sophisticated new techniques for brain mapping and behavioral studies, 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 echo chamber to continue to track the responses of millions of people to ignore. to the places it created.
Once 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 led groundbreaking research in this area. The EU-funded eMOTIONAL Cities project is now running in Lisbon, London, Copenhagen and Michigan. Frank Suurenbroek and Gideon Spanjar of Sensing Streetscapes have conducted trials in Amsterdam, and the Human Architecture and Planning Institute has followed suit in New York and Washington, DC.
Just this year, the Humanize Campaign partnered with Ellard to conduct a new international study into people's psychological responses to different building facades. This has been commissioned alongside research from Cleo Valentine at the University of Cambridge, which investigates whether certain building facades can lead to neuroinflammation, establishing a direct link between the appearance of a building and a testable health outcome.
Their findings are already shaping the work of my studio and many others, such as the Danish practice NORD Architects, who drew on the latest research on cognitive decline to design their Alzheimer's village in Dax, France. This is a large-scale care home that imitates the layout of a medieval fortified town in 'bastide' style. The idea is to create a reassuringly familiar design for many of the residents whose ability to find their way has weakened over the years.
While these appear to be isolated cases, there are encouraging signs that the construction and building design industry – once particularly resistant to scrutiny – is starting to change. Generative AI has already changed the way architecture works. Once a novelty, it is now an essential tool. If we put neuroarchitectural findings into these AI models, the shift could be even more dramatic.
Meanwhile, progressive city leaders are beginning to link the obsession with economic growth with human well-being. In Britain, Rokhsana Fiaz, the 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 advanced ways, I'm confident there will be more to come. People will realize the direct contribution of building facades to public health and human prosperity and start spreading the word.
I believe that project developers will soon have to treat neuroscientific findings as important information to be weighed alongside calculations of structural loads, energy efficiency, lighting and acoustics. And the person in 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 exciting.
