Most people now live in towns and cities that have grown around trade, industry, and automobiles. Consider the docks of Liverpool, the factories of Osaka, the car obsession of Robert Moses in New York, or the area of modern Riyadh. Some of these places are created with human health in mind. Meanwhile, as humans have moved their center of gravity to cities, diseases such as depression, cancer, and diabetes have arisen. 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 the inhumane ways of our cities, with their boring constructions, barren spaces and brutal highways. by the construction industry yet simultaneously marginalized. This is an inconvenient truth that seems at odds with mainstream architectural thinking, with its strict and often unfriendly aesthetic style. The challenge is that, although Jacobs and Gehl highlight real problems experienced by certain communities, without any hard evidence, they can only rely on isolated case studies and their own rhetoric to make their point. But the new availability of sophisticated brain mapping and behavioral learning 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 the echo chamber of the construction industry to ignore the responses of millions of people. to the place that has been created. Once confined to the laboratory, this neuroscientific and “neuroarchitectural” research method has taken to the streets. Colin Ellard’s Urban Realities Laboratory at the University of Waterloo in Canada has led a pioneering study into the area. The EU-funded eMOTIONAL Cities project is currently running in Lisbon, London, Copenhagen, and Michigan. Frank Suurenbroek and Gideon Spanjar of Sensing Streetscapes have conducted trials in Amsterdam, and the Institute of Human Architecture and Planning has followed suit in New York and Washington, DC. A recent international study investigated people’s psychological responses to different building facades. This has been commissioned in conjunction with a study by Cleo Valentine at the University of Cambridge, which examines whether certain building facades can cause neuroinflammation—drawing a direct link between building appearance and testable health outcomes. These findings have informed the work of my studio and others, such as the Danish practice NORD Architects, which drew on the latest research on cognitive decline when designing the Alzheimer’s Village in Dax, France. This is a large nursing home that mimics the layout of a “bastide” medieval fortified town. The idea was to create a familiar design for many residents whose wayfinding abilities have weakened with age. research – began to change. Generative AI has revolutionized the way architecture works. Once new, it is now an essential tool. If we attach the findings of neuro-architecture to these AI models, the changes can be even more dramatic. Meanwhile, progressive city leaders began to link their obsession with economic growth to human well-being. In England, Rokhsana Fiaz, the mayor of Newham in East London, has made happiness and health one of the key performance indicators for her economic strategy. And now that we can measure health in more sophisticated ways, I’m sure more will follow. People will realize the direct contribution of building facades to public health and human prosperity and begin to spread the word. Very soon, I believe, property developers may have to treat neuroscientific findings as important information to be weighed up together with calculations of structure-load, energy efficiency, lighting, and acoustics. And people on the street will welcome this change. Not only because it will improve your health, but simply because it will make the world happier and more enjoyable.
