You are standing at a crosswalk.
The light is red. A bus roars past you a little too closely. Your phone buzzes with a BOGO offer from Starbucks. A billboard changes from a perfume ad to a phone number of a personal injury law firm. Someone is talking about their cheating ex-boyfriend beside you. The walk signal starts flashing. You step forward, but a pickup truck next to you is already inching into a right turn.
Before you cross a single street, your brain has already sorted through a dozen competing demands. Then you arrive at work, class, or the library and wonder why on earth you cannot concentrate. What’s wrong with you?
We tend to treat that feeling as a personal fault. Put down the phone. Stop scrolling. Have better discipline. But city design is asking people to maintain attention in environments deliberately designed to fracture it. While urban planners carefully measure traffic congestion, pedestrian flow, and air pollution, they rarely ask: What is all of this doing to the brain?
Neuroscience gives us a reason to take this issue seriously. Attention depends on limited-capacity cognitive systems that must continuously select which information receives priority while suppressing competing stimuli. Neuroscientist Grace W. Lindsay, in a 2020 paper on attention, describes attention as “the flexible control of limited computational resources.” The brain must therefore continually determine where to direct and route information rather than processing everything in our environment with equal priority. Visual features, including color contrast, intensity, and motion, can automatically attract attention without conscious effort, Lindsay explains.
Yet our public infrastructure is designed to keep people engaged, no matter the cost.
Solving the damage city infrastructure has on the brain does not imply a city with no stimulation at all. After all, the stimulation a city provides is the very reason why so many people want to visit or live in urban environments. And even as it exposes people to specific environmental risk factors, urban life provides a multitude of health benefits, including social, educational, career, and leisure opportunities.
But urban planners and policymakers can enhance public health and wellbeing by mitigating the cognitive demands placed on residents. That could mean limiting digital advertising in particularly crowded public spaces, expanding quiet areas, planting more trees, and creating pedestrian spaces that allow for sensory relief. It could even take a more systematic approach, such as requiring attention-impact assessments for major public projects.
São Paulo’s Clean City Law offers one example of what this could look like. In 2007, the city prohibited outdoor advertising, requiring more than 15,000 billboards to be removed and subjecting hundreds of thousands of business signs to restrictions. As the 99% Invisible podcast reported back in 2016, the law also required bus, taxi and poster advertisements to go, while the city later began reintroducing some advertising in more controlled forms. It’s proof that cities can decide what commercial messages occupy shared public space, rather than treating every available surface as advertising real estate.
Beyond reducing the visual clutter of billboards and road signs that distract pedestrians and drivers alike, cities can also embrace outdoor lighting codes to help keep our skies free of unnecessary light pollution. Pittsburgh’s first-in-the-nation Dark Sky Ordinance, crafted in partnership with dark sky experts, uses shielding, dimmers, and warmer lighting in all of city parks, facilities, and streetlights. Not only does it mitigate light distraction and glare, it also reduces energy waste. Planners can consider how to design nighttime spaces to help people see without asking them to look at unnecessary light.
Cities can also reduce cognitive demands by changing the decisions people are required to make in the first place. Consider right turns at red lights. In Cambridge, as part of its Vision Zero plan for road safety, city officials banned right turns on red due to drivers looking for gaps in traffic failing to double-check for pedestrians and cyclists. Banning rights on red in dense urban areas could remove one more stress-inducing variable from an already complicated environment.
Indeed, cities can also protect our attention by simplifying the environments we are required to navigate. Slow streets and pedestrianized streets help eliminate obstacles and interference so pedestrians can move safely without constantly navigating hazards. Barcelona’s famous Superblocks are a more dramatic example of how cities can transform car-dominated spaces into people-centred ones, reclaiming streets for uses beyond moving cars.
Researchers caution that Barcelona’s transformation remains an “unfinished policy paradigm shift” due to political challenges, but protecting human attention does not require cities to become quiet or empty. It requires considering what our infrastructure is asking our brains to do and whether there are better ways to design it.
Even with such interventions, attention will always remain a limited resource that our environments and public space will ask us to spend. If cities constantly demand our attention, they should also provide places where we can recover it. In a 2008 study, psychologists compared participants who walked through an arboretum with those who walked through an urban environment. Afterward, the nature group performed better on a test of directed attention, suggesting that exposure to natural environments may help restore attentional functioning.
Attention deserves to be treated like any other public resource, something cities have a responsibility to protect rather than exhaust. We already ask whether a street is safe, accessible, and walkable. We should also ask whether the people moving through it have any mental space left when they arrive.
Julia Gendin is a neuroscience student at Boston University. She writes frequently on the intersection of neuroscience, policy, and institutional design.
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