Fast Urban Growth, Human Psycho-Socio-Ecological Needs and ‘Enactivisim’: The Future of Cities

Abstract

It has been projected that in three decades, two-thirds of the global population will become city dwellers, compared to 50 per cent today. Many urban concepts and planning principles have been generated to tackle the consequential challenges. Furthermore, there has been a noticeable paradigm shift towards psychological sustainability, with some theories indicating a link between the fulfilment of needs and ecological sustainability. Moreover, it has been previously stressed that environments play an important role in fulfilling people’s psychological needs. The current urban sustainable models provide solutions oriented towards physical and environmental aspects. But they lack a systematic understanding of human-environment interactions, therefore, neglect important cognitive and behavioural aspects. We argue that this misalignment between urban contexts and human needs and behaviour could be addressed if architectural and urban design started to be informed by neuroscience. This paper aims to emphasize the foundations of the ‘neuroscience-informed design’ approach.