Building for Mental Wellness: A Case for Mindful Cities Part III
Harnessing the power of tech for healthier cities
We are deeply and intimately linked to our environment. We don’t simply interact with our cities through work, transport and daily life — we have a constant emotional experience in them. The way cities are built has a powerful influence on mood and behaviour. Simply put, the systems and forms of our cities influence how we feel. Our roads, buildings, neighborhoods, and parks are emotional infrastructure, and understanding the effect on the people who encounter them is key to finding ways to enhance urban health.
While we aspire to build resilient neighborhoods, well-connected places, and cooperative communities, have we truly understood what is required to create such spaces? Could it be that we must first capture the emotional experience in order to build the cities we dream of? And if so, how?
We believe in taking a bottom-up approach to uncover the causes and cures of bad design from the very people inhabiting those places. By using innovative technology in the form of wristbands and headsets, we can now objectively measure our emotions. Often used as a complement to psychotherapy or to learn meditation, we are imagining other applications for these devices. Measuring changes in emotional states as people move from one urban setting to another could provide insight into how people experience cities in real time.
Academic research already does fascinating work in this realm, yet it almost never reaches the people who plan and build public spaces, buildings, neighbourhoods, and cities. A major obstacle is the lack of collaboration between specialists¹. We hope to create longer-lasting relationships between startups and urban planners in order to inspire mindful design decisions and drive impactful change. We believe in creating a space for partnerships to emerge at the intersection of neuroscience, health, and urban design by sharing knowledge, increasing cross-sector collaboration, and motivating action.
Significant investments have already been made to design healthcare facilities in ways that improve health and help recovery. These refined treatment spaces contribute to healing and broaden the therapeutic benefit of the facility. Collaboration between designers and healthcare professionals in treatment spaces may seem evident, but how about extrapolating this approach to the wider built environment in order to understand people’s lived experience and create solutions accordingly?
Measuring wellbeing
Human beings are emotional creatures. Our emotions motivate and activate us. Emotions are key drivers of many of our decisions, especially those involved in our behaviours and experiences around wellbeing and health. They signal to us what we like or dislike, both consciously and unconsciously. Adding an emotional dimension to urban analysis using psychological data provides a new opportunity for urban research.
So much of our behaviour is already being studied. Our private information is being collected and used, sometimes unknowingly, in order to distract us, misinform us, and even manipulate us. At our worst, we have used it for predatory marketing purposes, to push political agendas, and to target and discriminate against groups. A huge case is to be made for diverting the end goal and using data for good.
How we experience urban life: subjective experience
While we accept that our overall wellbeing is affected by our built environment, there are currently few studies that focus on the momentary subjective wellbeing in relation to urban space. Subjective wellbeing, commonly known as emotional states, refers to how people experience and evaluate their lives, which varies over time and place. Places are interconnected with our emotions, and every experience of a location can evoke them².
Subjective measures such as questionnaires, diary entries, and smartphone prompts allow us to collect self-reports of behaviour, cognition, or emotions in near real-time in the daily lives of participants. Reporting feelings as they occur in a natural environment minimizes certain biases as well as the incidence of coinciding with social norms. The World Happiness Report relies on city dwellers’ self-evaluation of the quality of their lives and how happy they perceive themselves to be. This kind of bottom-up approach gives the population a voice on the factors they believe matter most to them. Smartphones can be a rich source of self-reported data about urban space, and a number of projects have been involved more specifically in collecting and using this information to improve mental health in their cities. Over the years, large amounts of data regarding transport in cities have been collected and analyzed. More recent studies looked at pedestrians and attempted to measure their wellbeing in relation to their surrounding environment.
The LondonMood Project was designed to look at the relationship between mood and the physical environment of different neighbourhoods in London. This app-based project collected data by prompting its users to answer certain questions about their current subjective experience and their current surroundings³. Similarly, the Urban Mind app measured participants’ experiences in both urban and rural environments in order to determine how these spaces are affecting mental wellbeing as people go about their daily lives. Requesting momentary assessments of the participants’ environment — “Can you see trees?”, “Can you hear birds singing?”
How we experience urban life: objective measures
Today, objective measures of emotion are also available. Technology such as wristbands, eye tracking devices, or EEG headbands are making it possible to capture biomarkers such as heart rate variability, gaze patterns, skin temperature, tone of voice, and breathing patterns outside of the lab. In order to complement subjective self-report measures, which are known to be prone to bias, these indicators provide insight into our physiological arousal and wellbeing — simply by wearing a digital device.
In one study, the Urban Brain Lab was interested in the connection between social and neurological lives of urban citizens, with a focus on mental health. The researchers used a mobile EEG to record and analyse the emotional experience of people walking in different urban environments. The Urban Realities Laboratory used both subjective and objective measures, as well as immersive virtual reality to study how our bodies and minds respond to different environments. In order to track the way we think and feel about them, participants were asked questions while they moved through virtual spaces. Measures of their skin conductance were taken, reflecting bodily signals associated with stress and arousal⁴.
Not only did the results of these studies consistently demonstrate the restorative effects of green-spaces and the high stress levels due to overstimulation of cities, but the data also provides evidence that could inform future investments and policies. While these were informative but momentary studies, we wonder, how can we continue to operationalise new technologies emerging from startups to inform urban design and planning? How can we drive transformative change?
