Designing for Relationships

Oli Davey looks to the findings of the Harvard Study of Adult Development to make the case for sociable streets

The Good Life (and how to live it) by Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz summarises the findings of the Harvard Study of Adult Development. This research has been going-on for a rather incredible eighty-four years (and counting) and has tracked the same individuals (over 700 in the first cohort), asking thousands of questions and taking hundreds of measurements to find out what really keeps people healthy and happy. Through all the years of studying these lives, one crucial factor stands out for the consistency and power of its ties to physical health, mental health, and longevity. Contrary to what many people might think, it’s not career achievement, or exercise, or a healthy diet. While these things matter (a lot), one thing continuously demonstrates its broad and enduring importance: good relationships.
 
The study has found that relationships stand out for their power and consistency in being key to a flourishing life, keeping us healthier and happier. The evidence suggests that people who are more connected to family, to friends, and to community, are happier and physically healthier than people who are less well connected. Conversely, people who are more isolated than they want to be find their health declining sooner than people who feel connected to others. Lonely people also live shorter lives. In fact, those people who suggest that they are most satisfied with their relationships at age 50 were found to be the healthiest (mentally and physically) at age 80. Loneliness is also associated with being more sensitive to pain, suppression of the immune system, diminished brain function, and less effective sleep. The book also reports on other recent research that has shown that, for older people, loneliness is twice as unhealthy as obesity, and chronic loneliness increases a person’s odds of death in any given year by 26 percent.
 
Simply put, the frequency and quality of contact with other people are two major predictors of whether we are happy and healthy. We need love, connection and a feeling of belonging. And the basic benefits of human connection do not appear to change much from one neighbourhood to the next, from one city to the next, from one country to the next, or from one race to the next. The capacity of relationships to affect our well-being and health appears to be universal.
 
The question for us then becomes ‘how can we increase the frequency and quality of contact that people experience with everyone from their immediate family to their wider community through the design of our streets and spaces?’ How can we generate real social value by enabling people to create and nurture more and stronger relationships? If it has become the norm for many people to commute for over an hour each way every day in a car on their own then surely their relationships, and therefore their health and happiness will suffer? Equally, if the streets that people live on are so dominated by traffic that the opportunity to get to know their neighbours is all but lost then, again, we must be negatively impacting on people’s health and happiness. And if we are creating town centres with nothing but bleak and hostile streets that facilitate only the most basic functions of connecting buildings are we not limiting peoples opportunities to find connection and a feeling of belonging? If I needed any more proof that those who design our streets and public spaces had the most important job in the world (which I don’t!) then surely this is it?