Why the City You Live in Shapes Your Mind

Rakhi Amirah Khurana

Designing cities for mental and emotional health

Urban design isn’t just about where things go, it’s about how a place makes you feel the moment you arrive. It’s a multidisciplinary practice concerned with the physical layout, sensory experience, and psychological impact of built environments. It’s not just about structures; it’s about how environments actively shape human behaviour, perception, and quality of life.

You know where you are, and you want to stay.

When we follow these principles, we’re not just building cities, we’re creating the mental architecture for how people experience being alive.

The disoriented city, the disoriented mind

Spatial disorientation occurs when a city fails to provide clear visual cues, leaving people unsure of where they are or where they’re going. When streets, buildings, and blocks all look alike, the brain struggles to form a mental map. In the absence of landmarks, intuitive routes, or distinct spaces, navigating the city becomes not only confusing but emotionally exhausting.

Consider Georgia Street near Pacific Centre in downtown Vancouver. Although it’s the city’s core, it feels more like an airport terminal than an authentic setting. Many entrances are positioned sideways, so pedestrians often pass by destinations they’re meant to find. You might be searching for a café or bakery a friend recommended, only to miss it, it's signage pressed against glass or positioned so low it’s nearly invisible.

Cities as ecosystems of the mind

We need a shift in design philosophy, what urbanists call “third spaces”: neutral, non-commercial zones where you don’t have to buy something, prove something, or be something. A truly modern city wouldn’t just move bodies from point A to B; it would actively support the restoration of the brain and body.

One solution is for cities to formally integrate third space development into municipal planning, with dedicated funding and design teams responsible for creating non-commercial public zones in every neighbourhood.

The hidden cost of a poorly designed city

Urban design is not separate from mental health policy, it is mental health policy. Our city isn’t just a place. It’s a neurobiological environment.

British Columbia has an opportunity to lead the world in integrating neuroscience into urban planning. With its deep natural beauty, progressive health values, and growing mental health crisis, the province is perfectly positioned to reimagine its cities as environments that actively support psychological well-being.

Five principles for a brain-healthy city

• Spatial coherence: You pull into Scottsdale Fashion Square, one of the city’s most upscale destinations, but after exiting the parking structure, it’s hard to know where to go. For all its polish, there’s little shade, no clear pedestrian flow, and no sense of arrival. Signage should be minimal but strategic, and the mall entrance should act like a visual anchor: obvious, inviting, and centered in the line of sight.

• Follow the sun (circadian alignment): In much of Toronto, from office towers to condos, interior spaces stay uniformly lit, with no shift from day to night. Over time, this constant artificial brightness blurs your internal rhythm. To counter this, try syncing your day with natural light, start mornings near a window, take breaks outdoors when the sun is high, and dim your lights in the evening.

• Let nature in (biophilic design): You arrive at a UK train station and step out into a vast, empty car park, exposed to wind, rain, or glaring sun, depending on the season. There’s nowhere to shelter, nothing green in sight, just lines and tarmac. Design small, low-maintenance garden beds with native grasses, flowers, and shrubs. These can be placed near entrances or along pedestrian routes to add beauty.

• Protect the senses (sensory modulation): In Vancouver’s long, grey winters, tall buildings block the sunlight, leaving sidewalks in constant shadow. But small “sun pockets”, architectural cutouts could bounce warmth and light back into the space.

• Restorative micro- moments: In a quiet corner off a San Francisco side street, a small public square features a circular bench with wooden seating that holds a bit of afternoon sun. People pause with coffee from a nearby café, share a few words, or simply sit in silence.

This isn’t just an urban design issue, it’s a public health imperative. When we recognize the city as part of the brain’s environment, brain health stops being isolated to clinics and starts being built into streets, homes, and public spaces. The future of brain health lives not only in medicine but in how we shape the spaces we move through every day.

The city is not just a backdrop, it’s a biological environment.

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