Heatherwick's Humanise Launches £1.5m Research on UK Streetscapes

Thomas Heatherwick's campaign Humanise has launched a £1.5 million research project to study how the UK's streetscapes can be beautified to improve wellbeing.

The project, titled Delivering Humanised Places, is a partnership between the University of Glasgow, the funding agency UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and Humanise, the campaign Heatherwick established in 2023. Humanise said it wants to "challenge the 'blandemic' of dull, soulless development" and change how the UK designs and builds its urban environments.

The research will examine how buildings in the UK can promote health, pride and belonging, and the potential socio-economic benefits of doing so. Particular focus will fall on the external design of buildings and streets — an aspect Heatherwick argued receives too little consideration.

"Buildings in our towns and cities are experienced by millions of us every year as we pass by, and profoundly affect how we feel, yet we've spent decades designing buildings with a narrow definition of function, led by efficiency and cost, and too much focus on the needs of the people who use them inside," he said.

"The experience for passersby has been street after street of characterlessness," Heatherwick continued. "In this time when society is more fragmented than ever, characterised by an epidemic of loneliness, too little thought has been given to how the design of the outsides of buildings could benefit society more broadly."

The evidence base

According to Humanise's own research, 76 per cent of people in the UK believe the appearance of buildings affects mental health. The organisation plans to build on existing knowledge to strengthen the evidence of how buildings affect wellbeing, and to use that evidence to help create spaces that are engaging and joyful.

The research will centre local voices and aims to give communities more of a say in decisions that shape the places they live. It also hopes to influence policy, offering resources to mayors and developers to help them implement "humanised" design in regeneration and development projects.

"Human-centred design can help us create places with character and joy, that support our wellbeing and sense of belonging, and that people value for generations to come," said Heatherwick. "Places people love also last longer."

"Our ambition is to turbocharge the creation of radically more human, engaging and joyful places," he continued. "The opportunity to make meaningful change is massive, but it will only be able to begin with the deep understanding that comes from measuring."

Timing and criticism

The project arrives as the UK government works towards its plan to build new towns in England — a programme Heatherwick sees as a prime opportunity.

"Britain is preparing to build homes and communities on a scale we haven't seen for generations," he said. "This is a rare opportunity to ensure that the human experience is at the heart of what we build."

Heatherwick launched Humanise in 2023 to put into action ideas from his book Humanise, a Maker's Guide to Building Our World, which calls for, among other things, "an end to boring buildings".

The campaign has its critics. Writer Owen Hopkins described it as "an incredibly reductive way of assessing the built environment", arguing that it fails to identify the causes of poorly designed architecture or the ways to tackle them.

With £1.5 million in funding, university partners and a government building programme on the horizon, the project's first test will be whether measurement can translate into policy — and whether the evidence changes what actually gets built.