The Impact of Urban Design on Social Interaction

This chapter explores how contemporary urban design, particularly in Phoenix, inhibits walking and social interaction, turning cars into isolating barriers. The discussion emphasizes the need for more inclusive communal spaces and the movement advocating for these changes to foster better social connections.

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What if the key to designing better cities wasn’t just in concrete, code, or cost, but in understanding how our brains actually work?

In this episode, I talk with Ann Sussman and Kelsey Bradley of the Human Architecture and Planning Institute (HAPI) about a subject that’s as profound as it is underdiscussed: how our unconscious biology reacts to the built environment – and how that should change everything about how we design.

Ann, architect and author of Cognitive Architecture and Kelsey, founder of Design Cause Inc., now Executive Director at HAPI, walk us through the neuroscience of placemaking. We talk eye tracking. Skin conductivity. Heart rate variability. And how our “Stone Age brains” are still calibrated for the Savannah, even when we’re stuck in a strip mall.

This episode will validate what many of us feel but can’t quite explain why some places energize us, and others quietly drain us. The answers aren’t just aesthetic. They’re evolutionary.

CHAPTERS:

00:00 The Car-Free City: Oslo's Urban Transformation

03:43 Human Architecture: Merging Biology and Design

08:03 Understanding Human Experience: The Emotional Brain

11:24 The Impact of Environment on Human Behavior

18:37 The Influence of Modernism on Architecture

23:28 The Threatening Nature of Suburban Design

26:47 Measuring Human Responses: Biometrics in Architecture

31:25 The Science of Emotions in Design

33:52 The Power of Empathy in Leadership

36:57 Designing for Human Flourishing

40:07 The Impact of Built Environments on Mental Health