Well-being and stronger communities

Abstract

The planning and design of urban environments facilitates the meeting of their basic day to day living needs of access to shelter, food and water, waste disposal, clean environments, employment and community infrastructure. But, in a dramatically changing world, urban design and planning also influence many more aspects of people’s quality of life within towns and cities which lead to the possibility of good, and hopefully even better, productive, happy, healthy, meaningful lives, as individuals and as communities. Increasingly the evolving body of neuro-scientific knowledge helps us understand better the range of human needs that ‘go beyond the basics’, and how they are constant while varying in relative emphasis among people. And so that knowledge must surely underpin ways in which thoughtful committed planning and design in a changing urban world can help meet human needs in a diversity of ways. The consultant Neuropower Group identify, for example, six critical needs: