How to build a friendly building

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When developer Hesam Deihimi was thinking about what he wanted for a big development in the Vancouver suburb of Port Moody – almost 200 apartments in that city’s old downtown, incorporating a heritage building – he knew he wanted to help create a community, not just a bunch of boxes.

“I think people are longing for a sense of belonging,” says the Iran-born Mr. Deihimi, who has been interested in the topic of belonging himself since he was a child trying to figure out how he fit into Canada. There’s a reason his company is named Placemaker Communities.

So when the team he’d hired to design the project, GBL Architects Inc., came up with a plan that included a mews in the middle of the two buildings, with shops and cafes and places to gather and sit – places to connect – he was all in.

As it turned out, local residents and council felt the same way. The proposal for Mary Ann’s Place, named after a beloved community activist, Mary Anne Cooper, who died in 2021, saw 15 people come out to support the project and a unanimous approval vote from council last September.

Mr. Deihimi’s project is an example of the growing interest from a pioneering group of Vancouver developers and architects, community activists, urban designers, psychology professors and regular residents in the possibility of designing new buildings that help promote social connection – a topic of considerable interest in a city famously known for its high reported levels of loneliness.

And it’s getting even more attention as Canadian cities, due to new policies emanating from civic, provincial and federal governments panicking about how to grapple with the country’s housing crisis, are promoting massive new density of all kinds.

Among those trying to ensure that social connection gets built into this transformation is the urban-planning group Happy Cities, which consulted for Mr. Deihemi on the Port Moody project as part of its ongoing work on researching ways to create more socially connected new housing.

Another Vancouver organization, Hey Neighbour! Collective, is also dedicated to understanding and fostering connections among tenants as a way of creating more resilient social networks. That group, co-led by Michelle Hoar, has been working with Happy Cities in recent months on holding workshops for city planners on how to incorporate more of those ideas into formal design rules and incentives.

A non-profit group, also in Vancouver, called Urbanarium which focuses on better planning and design in cities, recently ran an architecture competition that asked entrants to focus on social connection, along with green design and affordability. That produced a raft of entries that aimed to increase social interactions among both residents inside a building and in the general neighbourhood.

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One of the winning entries, Tower House, by the New York firm Studio Oh Song, featured seductive outdoor courtyards with picnic tables and play areas, all accessible to the general public. Vancouver’s Team Switch included a café and other commercial space in the ground floor of their imaginary development that had two six-storey buildings with 16 apartments on a single lot. Others proposed having meeting rooms or gyms in the apartment building that could be used by other residents in the area. Many featured outside walkways on all floors, where residents could see each other as they travelled to their front doors

And, out on a new frontier that combines psychology with architecture and technology, Vancouver architect Bruce Haden, founder of FLUID Architecture, is working with TED-talk-famous University of B.C. psychology professor Elizabeth Dunn to develop a new kind of software to predict how architecture and design affect human interaction.

“We’re trying to build an evidence library,” says Mr. Haden.

He got interested in the topic almost a decade ago when he tried to design a different kind of social housing building for single mothers but couldn’t convince the funders that it was worth spending the needed 30 per cent more on exterior walls to support a design with outdoor walkways where the women would be more likely to see and subsequently socialize with each other.

“We had a hard piece of measurable data going up against a soft social intention,” he remembers ruefully. “So now we’re trying to bring some degree of evidence about sociability, like what happened with green design decades ago.”

The software he is developing, with the help of Ms. Dunn and tech specialists, aims to produce usable data to calculate how people move through the stages of connecting with neighbours – from simply encountering them, to proceeding to the “hello” phase, to forming enough of a bond that they can count on a neighbour for help. That could be anything from borrowing a tool to letting them know their pet has escaped to the street to checking up to see how they’re doing in a heat wave or power failure.

To that end, they model different kinds of designs with different “characters” (people who work outside the home, others who don’t, for example) to figure out what kinds of layouts create more of those encounters that help people gradually come to recognize familiar faces and be more inclined to start communicating.

“We’re trying to understand who are you crossing paths with,” he says.

That means looking carefully at the different types of areas in buildings where people might encounter each other: “pause spaces” – the places where people are 100-per-cent going to go as they conduct their regular lives, like garbage areas, parking, lobbies.

One scenario they modelled for a proposed Indigenous housing project on Vancouver Island showed that, under one kind of layout, the number of crossings increased more than 10 times, compared to another.

But space for connection can’t be just any random room or public area. At Happy Cities, senior housing researcher Madeleine Hebert says that one kind of space that developers often like to include – big, fancy, perfectly designed lounge spaces or outdoor areas with a couple of benches but nothing in particular to do there – don’t work. People need a reason to go (a playspace, a community garden, a space for a party or a yoga class), not just a photo opp.

“Where we see really lively spaces is where it’s used as an extension of their homes,” she said.

Ms. Dunn, whose research got a lot of attention during the height of COVID-19 isolation as everyone was trying to understand its impacts, emphasizes that this area of research is so unexplored yet that she and her team end up having to do new studies just to figure out what to program into the software.

An established body of research shows that the more times a person sees someone else, the more likely they are to have a positive association. But she said a lot of other supposed research about social connections is “conjecture that doesn’t rise to the level of evidence.”

So she’s fascinated with the idea of breaking new ground. “I think this is a really exciting area.”

That kind of connection isn’t just a nice, feel-good thing, as any one of the people interested in this issue will tell you.

Backing them up, the U.S. Surgeon General has included a recommendation to “design the built environment to promote social connection” as one of six remedies to combat what his office has described as a catastrophe of loneliness in modern society that is affecting people’s mental and physical health.

Still and all, design only goes so far, they also emphasize.

Says Ms. Hoar: “It doesn’t matter how pretty the buildings are if you can’t afford them” or if you’re constantly anxious that you’re going to be evicted.