The built environment plays a crucial role in our overall happiness. We brought together industry experts to explore how urban design foster wellbeing as part of our Happy London project.
Our Happy London panel event challenged conventional approaches to urban development by examining how thoughtful design and community engagement can foster genuine happiness and wellbeing across London’s diverse neighbourhoods.
Drawing on the programme’s filed trips to innovative projects in Hackney, Tower Hamlets, and Barking & Dagenham, the discussion further revealed how small design interventions and authentic community participation can create transformative social outcomes.
The event highlighted that happiness should be considered a core outcome of urban development, not an afterthought. As London faces multiple systemic challenges, practitioners across planning, development, and local government have an opportunity to rethink their role and consider not just what we build, but how our work can foster stronger relationships, healthier communities, and a greater sense of belonging.
Key takeaways from the day included:
- Consumption does not equate to happiness: Real urban happiness comes from interpersonal relationships and community belonging, not purchasing power. As psychologist Paul Hannah noted, “financial capital does bring us to a level, it then plateaus”, meaningful social connections matter more than commercial transactions.
- Small design details create big impact: Seemingly minor design decisions, from balcony placement to kitchen layouts, fundamentally shape how people experience spaces and form relationships. These “tiny little bits” can either enable genuine community connections or create barriers to social interaction.
- Co-creation is essential: Successful community spaces require authentic participation from inception through long-term stewardship. Projects work best when communities feel ownership rather than having solutions imposed upon them: “you don’t want things to happen to you or for you, [but] happen with you.”
- Commons build resilience: Shared resources like community centers, public spaces, and affordable housing that don’t require consumption to access provide crucial community resilience. These spaces became lifelines during COVID-19 and remain essential for diverse populations seeking belonging.
- Happiness delivers a strong ROI: Well-designed community interventions generate significant measurable social value — up to 1:6 returns through reduced healthcare, criminal justice, and social service costs, plus improved educational and employment outcomes. A Bristol University Research report by Karen Bell suggests these figures can be even higher, further underscoring the case for embedding wellbeing in urban development.
Insights from our speakers
Paul Hanna: Rethinking happiness in the urban context
Paul Hannah, a clinical psychologist and industry consultant with Hoare Lea, opened by confronting uncomfortable truths about urban happiness. He noted that cultural myths often link happiness to consumption, but his research in community psychology shows that while financial capital can lift people to a certain level, it quickly plateaus. What truly sustains happiness are strong interpersonal relationships and meaningful social connections.
This insight is particularly relevant in London’s development landscape, where Paul argues, “we’re building spaces that often don’t consider where we’re going to have those relationships.” He highlighted how minor design decisions can have profound effects: “those nuances, and I mean the tiny little bits when we start designing, when we start creating, they change how people experience the spaces they’re in. They change the relationships that they can form.”
Paul also cautioned against creating “sanitized communities” that marginalize residents who do not participate as consumers. Instead, he advocates for spaces that embrace “multiculturality,” “quality,” and the authentic messiness that makes neighbourhoods vibrant and inclusive.
Sripriya Sudhakar: The commons as foundation for belonging
Sripriya Sudhakar from Tower Hamlets Council connected happiness to belonging through the lens of the urban commons. Citing Aristotle’s definition of happiness as “the central purpose for life,” she argued that belonging requires “something to belong to,” shifting happiness from an individual pursuit to a collective experience.
In Tower Hamlets, where “35% of the population [is] of Bangladeshi origin” and “90 different languages are spoken in our schools,” Sripriya stressed the importance of accessible public resources that people can share without the need to consume or own them. “Commons have a different role and purpose,” she explained. “They are available to you, but you don’t have to consume. You work towards it, you hold it in commons, you hold it together, but you don’t necessarily have to own it.”
This approach proved vital during the pandemic, when “what sustained us in that period [were] the communities coming together and people going beyond boundaries to help each other.” That collective resilience, she argued, shows why safeguarding shared assets is essential. Her current work on Tower Hamlets’ local plan focuses on “safeguard[ing] those very shared resources, to ensure that we have that level of resilience for our community.”
