17 percent of the population suffers from poor mental health, one in eight Danes shows signs of loneliness, and more than half of adults are moderately or severely overweight, according to the publication "The Urban Health Culture of the Future", produced by the Juul Frost Arkitekter studio team in collaboration with an interdisciplinary think tank. How does this data relate to the way we design our cities? This is what we discuss with project initiator Helle Juul.
Helle JUUL — Danish architect and urban planner, co-founder of the Juul Frost Arkitekter studio, recognized for her aspirations to make cities more sustainable and liveable. She teaches about urban design and development, and believes that architecture is a matter of working at all scales: from the small, individual space and building to the large scale of the neighborhood and city. She is vice president of INTA International Urban Development Association, architectural advisor to the municipality of Hillerød, and a Danish member of ECP, the European Parliament of Culture. She is co-author of "The Urban Health Culture of the Future" project, which aims to provide a link between health and planning — a holistic tool to promote physical, mental and social health in the built environment.
Ola Kloc: How do cities and urban planning affect our health and well-being? On mental health, stress levels and physical inactivity? What makes them unhealthy for us?
Helle Juul: Urbanization and the way we organize our built environment affect health and well-being — it's lack of biodiversity, less green space, bad air. We — as architects and designers — are responsible for the design. By creating "The Urban Health Culture of the Future", we are shaping a new way of thinking about how we design, how we can promote health and be aware of all those factors that affect our well-being. The reason we titled this publication "The Urban Health Culture of the Future" is that urbanity is the way we behave towards each other. We create a culture of well-being, wanting to promote health together in the physical environment around us. So it's not about cities per se, but about the way we organize them, the noise we create, the air pollution and heat islands we generate.
Why was "An Urban Culture of Health for the Future" created?
© Juul Frost Arkitekter
Ola Kloc: The information that loneliness, living alone and poor social ties are as harmful to us as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day and worse than obesity froze me. How can we fight this?
Helle Juul: When one of our think tank members, Jesper Lund Bredesen, spoke at our first meeting about loneliness, we did not address the issue in our office. It seemed to us that it was beyond our reach. But when he mentioned that there was a minister for loneliness in Japan, we understood how much all this should be taken into account. We are in the habit of discussing global issues — demographics, climate, biodiversity, mobility and so on — but we don't think about how much loneliness affects our health. One of the cases we investigated involved a social housing area where people were asked to take a neighbor to a community event being held there. When they are non-native speakers, it is very difficult for them to join the neighborhood or join local activities, they are shy and don't have the courage to come and say, "Here I am!". So all it takes is a small gesture, asking the people in charge to say, "Please go and bring your neighbor to this event". This is very simple, and has a huge impact on the sense of belonging in the neighborhood. I think that the awareness of belonging that we usually use in educational institutions should also be included in social housing, in cities. Just building awareness about it can have a profound effect on what to consider in a project.
When we started this project, I didn't know that being lonely is as dangerous as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day, but I think these data and figures show how important it is to take into account different sectors, professions and disciplines. An interdisciplinary approach to everything we do will ensure deeply balanced knowledge in the future. When we talk to people who are not like us, we have the potential to create something innovative.
Ola Kloc: You analyzed four different cases of urban solutions, what is the most important thing we can learn from each of them?
Helle Juul: We looked at twenty, forty cases and had to choose from them. The reason we chose these four — the twenty-minute city strategy; the example of mobility in Barcelona (Superblocks), which has an impact on the quality of life of residents; social housing and Gillett Square in London, another strategy — is that they represent different scales. They talk about the same thing, but on different levels. They show the importance of moving from the strategic scale to urban spaces, to the neighborhood and finally to the individual building. Being aware of this ensures that the solution we choose in, say, a twenty-minute city as a strategic approach will have an impact on neighborhoods, how we go to school, urban spaces and how we develop our green resources. We need to realize that scaling is very important, we should always raise our eyes, open our umbrellas and pay attention to what is happening in the context of the problem we are facing in the project — maybe we can solve it, or maybe we can find some elements outside this area to heal the space. The idea of a twenty-minute city is a strategy for all cases.
Gillett Square in London is in a very sensitive area. A strategy of a hundred complementary urban spaces was created there. So you can go from one place to another, experiencing different things, and each of these spaces fosters a diversity of people, a sense of belonging and tolerance. Richard Sennett writes about this in the context of Gillett Square — the more diverse a neighborhood is, the more tolerant we are.
Ola Kloc: I liked a sentence from the report: "Health planning is about providing spaces and places that allow people to experience well-being everyday and in unexpected ways, but with the opportunity to extend that feeling as far as possible". How should we design such spaces? What should we avoid?
