“Furthermore, local economic conditions, as measured by the cost of living, and the perceived beauty of the city are associated with the happiness.” (Leyden et al., 2011, p. 882)
Leyden, K. M., Goldberg, A., & Michelbach, P. (2011). Understanding the Pursuit of Happiness in Ten Major Cities. Urban Affairs Review, 47(6), 861–888.
“The main findings confirm the hypothesis: beauty and aesthetics are among the most important factors in perceived community satisfaction. The findings for beauty and aesthetics lend support to those by GLAESER et al. (2001) and CARLINO and SAIZ (2008), among others, who highlight the importance of ame- nities in urban and regional development.” (Florida et al., 2011, p. 43)
Richard Florida , Charlotta Mellander & Kevin Stolarick (2011) Beautiful Places: The Role of Perceived Aesthetic Beauty in Community Satisfaction, Regional Studies, 45:1, 33-48
“We find that inhabitants of more scenic environments report better health, across urban, suburban and rural areas. This result holds even when taking core socioeconomic indicators of deprivation, such as income, and data on air pollution into account. Importantly, we find that differences in reports of health can be better explained by the scenicness of the local environment than by measurements of greenspace.” (Seresinhe et al., 2015, p.6)
Seresinhe, C., Preis, T. & Moat, H. Quantifying the Impact of Scenic Environments on Health. Sci Rep 5, 16899 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/srep16899
“Society ignores new results in applied science that might dispute standard typologies shaping the built environment, used without controversy over the past century. In addition, many practitioners in architecture and design simply continue what was set by the modernist revolution (one century ago), never questioning whether it was all such a great idea. Will people now pay attention to the visual information embedded in the environment? [97]
“For this reason, architectural culture today is not reacting to the alarming converging lines of evidence pointing to the deleterious effects of these practices on child development. Contemporary architectural discourse is apparently uninterested in this question.
“This essay accuses the architecture profession of not paying sufficient attention to human psychological health, including children’s development. Recent studies of infants born during the COVID-19 lockdown raise alarming questions about the possibility of lowered cognitive development, for whatever reason. Various arguments were collected here to point the finger at the lack of requisite visual complexity in “fashionable” industrial- minimalist interiors. Will we see a generation of children with intellectual impairments? Nobody really knows. Can the medical profession and society as a whole ignore this frightening possibility and do nothing about it?” (Lavdas & Salingaros, 2021, p. 8)
Lavdas, Alexandros A., and Nikos A. Salingaros. “Can Suboptimal Visual Environments Negatively Affect Children’s Cognitive Development?.” Challenges 12.2 (2021): 28.