Mindful cities harness the power of innovation and collaborative action
The barriers to building healthy places are known. However, few studies have paid attention to the solutions conceived by planners to overcome these obstacles and integrate healthy principles into the built environment. The Royal Town Planning Institute responded to the call for evidence and conducted a large research study to fill that gap⁵. A few of their key findings reflect what we believe is needed to bring change and take action: harnessing the benefits of digital innovation, engaging the communities, and supporting cross-sector collaboration.
The use of activity trackers worn during exercising, such as the Apple Watch and the Fitbit, is ubiquitous. The wearable device trend is now making its way into the mental health market with AI-driven startups looking to help people track and monitor their emotions and behaviours. InteraXon created a wearable EEG headband, Muse, that senses your brain activity and translates it into signals that help people learn to meditate. Somatix developed a real-time gesture detection technology that monitors your behaviours, identifies irregularities, and offers incentives to support desired changes. The Feel wristband coupled with a smartphone app, developed by Sentio Solutions identifies your emotions by measuring skin electricity conductance, heart rate, and temperature, which are translated into notifications to help you regulate your internal states.
Several of these startups have partnered with employers, hospitals, and healthcare plans. Some wearable tech has even been used in public spaces to analyse people’s emotional reactions to advertisements on large billboards. If the experience of urban life can now be measured within our bodies and minds, could this not provide an opportunity to contribute to psychologically sustainable cities?
We believe that to best adapt our spaces to people’s needs, the planning process should accommodate residents’ experiences and opinions using a quantitative approach to measure wellbeing. The data collected by these wearable devices could allow us to understand the way people feel while they navigate their cities, including which features of the urban surroundings are positively or negatively impacting our brains. Through partnerships with urban planners and policymakers, we could design with a better understanding of the human experience in mind and continuously improve the exchange between the environment and its occupants.
Not only could this information influence urban planning, but it could also be used to measure the success and impact of interventions. As was revealed in the Design Council Healthy Placemaking report, there is a need to focus on evaluation, review, and learning based on what has worked in the past⁶. Two EU-led urban planning projects, euPOLIS and HEART, both incorporate nature-based solutions into city landscapes with the aim of creating sustainable and healthy environments to improve public health and wellbeing. Through a partnership with Feel, the emotion sensor wristband will be used to assess the impact of the interventions of these projects by monitoring participants’ emotional state through bio-signals. Based on the data collected, policy makers will identify the most effective interventions to be implemented in cities. The city interventions could be included into Feel’s intervention roadmap, too. When the wristband identifies real-time changes in the user’s body, the notifications could not only suggest a breathing exercise, but could now include a visit to your nearest park, or a walk in a certain restorative area of the city. These examples of cross-sectoral projects involving government bodies, tech companies, and academic institutions are demonstrating the potential of multidisciplinary collaboration.
Even closer to our vision lies the EU-funded eMOTIONAL Cities project. The international and multidisciplinary consortium includes 12 partners working on a four-year, and nearly €5 million project. With the knowledge that urban spaces generate emotions, the project focuses on providing scientific evidence on how the built environment shapes the neural system underlying the way we think and feel. Leveraging neuroscience and technology with both subjective (smartphone surveys) and objective (fMRI, EEG) measures, this research will create a spatial analysis toolbox for urban health, hoping to shed light on how to design spaces that trigger positive emotional responses. These are undoubtedly steps in the right direction.
We have seen how our current built environment and infrastructures across cities are no longer fit for today’s needs. This lack of congruence is urging us to develop closer contact and exchanges between urban planners, architects, psychologists, and neuroscientists. By combining forces, we can not only further our understanding of people-place interactions, we can adopt a systems approach to drive interventions that would better our urban spaces. We can keep up with the rapid rate of urbanization and the proliferation of technologies and we can turn evidence into policy, and policy into action.
As urban loneliness rises and our cities become more densely populated, building for communities that support humans’ basic needs and wellbeing must become the new minimum standard. The way we design our built environment has a strong effect on how we treat other people. Natural exchanges and experiences of conviviality among strangers trigger feelings and actions that are more altruistic and cooperative. This is just the kind of frame of mind we need to deal with the pressing issues of today’s urban life — poverty, inequity, climate change, to name but a few. These challenges demand cooperation, how can we expect to solve them feeling isolated and disconnected?
We must demand our planners, architects, and developers to build differently.o build mindfully. To build placing physical and mental health above traditional measures of efficiency.
To build leveraging science and innovation. For happier and healthier citizens.
Want to learn more about the connection between our mental health and physical environments? Read Building for Mental Wellness: A Case for Mindful Cities Part I!
What would an ideal city look like? Read Building for Mental Wellness: A Case for Mindful Cities Part II to find out!
At Masawa, Tiff focuses on Nurture Capital. Before that, she has tried her hand in the fashion industry, co-managing a business, teams, photoshoot production, and digital transformation. Tiff’s cultural experience is just as diverse — she speaks 4 languages and lives in a multicultural city of Geneva.
¹ https://www.designcouncil.org.uk/what-we-do/built-environment/creating-healthy-places
² Scannell, L., & Gifford, R. (2017). The experienced psychological benefits of place attachment. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 51, 256–269.
³ https://www.urbandesignmentalhealth.com/journal1-smartphones.html
⁴ Christopoulos, G. I., Uy, M. A., & Yap, W. J. (2019). The body and the brain: Measuring skin conductance responses to understand the emotional experience. Organizational Research Methods, 22(1), 394–420.
⁵ https://www.rtpi.org.uk/media/5777/enabling-healthy-placemaking.pdf
⁶ https://www.designcouncil.org.uk/resources/report/healthy-placemaking-report
