How urban design leads to better wellness
A new big-data analysis of the U.S.
The study examines tens of thousands of urban census-bureau tracts in the U.S., seeing how city features correlate with population health measures, while accounting for socioeconomic considerations as well.
“We found that on a very large scale, urban planning and design, such as the availability of different amenities and their spatial arrangement, plays a critical role in population health outomes,” says Winston Yap, a visiting scholar at the MIT Senseable City Lab, a postdoc at Cornell University, and co-author of a new paper outlining the study’s findings.
While there is not one design template for all locations, short and well-connected blocks with a variety of amenities, as well as the strategic placement of parks, all help well-being — physiologically and psychologically.
“We usually think about physical health first, but we also found a high correlation between good design and mental health,” says Fabio Duarte, an MIT researcher and co-author of the paper. “If you are walking more, it is not only a matter of physical fitness, but gives people a chance to avoid isolation, have serendipitous meetings with people, and at least see there are others around.”
The paper, “ Urban motifs associated with population health ,” appears today in Nature Health . The authors are Yap; Duarte, who is associate director and a principal research scientist at MIT Senseable City Lab; postdocs Yu Zheng, Kee Moon Zhang, and Peng Luo, who is also an incoming assistant professor at the University of Iowa; Paolo Vineis, a professor at Imperial College, London; Carlo Ratti, director of the MIT Senseable City Lab; and Filip Biljecki, an associate professor at the National University of Singapore.