Report | Neuroscience for Cities | Playbook Launch | London: 2018 July 19
London based The Centric Lab in collaboration with the Spatial Cognition Laboratory at UCL have been commissioned by the Future Cities Catapult to produce a playbook (read: manual) on how neuroscience is providing new ways to understand how people experience the built environment, revealing new opportunities for innovation and improved experiences, leading in turn to greater productivity, well-being and attraction.
As part of Future Cities Catapult’s flagship monthly networking event “Third Thursday”, The Centric Lab Director Araceli Camargo is joined by lab co-founder, Josh Artus to present findings of their year-long research bringing forward a framework of how neuroscience research can be put into practice in cities. The Playbook presents a set of new tools, methodologies and strategies for organisations big and small, to adopt neuroscience insights into their working methodologies.
Their collaborator, Dr. Hugo Spiers, Director of Science at The Centric Lab and Lecturer at UCLexplained how recent developments in neuroscience are showing us new ways to understand how people experience the built environment. He has highlighted how Neuroscientists are also discovering important insights about outcomes for the less advantaged in our cities, providing compelling evidence in support of interventions to tackle the negative health impacts of city living, and ways to reduce barriers to access and opportunity.
Centric Lab Director of Real Estate Strategy Josh Artus went on to explain the main makeup of the Playbook, consisting of three stages in which it helps cities. The first is identifying the core environmental stressors, which have the widest mental and physical effects on city citizen, even a small reduction will make a fundamental difference in quality of life. The second is understanding the unintended human consequences of urban trends such as urban sprawl or automation. The final is highlighting the different opportunities for enhancing the user experience of cities through neuroscience-informed technology and urban planning.
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