Alison Benzimra: Case studies for a Happy London
Alison Benzimra from United St Saviour’s Charity presented Appleby Blue, their Stirling Prize-shortlisted almshouse in Bermondsey, as a living example of happiness through design. The 500-year-old charity’s latest project provides homes for residents over 65 while also acting as “an asset to the wider community” through intergenerational programmes and facilities such as a shared kitchen. “Fundamentally, we believe in the power of food to bring people together,” Alison explained, describing the community kitchen as “the heart of the home.”
While Appleby Blue costs around 25% more to build than standard social housing, its high-quality design offers residents an aspirational reason to move, helping to release 118 under-occupied properties back into use – creating a positive housing chain.
A research partnership (The LEMONADE Project) with Bournemouth University, where researchers lived alongside residents, has provided robust evidence of improved health and wellbeing. This reinforces United St Saviour’s conviction that housing, health, and social care must be treated as an integrated system to create a happier London.
Innovation from Future London Leaders
Three built environment professionals and graduates of the Future London Leaders programme presented bold proposals addressing the theme Happy London:
Betty Owoo – London Sharing Plate
Betty’s proposal responds to food poverty and youth service cuts with a vision for food-focused pavilions on the city’s periphery. She highlighted that “one in three children in London live in poverty” and that since the 2011 riots “over £36 million [has been] cut from youth services each year.” Her project uses food as a form of “soft power, holding stories, ritual and memory” to foster community connections, where “the food is shared and not sold.”
Luke Kon – Building Second Chances
Luke’s initiative tackles ex-offender reintegration through construction training and housing development. With only 20% of ex-offenders in stable housing one year after release, his proposal offers a practical, scalable way to address two of London’s most pressing challenges. It also demonstrates the wider value of meaningful work in building comfort, confidence, and long-term stability.
Izzy Theodoreson – Sports Spaces for Social Connection
Izzy’s project transforms underused urban sites into inclusive sports facilities, engaging marginalized groups and fostering connections across different communities. Drawing on the success of Football Beyond Borders, she emphasised sport as a universal language that “opens up spaces where other kinds of conversations can happen, building trust, connection, and opportunity.”
Panel discussion
Sustainable community engagement offers real social value
The discussion highlighted that successful projects require genuine co-creation from inception through long-term stewardship. As Betty Owoo noted:
“It is essential to make sure that we build relationships with key partners and stakeholders from project inception through to post-occupancy, to ensure that decisions are not made for people or on behalf of communities and instead happen with communities engaged.”
This principle proved essential for addressing community tensions, particularly around demographic change and perceived competition for resources. Projects demonstrated that spaces designed with authentic community input can bridge divides by providing grassroots accessibility — for example, sports facilities where “you don’t need to speak the same language, you can just kick it, just go and have that shared experience.”
The panel concluded that these approaches generate significant social returns. Appleby Blue demonstrates upstream healthcare savings through integrated support, while Paul’s research has found that community interventions achieve 1:6 returns through reduced demands on health, criminal justice, and social services.
Systemic change: Putting wellbeing at the heart of cities
Insights from the panel align closely with Future of London’s broader work on inclusion-first growth, co-production, and climate equity. Our 2025 research on inclusive economies shows that “boroughs must create clearer pathways for the private sector to drive meaningful inclusion,” and our ongoing exploration of co-production demonstrates that genuine collaboration requires moving beyond “co-production washing” toward authentic power-sharing with communities.
These findings reinforce the panel’s core argument: sustainable urban happiness does not come from isolated interventions but from interconnected systems that prioritise relationships over transactions, shared stewardship over extraction, and community resilience over short-term gains. Evidence shows that when we design for genuine human connection, we unlock both social cohesion and economic prosperity.
The panel underscored that happiness cannot be an afterthought. To achieve real impact, urban development must embrace systems change that places people’s wellbeing at its centre, designing policies and spaces that foster connection, equity, and resilience at every stage. Only by embedding these principles consistently can cities genuinely support flourishing, thriving communities.
Future of London would like to thank our programme sponsors: Countryside Partnerships, Potter Raper, and Queen Mary University of London, for making the Happy London project possible. Their support enabled both this event and the wider programme of research, site visits, and knowledge-sharing that underpinned it. Thanks to their commitment, practitioners across London have been able to come together to explore how we can design places that truly support happiness and wellbeing.
Find out more about the Happy London project.
The Happy London project is supported by Countryside Partnerships, Potter Raper and Queen Mary University London
