top of page

Compassionate Places: Smart Cities as Psychologically, Emotionally and Socially-Intelligent Cities

Updated: 18 hours ago

PRESENTATION BY NATASHA REID AT SMART CITY EXPO MIAMI - RE:IMAGINE URBAN SPACES. October 2025




As cities grow more complex, a new paradigm is emerging—one that treats the built environment as a living ecosystem shaped by human emotion, connection, and well-being. Compassionate Places redefines smart cities through empathy, equity, and psychological insight.

SMART CITY MIAMI MAGAZINE - RE:IMAGINE URBAN SPACES SPECIAL ISSUE






Compassionate Places is a philosophy and practical method for humanistic, interdisciplinary built environment design which focuses on how we can accelerate the shift towards a new urban paradigm -


One where we are intentionally shaping places for human outcomes, where our surroundings are considered not as static bricks-and-mortar constructions, but as living ecosystems that respond to human experience, emotion, evidence emerging from the sciences and equity-based approaches and values.


Can the advances in technology and data that Smart Cities offer be combined in developments in the emergent fields of human-centric design and neuroarchitecture to accelerate human health and social wellbeing?





TOWARDS COMPASSIONATE PLACES


The Compassionate Places Method is a form of built environment design that recognises and prioritises human experience, feelings and relationships. It seeks to reconnect us to ourselves, to those around us, to community and to the natural world. It proposes a structured, multifaceted approach for Human-Centric and Science-informed design that can be applied to design and planning standards, policy and directly into everyday design practice in industry.


Compassionate Design looks at how we can design for mental wellbeing, to tackle loneliness, or anxiety, or for opportunity and social mobility. It is about centring feelings, connection, emotional impacts and factors that are not easily measurable. It’s about changing what we value and prioritise and rethinking how our surroundings are shaped accordingly. Compassionate Design moves beyond beauty and surface appearances, to span across concepts from designing for joy to spatial justice.





WHY IS CHANGE NEEDED?



We know the built environment has a profound impact on people’s lives, health, happiness and the way we come together as communities and society.  Our surroundings affect how we feel as individuals, how we interact as groups, our sense of identity, sense of place and belonging. But in public health terms, critically the built environment is one of the determinants of health, affecting life expectancy and life chances as well.  


However, the business-as-usual practices of design, planning and development do not typically integrate knowledge, insight and research from many other disciplines that address how people are affected by places. From public health to cutting-edge research and findings in neuroscience.  Similarly, it is rare for the lived experience of people and communities to be meaningfully applied to shape a place.


With multiple ongoing urban crises - such as mental health, loneliness, social fragmentation - the built environment offers a tool and potential that’s not being fully optimised to help with these interconnected issues.






3 SHIFTS FOR COMPASSIONATE PLACES



1.      Different ways of seeing


The approach takes a different starting point, to specifically address the missing layer of human experience in the design, development and planning processes.



2.      Different methods


A multi-faceted method is key to be able to address the full complexity of human needs and human nature, and draw from different perspectives, areas of knowledge and insights from different disciplines, such as environmental psychology, neuroscience, anthropology or sociology.



3.      Different value systems


The benchmarks for success are based on the impacts on human beings, such as health, social wellbeing and inclusivity outcomes. In this way, design practice is orientated to directly addresses the benefits for people and communities, rather than only physical attributes.



Key Design Shifts include:


  • Design that goes deeper than skin-deep aesthetics to make meaningful impact for people.

  • Design that anticipates, acknowledges and accommodates user’s needs and responses

  • including perception, feelings, behaviours etc.

  • Design that creates new dynamics, new relationships, new connective tissue and types of social fabric.


Fundamentally Compassionate Places starts with understanding what people want and need - emotionally, socially, psychologically - alongside what is important to people and what matters in their lives.   






SMART CITIES THAT ARE SOCIALLY, EMOTIONALLY AND PSYCHOLOGICALLY INTELLIGENT


Smart Cities are associated most strongly with technological advances and data, but when combined with the goal of improving citizen quality of life and wellbeing, Smart Cities could also mean psychologically, emotionally and socially-intelligent cities.


With advances in neuroscience and the emergent field of “Neuroarchitecture”, there are increasing possibilities to measure directly how people feel and respond to built environments through wearable technologies that can record aspects like stress responses and brain activity.  


This new era of data will not only shine a light on how people experience places but also the impact of design interventions.  This can support human experience and wellbeing becoming part of the typical understanding of what makes a successful place, and the importance of this for commercial value – rather than the human impacts being considered a separate “nice to have” area.  




With rapid urbanisation accelerating globally, increasing urban density will only create more challenges for quality of life. To face the challenges of today, we need a new type of response. We need a new philosophy for making our cities and places, that is drawn from our own humanity.


And approaches, methods, technologies and forms of practice that are in service of this. Smart Cities made through the lens of Compassionate Places could help accelerate the paradigm shift so urgently needed, leveraging advances in many fields to truly and deeply design for health, humanity, equity and economic impact all together.













Smart City Expo Miami has emerged as the leading smart city event in the United States, with global reach and influence —fostering conversations that push the boundaries of urban innovation and resilience.

 

The 2025 theme, RE:IMAGINE URBAN SPACES, inspired powerful ideas and transformative dialogue. The special edition magazine showcases some of the most engaging and thought-provoking moments from the event: https://smartcitymiami.com/








 
 
bottom of page