Housing design subtly shapes how people move, interact, and feel in their daily lives, yet architects rarely use behavioural science to guide their decisions. This project aims to change that by applying a new concept called "urban plasticity"—the idea that cities physically and functionally reshape themselves through the ongoing interactions between people and their surroundings. The researcher will work with a housing association to study how specific design features in homes and neighbourhoods influence residents’ behaviour, drawing on insights from neuroplasticity (how the brain rewires itself) and urban resilience research. If successful, the work could give housing developers and planners a practical, evidence-based framework for designing places that support human well-being and community life, rather than prioritising profit alone. The project will produce workshops, interviews with residents and design professionals, and written guides for both academic and non-academic audiences. It is primarily exploratory—building a new research agenda rather than delivering a ready-to-use tool—but its findings could eventually reshape how housing estates, streets, and public spaces are conceived, making them more responsive to how people actually live.
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A major challenge of modern life is how we can live in cities healthily, happily and sustainably, with over half the world's population now living in urban areas. Housing design and development can be used as a routed to reimagine urban life for human and planetary well-being. This project, through collaboration with a housing association – J49 Ltd – as the partner organisation, aims to unravel the interactions of housing design with human behaviour. A recent novel concept, urban plasticity – the ability of a city to undergo structural and functional change as a result of interactions between people and place, will be applied to used to achieve two key aims. The first aim is to understand how place design, particularly housing, can shape behaviour. This aim will draw on and advance the urban plasticity framework as a way of explaining urban life as people-place interactions using neuroplasticity and urban resilience research. The second, translational aim is to encourage design professionals to use behavioural research to inform place design. Integrating an understanding of human behaviour into the design process is an important way to guide the focus of housing design and development away from profit and back towards human and community flourishing. These aims will be achieved through forming connections between academia and industry partners using workshops and community engagement events, conducting interviews with design professionals and residents of J49's developments, written outputs in academic and non-academic formats. Finally, the fellowship will cultivate an attentiveness as a behavioural researcher to the interactions of behaviour and place for the research fellow with a background in psychology but a keen curiosity for urban design. The programme will culminate in further funding applications and a new research agenda aimed at the reconnection of person and place for collective flourishing.
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