Welcome to Your World: How the Built Environment Shapes Our Lives

Taking us on a fascinating journey through some of the world's best and worst landscapes, buildings, and cityscapes, Sarah Williams Goldhagen draws from recent research in cognitive neuroscience and psychology to demonstrate how people's experiences of the places they build are central to their well [...]
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Taking us on a fascinating journey through some of the world's best and worst landscapes, buildings, and cityscapes, Sarah Williams Goldhagen draws from recent research in cognitive neuroscience and psychology to demonstrate how people's experiences of the places they build are central to their well-being, their physical health, their communal and social lives, and even their very sense of themselves. From this foundation, Goldhagen presents a powerful case that societies must use this knowledge to rethink what and how they build: the world literally needs better designed, healthier environments that address the complex range of human individual and social needs.By 2050, America's population is projected to increase by another eighty million people. The amount of new construction that will be needed--almost all in urban areas--will be roughly equal to one-third of all the buildings, landscapes, infrastructure, and urban areas that exist today. Now is the time for us to seriously reconsider the importance of the built environment's design--how and what we build, and what for. We must do everything we can to prevent the construction of both exhausting, overstimulating environments and enervating, understimulating ones. Buildings, landscapes, and cities must both contain and spark associations of natural light, greenery, climatological variation, and other ways of being in landscapes that humans have evolved to need and expect. Fancy exteriors and dramatic forms are never enough, and may not even be necessary: Goldhagen demonstrates that authentic textures and surfaces, and careful, well-executed construction details are just as important. Goldhagen supports her exhortations by comparing and contrasting examples of good and bad design in schools, homes, workplaces, and parks around the world. Erudite, wise, and lucidly written, Welcome to Your World is a vital, eye-opening guide to the spaces we inhabit, physically and mentally, and a clarion call to design for human experience.