The emotional and economic impacts of cities are closely connected, but this is lost in a proliferation of meaningless phrases like "healthy placemaking" and "human-centric design", says Reinier de Graaf.

The built environment affects us all. It is the common opening line of every conference about architecture. Elitist in the 1970s, forgotten in the 80s, rediscovered in the 90s, idolised in the 00s, architecture today mostly registers as a cause for concern, a discipline insufficiently aware of its consequences, one to be scrutinised and kept in check.
Gone are the days of splendid isolation, privileged deliberations among peers and wallowing in each other's praise. Architecture has caught the eye of public authorities and the business world alike, and there is one thing the two wholeheartedly agree on: too much is at stake to leave architecture to architects. Indeed, the built environment affects us all, emotionally and economically. To start with the latter, valued at 280 trillion US dollars, real estate represents the largest global asset class: triple the global GDP, worth twice the world's oil reserves and thirty times its gold stock.
Buildings (and the land they sit on) are the most important pillar of our financial system, and as our most recent global crisis demonstrated, an occasional source of its collapse. But while buildings generally make us richer, they don't seem to make us any happier. Never has the emotional evaluation of our built en...