Why privacy is sometimes overrated

I have always had a thing for buildings. I’m the kind of person who sometimes finds more wonder in museum buildings than in the art they house. And since becoming a practitioner of Behavioural Design, that fascination with what buildings and spaces can do has only grown. This week, I was reading a story about two apartment buildings in São Paulo that made me rethink how I see my neighbours and my neighbourhood, and revealed the quiet power of spatial design.

What I found quite funny, and completely irrelevant to the point I want to make, is that these buildings in São Paulo actually have names. They’re called Locarno and Lugano. I couldn’t keep that from you, right? But despite their friendly names, they are twin modernist towers built in 1958 by the German architect Adolf Franz Heep, and nothing about them looks revolutionary from the outside. They are elegant, well-proportioned, mid-century in the best sense. And yet, what has happened inside them over seven decades is quietly remarkable.

The buildings face each other across a narrow garden. The windows stretch the full length of every apartment. Which means that from your living room, you can see directly into the living room opposite. You know when your neighbour is home. You notice when another neighbour is back from holiday. When I first read this, I caught myself thinking; so glad I am not living there. That kind of transparency feels so intrusive to me. But as it turns out, in practice, it creates something else entirely: the low-level awareness of each other that is the foundation of community.

Heep did not set out to design a community. He set out to design good apartments for a growing Brazilian middle class. High ceilings, natural light, cross-ventilation, rooms that connect logically. But the consequence of those decisions, the narrow gap between the buildings, the full-length windows, the shared garden, was a context in which connection became the default rather than the exception.

Danish architect and urban designer Jan Gehl has spent his career documenting exactly this phenomenon. In his research on cities and public space, Gehl found that what determines whether people connect is not their desire for connection but the physical distance between them and the presence of reasons to linger. Soft edges, he calls them, the transitional zones between private and public space where unplanned encounters happen. A shared garden between two buildings with full-length windows is a soft edge made permanent in concrete and glass.

What Heep built, whether intentionally or not, was a machine for gentle, ongoing contact. Not forced community, not organised socialising, but the quiet background hum of knowing your neighbours are there. Gehl's research shows that this kind of passive contact, simply being aware of others going about their lives, is one of the most undervalued sources of urban wellbeing. In fact, when I did research for my new book ‘The Happiness Code’, connection turned out to be one of the primary drivers of health, longevity and wellbeing.

This is what behavioural designers mean when we talk about the power of the environment. Nobody in those buildings decided to become close neighbours.

How to use this insight:

The question worth asking about any space you design or inhabit is not just: does this look good? It is: what behaviour does this make easy?

In an office: do people have reasons to pass each other during the day, or does the layout allow everyone to arrive, sit down, and leave without a single unplanned encounter? The coffee point, the staircase, the placement of the printer, these are not facilities decisions. They are community decisions.

In your own home: which spaces invite lingering and which ones hurry people through? A kitchen where there is nowhere to sit while someone cooks is a kitchen that discourages company. A small bench by the front door is an invitation to stay a moment longer.

In urban planning: the distance between front doors matters. The presence or absence of a shared threshold, a garden, a stoop, a covered entrance, determines whether neighbours ever become more than strangers who happen to share a postcode.

And although I can’t really change the design of my street or neighbourhood, I’ve started to say hello to people on my street. And you know what? For me, this is exactly the right level of passive contact. I don’t feel like I suddenly have to invite them over for dinner, but I do feel a stronger sense of belonging. It may sound soft, but try it yourself. The least it can bring you is the reputation of being that happy camper in the neighbourhood. There are worse things to be known for.

Many people find they concentrate better in a coffee shop than in their home office, even though the café is objectively noisier and more distracting. Researchers at the University of Illinois found that a moderate level of ambient noise, around 70 decibels, roughly the hum of a busy café, actually enhances creative thinking compared to both silence and loud noise.

But the effect is not just about sound. It is also about context. Your home desk carries the psychological weight of everything else associated with it: unread emails, household tasks, the general blurriness of domestic life. The café has one implicit social norm: people here are working or thinking. That norm is contagious. You absorb it the moment you sit down.

This is why so many productivity tips fail. They focus on motivation and discipline when the real lever is the environment. You do not need more willpower. You need a context whose unwritten rules point in the right direction.

The practical implication: if you are stuck on something, do not push harder at your desk. Change the room. Sometimes a different context is the only intervention you need. Or just go out to your local café. There is now a perfectly valuable excuse for going out and treating yourself to a probably overpriced barista prepared coffee. It is totally worth it, as we now know it is not just a coffee, it is you preparing for deep work that will most properly deliver brilliant insights.

Until next week,

Astrid Groenewegen

Co-Founder of SUE | Behavioural Design Academy, Author of 'The Art of Designing Behaviour' / 'De Kunst van Gedrag Ontwerpen' and ‘De Gelukscode’.