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It's Official: Boring Cities Are Bad for Your Health
Oppressive, unstimulating urban architecture isn’t just about eyesores; there’s evidence that it can cause actual harm to its residents. To fix this in 2025, we must start building for joy.
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. 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. Their findings are already informing the work of my studio and many others, such as the Danish practice NORD Architects, which drew on the latest research surrounding cognitive decline as they designed their Alzheimer’s Village in Dax, France.
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