It's Official: Boring Cities Are Bad for Your Health

A significant proportion of people today live in towns and cities that grew up around trade, industry, and cars. 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’s been an alarming rise in illnesses such as depression, cancer, and diabetes.

This mismatch between humans and our habitat shouldn’t come as a 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 highlighting the inhuman way our cities were being shaped, with boring constructions, barren spaces and brutal expressways.

Their work was widely read by the construction industry yet simultaneously marginalized. It was an inconvenient truth that seemed to contradict mainstream architectural thinking, with its austere and frequently unfriendly aesthetic style. The challenge was that, even though 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 a point. But the recent availability of sophisticated new brain-mapping and behavioral study techniques, such as using wearable devices that measure our body’s response to our surroundings, means it is getting much harder for the construction industry echo chamber to keep ignoring the responses of millions of people to the places it has created.

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