Erin Peavey was four months pregnant when she lost her mother to cancer. After her daughter was born in January 2019, the loneliness set in. Her mother had been her rock, a source of steady support. Now, home alone with a newborn and her husband working full time, Peavey clung to a piece of advice her mother had always given her: stay connected.
Each day, Peavey strapped her newborn to her chest and took walks in their Dallas, Texas, neighborhood. She hung out in coffee shops, made small talk at the grocery store, and got into the habit of visiting other such “third places”—a term by urban sociologists for informal gathering spots that aren’t home or work but can foster community. Peavey, an architect, says she didn’t need in-depth exchanges with others, she just felt a shared connection when out.
“It was like this antidote to the loneliness and mental struggle from losing my mom at the same time as becoming a new mom for the first time,” she says. “I was just struck by this gift that my built environment was for me…It allowed me to cope.”
Many experts now consider loneliness to be a public health epidemic, with the former U.S. Surgeon General warning that it affects roughly half of American adults and raises the risk of premature death to levels comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. But as these mental health challenges mount, experts like Peavey are asking: What if the spaces around us could help us feel less alone?
“The built environment, which is everything from our streets to housing to transportation systems, is such an important piece of how we actually interact with each other,” says Julia Day, a partner at the global urban strategy firm Gehl. “While addressing an epidemic requires multiple tools, changes to place design and programming are a key ingredient.” A 2024 report by the Foundation for Social Connection underscores this point, showing how the built environment can hinder or encourage meaningful social interactions—whether brief or deeply personal.
These ideas aren’t new, but they’ve been gaining traction. Peavey says this is partly because the pandemic helped destigmatize loneliness and made people more aware of their physical surroundings while stuck at home. “Over the last five-plus years, we’ve started to recognize that there are these structural factors that impact so much of our health, well-being, economic outcomes, etc,” she says. “And that one of those is our physical and built environment.”
Designing for connection
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to designing for social connection. However, architects, urban planners, policymakers, and others have developed various strategies that increase the chances of spontaneous or meaningful interaction—including in both private housing and public spaces.
Peavey has evidence-based design guidelines for social health she’s coined PANACHe. One type of place with these elements, she says, are Italian piazzas: They’re open to people (accessibility), have a hub of restaurants and shops (activation), and buildings with natural clay bricks and stones, often covered in ivy (nature). “When places can help us feel anchored and calmer, which is a huge part of what nature provides, it can help people feel more open,” she says.
(Asking for help is actually really good for you, according to science.)
These ideas are also reflected in a student residential campus at the University of California San Diego designed by the global firm HKS Architects, where Peavey is a design leader in health and well-being. It features shared spaces for cooking and socializing, interconnected staircases, and large windows overlooking common areas to promote social and academic interactions. After completion, studies showed an 8.2 percent drop in students’ self-reported depression and a nearly 28 percent increase in satisfaction with the residential spaces.
Elsewhere, a Canada-based consulting firm called Happy Cities is helping apply similar ideas to urban housing. With a growing global housing crisis, Emma Avery, an urban planner and communication lead at the firm, says there’s been greater interest in their approach to multi-unit housing, like apartment buildings and townhouses.
“We have housing unaffordability. We have the climate crisis. We have the crisis of social isolation and loneliness, and we really must work together to solve all these things at once,” Avery says. “If we’re building thousands of new homes in these high-rise towers, how are we ensuring that we’re not worsening social isolation?”
You May Also Like
To that end, Happy Cities produced a toolkit based on over a decade of research. Key recommendations include blending buildings into the surrounding neighborhood, creating gradual transitions between public and private spaces, and co-locating shared amenities.
These concepts guided the development of Our Urban Village in Vancouver, a 12-unit “co-housing lite” project where residents live collaboratively. In line with their principle of invitation, for example, there are wide outdoor walkways, a shared courtyard, and social nooks to encourage lingering and interaction. A study showed that six months after moving in, 100 percent of residents said they never or rarely felt lonely, and 88 percent considered two or more neighbors to be friends.
“With loneliness it’s not necessarily always about a lack of social relationships, but it’s how satisfied you feel in those relationships,” says Avery. That’s “why we’re really focused on creating these inviting spaces for people to pause and where they feel more open to connection and at their own pace.”
(Here’s why your neighborhood matters more for your health than you think.)
Public spaces are another area where they’ve seen more interest, especially since the pandemic. Though their toolkit focuses on housing, Avery says some concepts can also apply to public spaces. One is activation, where space is activated with intentional things to see and do, whether it be seating, a playground, or a community garden.
A recent study by Gehl and University of Toronto public health researchers highlights the value of activating public spaces. They examined The Bentway, a once-overlooked space beneath a major highway in Toronto that was transformed through design and programming. Most visitors said they felt healthier and more socially connected in the space—especially with its inclusion of landscape features, public seating, and arts events.
Day says that while urban planners increasingly recognize the value of such features, public health professionals often need more concrete data on the benefits to support their inclusion.
“Getting some more research on this like The Bentway project is really helpful to form more meaningful partnerships between public health and urban planners and developers, who can then really work together as needs to happen and make sure that addressing social isolation is a core part of a design brief,” she says.
Challenges and possibilities
Translating these design ideas into reality is far from simple. Built environments are heavily regulated and negotiated among numerous stakeholders, including developers, local and state governments, and community members, who often have competing interests. Priorities and policies can also shift with changing governments.
More cross-sector collaboration and more research are needed. Candice Ji, an urban planner and designer at Gehl, says there was little systematic data available when they first began looking at this issue. “We’re continuing to build an evidence base for action through the different studies we’re conducting,” she says.
Eric Klinenberg, a New York University professor of sociology and author of Palaces for the People, says there’s been more recognition of social infrastructure’s value over the past decade, but this hasn’t always led to more resources. “Investment in public spaces and social infrastructure remains stingy and uneven,” he says. “Cuts to government social spending, on parks, schools, libraries, and public spaces, threaten to increase the threat of loneliness and isolation at the very moment people need stronger ties.”
(Nine simple ways to boost your mental health, according to science.)
Still, some cities are applying these ideas. For instance, New York City’s Active Design Guidelines, though focused on physical health, also encourage features that support social interaction. Barcelona’s 10-year plan to reduce loneliness includes restructuring the city into community spaces and promoting new forms of home-sharing. In Seoul, South Korea, the Seoul Without Loneliness plan takes a multi-pronged approach, including using convenience stores as third places for people to gather over ramen and ensuring sufficient open spaces.
“When we can start to create places that foster trust and belonging and combat loneliness,” Peavey says, “that has so many different positive ripple impacts throughout our lives.”
English