Is beauty important for people’s wellbeing in cities?
“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.
The Challenge
“The world has erected vast amounts of urban fabric that fail to generate or sustain happiness: possibly because it was not clear what happiness is or why humans need happiness as a basic component of their lives. For millennia, a society’s wealth was invested in creating a healing environment, but after World War II, money was used to build an ugly world that achieves the opposite (Buras, 2020; Curl, 2018; Life, 2020; Millais, 2009; Rennix & Robinson, 2017; Robinson, 2021; Salingaros, 2020b; 2021). One of the monumental tasks facing civilization today is reconstructing the world’s cities so that they provide happiness through their details and geometry.” (Salingaros, 2021, p. 24)
Salingaros, Nikos. “Happiness and Biophilic Urban Geometry.” Journal of Biourbanism 9, no. 1-2 (2021): 21-28.
What do people find beautiful in streetscapes?
“The strongest spatial parameters affecting aesthetic judgments of urban spaces are symmetrical and uniform arrangement of the lateral spatial boundaries, preferably formed by vegetation or stylistically uniform building types. These characteristics correspond to the kind of properties of figure formation originally developed in Gestalt psychology and later adapted to three-dimensional architectural spaces by Weber (1995). In short, visual regularity is a primary factor in the judgment of beauty.” (Weber et al, 2008)
Weber, R., Schnier, J., & Jacobsen, T. (2008). Aesthetics of Streetscapes: Influence of Fundamental Properties on Aesthetic Judgments of Urban Space. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 106(1), 128–146.
“ We have indeed found that tall residential buildings are negatively associated with beauty and happiness.” (Quercia et al., p. 953)
Quercia, Daniele & O’Hare, Neil & Cramer, Henriette. (2014). Aesthetic capital: What makes london look beautiful, quiet, and happy?. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW. 945-955. 10.1145/2531602.2531613.
Where do people want to live?
“People want to live in suburbs and many are happy there.”
“Planners and urban theorists hate suburbs, and believe that Europeans have a preference for living in apartments. This is demonstrably wrong, according to a 2013 survey a clear majority of Europeans seemed to want a detached house as a ‘dream home’.”
“There are strong correlations between living in green environments and overall better mental health. High level of urbanization is associated with increased risk of psychosis and depression, as well as hospital admissions, divorce, death rates.”
Boys-Smith, Nicholas, and Alessandro Venerandi. Heart in the Right Street: Beauty, happiness and health in designing the modern city. London: Create Streets, 2016.
Popularity of traditional versus modern architecture & urbanism
Links to polls and studies showing popular support for traditional and classical architecture and urbanism versus modern environments can be found here:
Harris Poll:
YouGov and Adam Architecture
https://adamarchitecture.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/YouGov-survey_Oct09_resultsfollowup.pdf
CreateStreets
https://www.createstreets.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Create-Streets-Pop-up-poll-1.pdf
Noorwegen:
Zweden:
https://gupea.ub.gu.se/bitstream/handle/2077/57500/gupea_2077_57500_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
Sources Arkitekturupproret:
https://arkitekten.se/kultur/bostadsgarden-som-inramad-rumslighet/
“Empirical work has confirmed the popular suspicion that the aesthetic tastes of architects differ markedly from those of the general population. … Subjects were shown photographs of unfamiliar people and buildings (with varying frequencies) and were asked to rate each in terms of attractiveness. One of the findings of this research was that although correlation between the architects’ and non-architects’ ratings of the attractiveness of people was extremely high, the correlation between their ratings of the attractiveness of buildings was low and non-significant.”
Halpern, D. (1995). Mental health and the built environment: More than bricks and mortar? Taylor & Francis.
In order to help those who work on creating more beautiful, durable cities and buildings, I will share useful resources on architecture and urbanism. Contact me via twitter or on hello@theaestheticcity.com if you have additions for this database.