Urban Architecture: A Cognitive Neuroscience Perspective

Abstract

The rapid urbanization of the past century has led to an accelerating demand for urban design that caters for city-dwellers in both physical and psychological domains. The field of architecture has begun to cultivate more analytic approaches to city design, in order to enable quantification and hypothesis-testing of design principles. In parallel, the cognitive science of human navigation has been developing rapidly, fuelled by neuroscientific findings from rodent research. The time seems ripe to bring these disciplines together. This paper reviews some of the most salient neuroscientific discoveries of recent decades and shows how these discoveries, and the design principles that emerge from them, can add important constraints on architectural design. By taking these cognitive constraints into account it is argued that urban spaces – particularly large, complex ones such as transport termini and convention centres – can be made more navigable and able to provide a better experience for users.