Helle Juul: I would rather reverse this question and say: what would we want to gain. In Warsaw, we talked about five Polish cities and noticed a tendency to think that if an area has a lot of greenery it means it is healthy. But health is not only about greenery. It's important to create a balanced sequence of urban spaces where you can stay, be active, places that respond to a variety of needs. It's about looking at urban planning in the right way — you have different spaces that you need to address, different needs in the area, so that residents, people visiting these places, people from different cultures can feel at home in them. These spaces should also encourage less formal ways of spending time — the less formal they are, the more inviting they become. If we put a bench on the lawn, people will sit on it and probably start talking to each other. So it's all about careful space planning, creating micromobility and caring about it.
I often see places where benches are placed in the wrong way, and I wonder why no one turns them around. They just stand there. We should think carefully about the way we design — for everyone, for the many, for the few — so that we take into account both those who are and those who are not, part of the space, so that everyone feels they have the right to be in it, observing or not.
We should eliminate parking lots and create more spaces where people will feel safe, provide lighting so that corners can be seen, and so on. We design taking into account the principles of crime prevention — guidelines that say how to make sure that you can feel safe, that people will take care of the space, not throw garbage there, and so on. So it's not that we should do a lot of design or programming, but simply change the perception about neglected spaces, ask what can be changed in them to make them easier to access, what to design so that different people can feel at home in them.
needs and tools
© Juul Frost Arkitekter
Ola Kloc: In Poland there is still a belief that if something is shared, it is nobody's. How do you deal with this topic in Denmark? Do you have any advice on how we can change this kind of thinking?
Helle Juul: The city, the municipality, which is responsible for the plan, plays an important role in the planning process and must be very aware of the importance of creating with good materials, providing quality greenery, good services and diverse neighborhoods.
In Denmark, it also happens that municipalities just want to build. This is a very dangerous approach — they should rather make demands on developers and everyone involved in the design process. They should create, talk to everyone in the value chain, and have high ambitions. I think high ambitions are attractive to developers, you can see this in Denmark — the higher expectations the City sets for developers, the more they like it, because they know that if they create attractive spaces, the development around them will bring them higher revenues. So it's an added value, and people will care about spaces that have the power to connect people around them.
We built a small university building a few years ago that works fantastically because it allows students to interact. This is the approach we should create in public spaces. They are not the responsibility of only the developers or the City — they are the responsibility of all of us, so we should create an idea about it, write articles, talk about it. Even a small public area is more important than a huge parking lot, and creating a pilot project can inspire many more. This is needed and can change the mentality. Maybe it's naive, but I think it's important.
Ola Kloc: In a report, conductor Peter Hanke compared urban health planning to a polyphonic composition. Could you say more about this concept?
Helle Juul: Yes, I love it! He talks about planning cities like musical pieces. When she composes, she has clarinets on one side, trumpets on the other, piano and so on. All the instruments have to achieve the right sound, even though they have different tones. Drawing from this in city planning — the idea is to look at the process differently, to see that each neighborhood has different tones, different green spaces. They have their own life, identity, they are different, and together they have to create a common piece.
For me, it's a fantastic image showing how we can look at urban planning — not as a fight against urbanization, but a constant analysis of urban areas so that they work with each other, so that they are integrated through how we design. It's not about thinking only about one place, but all the time talking about how that one space can participate in a symphony with other neighborhoods, and finally how to create a city that is a great concert.
Ola Kloc: How do you invite all the urban players to participate? I'm afraid it can be quite difficult.
Helle Juul: You are right! Today, when we develop one area, we talk to its residents and to the city government. Maybe another way of planning would be to invite representatives from each part of the city to these conversations to talk about the identity, the atmosphere they would like to achieve and promote. With this information, neighborhoods can be created that are healthy, that support and promote social neighborhoods in very subtle ways.
Ola Kloc: How do you envision socially sustainable cities, cities of the future? What would you like them to look like?
Helle Juul: This is a very difficult question. I live in Copenhagen, which most of the time is very calm, very green, we can swim in our harbor. I don't think Copenhagen is the city of the future, but I think when we talk about the city of the future in "urban health culture", we are asking for a more proactive relationship between needs across borders, across scales, between sectors that do things in different ways to achieve a healthy urban environment.
I'm not talking about designing cities, but developing a new way of doing things and taking into account that we don't build for the buildings themselves, but for the people. We do it all the time for the people who live here and those who visit these places, to create a new way of living together. For me, this awareness is the future.
Ola Kloc: Thank you.
Ola Kloc
illustrations courtesy of Juul Frost Arkitekter studio
more: A&B 6/2024 - Health,
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