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Design for neurodiversity: “This is not a niche concern”
The future city is not smart, it is emotionally intelligent, offering transitional spaces, refuge and sensory choice, writes Christopher Martin
U rban design has spent the last century obsessing over what cities do. The next century will be defined by how cities feel.
That may sound a little woolly for a profession that enjoys discussing modelling, density ratios and active frontages. Yet after decades of designing cities around efficiency, economics and movement, the profession must accept an awkward truth: Many of the places we build are technically successful while remaining emotionally exhausting.
The modern city is full of spaces that planners admire and people endure. We celebrate intensity. We applaud activation and praise vibrancy, writing reports congratulating ourselves on footfall, mixed-use vitality and animated public realm. We fill streets with movement, colour, sound, events, signage, screens, bikes, scooters, deliveries, wayfinding systems and opportunities for connection. Then we wonder why so many people feel overwhelmed.
Many urban environments are difficult places to exist. Not because of physical barriers, but because of the relentless neurological negotiation they demand
The public realm is not merely the gap between buildings. It is where society happens. It is where we move, meet, work, learn, play, wait, think and belong. Streets are the stage on which everyday life unfolds. If people cannot comfortably use those spaces, then they are not truly public and we have failed.
My own route into this subject was not academic, it was personal, as my wife is autistic. Moving through cities together showed me something that years of professional practice had failed to reveal. Many urban environments are difficult places to exist. Not because of physical barriers, but because of the relentless neurological negotiation they demand.
Noise. Unpredictability. The crowds and visual clutter. The absence of retreat. The constant requirement to process, filter and adapt. Urban designers often speak about creating stimulating environments. However stimulation is not universally experienced as a benefit.
For many people, what professionals describe as vibrancy can feel much closer to assault, and this is supported by growing research suggesting that autistic people process significantly greater volumes of information than their non-autistic peers, even at rest. Before they have left the house. Before they have boarded a train. Before they have encountered a busy street.
Now imagine dropping that person into Oxford Street, Shibuya Crossing, Times Square or a major transport interchange. Announcements compete with traffic. Cyclists move past unexpectedly. Digital advertising flickers, hums and pulses. Pedestrians move around. Routes are unclear. Signage contradicts itself. The environment never stops asking questions.
Accessibility also has a cognitive dimension: A city can be physically accessible while remaining neurologically hostile
For many people, this is not an inconvenience. It is dysregulation. And when environments repeatedly dysregulate people, they stop using them. That is not a personal failing. It is an urban failure.
The remarkable thing is how often this remains invisible to the people designing cities. Most urban design guidance still assumes that accessibility means physical accessibility. Ramps. Kerbs. Gradients. Lifts. Those things matter enormously. But accessibility also has a cognitive dimension: A city can be physically accessible while remaining neurologically hostile.
This is not a niche concern. Around one in every hundred people is diagnosed as autistic, while many more remain undiagnosed for a number of reasons. Across the world’s urban population, we are talking about tens of millions of people whose experience of cities may be fundamentally different from the assumptions embedded within the environments around them.
Yet the solutions are neither exotic, nor particularly expensive. The first is predictability. Urban designers love complexity. People often do not. Many neurodivergent individuals experience anxiety through uncertainty. When spaces become difficult to read, cognitive effort rises dramatically. Every decision becomes work.
Good urban environments communicate clearly. Routes are obvious. Signage is clear and literal. Layouts are legible and intuitive. Materials, lighting and spatial character should not change randomly every twenty metres simply because a designer became bored.
This does not mean cities must become dull. Exciting streets are wonderful. But before a street can be exciting, it needs to be understandable.
The second principle is sensory modulation. We need to stop designing environments that treat every human nervous system as identical. Most streets are designed visually. Yet human beings experience environments through multiple senses simultaneously. Sound matters. Glare matters. Smell matters. Movement matters. Contrast matters. Clutter matters.
A neurodiversity-friendly street should include softer planting buffers, reduced traffic speeds, calmer material palettes, less visual noise and greater separation from intense sources of sound. The aim is not sensory deprivation. It is sensory choice.
Designing for neurodiversity is not about creating niche environments for a minority. It is about creating calmer, healthier and more humane places for everyone
The third principle is transition, and this might be the most overlooked aspect of all. Cities often move people abruptly from one sensory condition to another. A quiet residential street suddenly becomes a popular high street. A calm station platform explodes into a bustling concourse. A peaceful square opens into a corridor of noise and advertising.
Transport planners are exceptionally good at moving bodies, but we are much less good at moving nervous systems. People need transitional spaces that allow them to adjust. Green edges. Shaded routes. Slower thresholds. Moments of pause. Places where sensory intensity increases gradually rather than all at once, so the nervous system has time to catch up.
The final principle is refuge. Most public spaces offer nowhere to recover. If somebody becomes overwhelmed in the middle of a large piazza where exactly are they supposed to go?
Increasingly, autism-friendly environments incorporate what are often called escape spaces or haven spaces. Small, quiet environments where sensory demands are reduced, and self-regulation becomes possible.
These are not grand civic gestures. They are often simple interventions. A sheltered seating area. A pocket garden. A quieter room. A protected corner. Somewhere with clear boundaries and a softened atmosphere.
Interestingly, these spaces benefit almost everyone. Children benefit. Older people benefit. People experiencing anxiety benefit. People carrying grief benefit. Anyone who has ever felt exhausted, stressed or emotionally depleted benefits.
One of the best examples comes not from urban design but from aviation. Edinburgh Airport’s sensory journey guide provides travellers with clear visual sequencing and explicit expectations about what they will encounter. It reduces uncertainty before uncertainty occurs.
The lesson is profound. Accessibility is not only about removing physical barriers. It is also about reducing cognitive friction. Ultimately, however, none of this can be achieved without involving neurodivergent people directly in the design process. Lived experience must become part of the design toolkit, and we must make tools such as Sensory audits; participatory mapping; and journey testing par for the course - standard practice rather than specialist additions.
Designing for neurodiversity is not about creating niche environments for a minority. It is about creating calmer, healthier and more humane places for everyone. And that points towards a much larger shift that is beginning to emerge within urbanism.
For years we have been told that the future city is the smart city. The smart city arrives wrapped in dashboards, sensors, apps, data platforms and proprietary technologies. It promises optimisation. It promises efficiency and a frictionless urban life, usually while someone is trying to sell municipalities a software subscription.
But cities are not machines. They are emotional systems. People do not experience urban life as datasets. They experience it as stress, comfort, confusion, delight, belonging, anxiety and joy.
The next great challenge for urban design is not teaching cities to think. It is teaching them to care. The future city is not a smart city, that is largely a marketing concept. The future city is an emotionally intelligent city.
Christopher Martin is the co-founder and director of Urban Movement
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