Building Social Connections: Toolbox of design actions to nurture wellbeing in multi-unit housing
As governments across Canada push to build denser housing faster, it is critical that we design new homes to support community wellbeing, social connection, sustainability, and inclusion for everyone.

Our neighbours are our closest source of social support and connection. Socially connected homes and neighbourhoods nurture greater physical and mental health, community resilience, and social trust between diverse residents.
The homes we live in play a significant role in encouraging and creating opportunities for positive neighbourly interactions. In particular, evidence shows that the design and location of common spaces in multi-unit housing—including common amenities, circulation spaces, and outdoor areas—can make a big difference in our connections with neighbours, and are closely connected to the social wellbeing of residents.
As governments across Canada push to build denser housing faster, it is critical that we design new homes to support community wellbeing, social connection, sustainability, and inclusion for everyone.
Introducing: The Building Social Connections Toolkit
Over 2023 and 2024, Happy Cities, Hey Neighbour Collective, and researchers from Simon Fraser University worked together with five local municipalities and one First Nation to co-create new policies to encourage sociable multi-unit housing design.
Building on the learnings from this project, Happy Cities and Hey Neighbour Collective have published a new design toolkit of evidence-based strategies to nurture social wellbeing multi-unit housing. The design principles and actions equip policy makers, planners, designers, and community members to build and advocate for more socially connected, inclusive communities, drawing on over a decade of research and engagement with residents and housing industry actors—including non-profit housing providers, city planners, architects, and market developers.
In the face of growing challenges—including an acute housing affordability crisis, extreme weather, social isolation, and an aging population—our social connections are one of the strongest resources we have to chart a more sustainable, resilient path forward.
About the toolkit
This toolkit is part of the Building Social Connections project – within this project, Happy Cities and Hey Neighbour Collective worked with six local governments to co-create new multi-unit housing design policies to support social well-being for all residents. Happy Cities and Hey Neighbour Collective collaborated on the vision for this toolkit, building on project learnings and prior research, policy, and engagement by each organization. Happy Cities led the research, writing, and design of the toolkit, with detailed content review from Hey Neighbour Collective and external reviewers.
The project included three phases:
- Phase 1: Measuring the impact of the City of North Vancouver’s Active Design Guidelines
- Phase 2: Co-creating housing design policies to support wellbeing in multi-unit housing
- Phase 3: Developing the Building Social Connections policy and design toolkit
Visit our Building Social Connections project page to learn more about each phase.
How to use this toolkit
This toolkit presents design opportunities to nurture social well-being in housing for people of all ages, backgrounds, abilities, household sizes, and incomes. The design areas are broken down into four toolboxes:
- Social building edges
- Social circulation
- Social amenities
- Social homes
These actions are designed to be flexible and applicable across the spectrum of multi-unit housing, including townhouses, multiplexes, low-rise apartments, and high-rise towers—and tenure forms—both market and non-market. These toolboxes act as a starting point for both designers and policymakers and should be considered in relation to local policies, building context and typology, budget, and the anticipated needs of future residents.
Coming up
Stay tuned for more updates and resources as we roll out the launch of this toolkit.