Can We Humans Build Cities That Don't Freak Us Out?
Outside PopSci's Office Google StreetviewNew research tries to measure the impact of streetscapes on our mental health. If you condensed all 200,000 years of humanity's existence into a one hour-long video and then played it back, you would have to wait 58 minutes for people to build their first city-like habitat--a honeycomb-like mud-brick town of 5,000 in present-day Turkey. Half a minute later, you'd see another city, in Iraq, surge to 50,000 people, and 45 seconds after that, Egypt's Alexandria would swell by another factor of ten, to 500,000. With just two seconds to go in the movie, London's population would skyrocket to 5 million--another order of magnitude--just as all the rest of the developed world began to erupt in a frenzy of urbanization. During the last half of the last second, the developing world would follow. Today, for the first time in human history, more than half the world's...