How a consumer movement is translating into placemaking
What do you think of when you hear the term “Health and Wellness”? a spa? A meditation app? A suite of supplements to ingest with your orange juice each morning?
All of these are indeed products and services of the global health and wellness industry, currently worth $6.8 trillion and forecast to reach $9.8 by 2029, according to the Global Wellness Institute.
Until recently, few thought about cities, neighbourhoods or placemaking when asked about health and wellness. But this is changing fast as “Wellness Real Estate” is one of the fastest growing sectors in the “Wellness economy” with a 19.5% annual growth rate, according to McKinsey. Health and wellness has evolved from a niche market into a powerful, consumer-led movement that is reshaping how people live, shop, and evaluate everyday products and services.
In the context of placemaking, there is often a gap between how the real estate industry and the planning profession view health and wellness. Like two nations divided by a common language, the commercial real estate industry and local authority sector speak very differently when it comes to improving health through placemaking.
While there’s shared acceptance and growing adoption of principles that homes and places impact health, there’s also a different interpretation of these how these impacts play out and, most critically, for whom. Planners care about population health and health equity, and translate these concerns into health impact assessments and mitigation measures. Planning authorities vary as to what extent and how they do this – and some are to be commended for leading best practice in meeting the challenges of data collection and programme design through collaboration with health providers.
The commercial approach needs to incentivise and satisfy investors, and commercial developers focused on health and wellness have data and narratives to support their offer. According to the Global Wellness Institute, the built environment is the next frontier and greatest future opportunity for wellness:
“Our built environments have a profound influence on our health and well-being (an impact that is often negative), and these impacts have become more obvious since the COVID-19 pandemic. The rise of wellness as a dominant consumer value is driving trillions of dollars of spending across every product and service category. Worldwide, nearly 15% of GDP (or over $16.5 trillion in 2024) is spent on construction every year, building our workplaces, homes, schools, hospitals, roads, and infrastructure. Housing is one of the largest household expenditures worldwide (representing about 20% of all global consumer spending, or $12 trillion in 2024) in addition to being our biggest financial investment. It is only logical that what we build should also be an investment in our health and well-being.”
It describes six dimensions of Wellness Real Estate: physical; mental & spiritual; social; economic & financial; environmental; civic & community. Each of these is broken down into measurable subcategories. All of this is supported by six “key principles” to “guide the development of Wellness Real Estate from the ground up”:
1. From small to large scale: Wellness can be incorporated into any size, scale, and type of building or project, and at any price point.
2. From intentional to multidimensional: Wellness real estate should be intentional, starting at the early stage of the planning process; it should use a multidimensional and holistic approach.
3. From “do no harm” to optimizing wellness: Our built environments should not be unhealthy or unsafe; they can also leave us feeling better than before we entered them.
4. From passive to active wellness: Our built environments can affect our health simply by existing within a space; they can also encourage the proactive behaviors that drive wellness.
5. From infrastructure to operations: Wellness should be embedded in the infrastructure and not just an amenity; it should also be activated through ongoing operations and programming.
6. From “me” to “we”: Apart from catering to individual wellness needs, wellness real estate recognizes that connections and community are central to our well-being.
Both the commercial industry and planners have much to learn from the other in developing homes and places that improve the health of their inhabitants.
This week I attended an event at NLA to launch Saluura, a framework for designing and appraising wellness in neighbourhoods, estates and regeneration projects. Saluura builds on the six dimensions outlined above, breaking these down into multiple criteria and sub-criteria to measure “place-based wellness”. It’s one of several contributors to NLA’s Health Creating City initiative.
It’s encouraging to see these frameworks evolve and an evidence base emerge to support them.
A key challenge will be to apply them in communities with poor health outcomes and to demonstrate how they are integral to developing homes and places that go beyond “do no harm” and actively deliver health net gain.
Clare Delmar
Listen to Locals
29 September 2026
