Rethinking Sleep: Rise of sleep cities
Not getting enough sleep? Blame your local mayor. In a small town, Ador, in Valencia, Spain, Mayor Joan Faus Vitoria issued an edict that town residents be able to take a nap between 2-5pm.
Historically, the famous siesta, an afternoon nap, had been a longtime tradition in Spain. However, with global modernization and the invention of air conditioning, which helped the urban dwellers to avoid the midday heat, the tradition entered into a longtime slumber.
However, in 2015, Mayor Vitoria issued a proclamation to urge the city residents to stay quiet during the siesta hours while keeping their children indoors. While, there are no penalties for violators, the edict symbolized an important cultural shift in the town’s sleeping pattern.
Spain isn’t the only country suggesting that we change our sleeping norms.
A German spa town, Bad Kissingen, announced an ambitious project in 2013 to change the people’s relationship with sleep. Based on the concept of Chronobiology, research that suggest that everyone has different ideal sleep hours based on their inherent circadian rhythms, Dr. Thomas Kantermann has started the ChronoCity Project, which attempts to “promote the town’s health through sleep.” In an attempt to utilize our most productive working hours, the ChronoCity Project would adjust city lights, working schedules, and customizable city designs to so that residents can sleep during hours that will maximize their productivity when they’re awake.
These cities are currently the forerunners in utilizing sleep to transform the people living inside them. They see sleep as a source of nourishment like food and water, which actually seems to make more sense than seeing sleep as a habit (like how famous Thomas Edison used to see them).
The issue of sleep deprivation may stem from our ever growing urban settings. This is why cities like Ador and Bad Kissingen are so attractive. It realizes a social need and is willing to experiment to solve a desperate biological need that is so often ignored. Ador and Bad Kissingen are attempting to change everything. In the new world, your sleep would be prioritized and triumph over other needs.
In the 1960s, John Calhoun ran a experiment studying the population growth of rat and mice in a limited space. He found that overpopulation could stress rats to the point of extinction regardless of the amount of food and other resources available to them.
The only reassurance from this disturbing experiment was not all rats went “beserk.” Historian Edmund Ramsden suggested that rats that could limit the overload of social interactions managed to remain relatively normal and healthy in Calhoun’s mouse utopia.
We need to be like the smart rats that learned to adapt to the overcrowded environment. Sleep is associated with various health problems that is likely to affect city dwellers in invisible ways. We live in spaces that are loud with too many bright lights and distractions.
Sleep cities are attempting to revolutionize the world by eliminating — at least reducing — such distractions. Imagine a world where your sleep schedule is actually respected instead of ignored.
While such efforts are ongoing, it might take some time to enjoy full services that will make it easier to snooze daily. While Ador and Bad Kissingen continue to shape our cities to incorporate better sleep, we will probably have to sneak in our daily naps in other ways to sustain ourselves.
For the time being, we may need to fill the gap in our sleep schedules with other alternatives. After Japan introduced nap pods, they have been expanding their products rapidly overseas to other sleep deprived nations like South Korea, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, and Germany.
To learn more about how snoozing more (or less) can change your life for the better, preorder my book, The Art of Napping: The Sleeping Samurai and the Dormant Dragon, here.
