The onset of the pandemic and the resulting global lockdown has shed new light on the topic of mental wellness. With borders suddenly closed, doors abruptly shut, and ties painfully albeit momentarily cut, cities and their people experienced a palpable and never-before sense of isolation. As the world regains its footing and establishes a new, hopefully better normal, how do we open up conversations to help our cities recover, make them more resilient, and take better care of them?

Based in Singapore and Paris, design practice WY-TO has established a systemic framework that assesses the well-being of a city across various scales of intervention. While there are many theoretical and national well-being and happiness indices established by both government and private stakeholders globally, most of these tend to be eurocentric. WY-TO’s research casts the spotlight on equatorial and tropical cities in the larger context of the Global South, based on the following 12 principles to evaluate the well-being of a city.

Besides expanding these 12 principles into objectives and actionable strategies, WY-TO has also developed a toolkit that includes a scorecard to help both ground-up and top-down stakeholders evaluate the well-being of greenfield and brownfield sites across various scales, including that of Regional, Town, Neighbourhood, Precinct and Building.