Ongoing projects
eMOTIONAL Cities - Mapping the cities through the senses of those who make them
Funded by the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 Framework Programme, eMOTIONAL Cities is a 48-month project, with a total budget of nearly 5 million Euros, that is designed to fully characterise the intensity and complexity of urban health challenges and inequalities.
As the world is becoming more urbanized and cities of the future need to be people-centred, robust evidence-based knowledge on the underlying biological and psychological processes, by which Urban Planning & Design influence brain circuits and human behaviour, will be critical for policy making on urban health. Emotions are key drivers of our decisions; similarly, our choices are the conduit for our well-being and health.
The eMOTIONAL Cities research focusing on the signals triggered in our neurobiological architecture, responsible for emotions and decisions, while humans interact with the urban environment, will shed light on how to improve population health, physical and/or mental.
Adopting a systems approach, based on natural experiments and actual problems of case-study cities, eMOTIONAL Cities will provide robust scientific evidence on how the natural and built urban environment shapes human cognitive and emotional processing, with a perspective that also incorporates age, gender and vulnerable groups’ specificities – such as elderly subjects with mild cognitive impairment.
In particular, through specific outdoor experiments, eMOTIONAL Cities will invite adult volunteers to perform trajectories in the urban environment as if moving through a regular working day. During their interactions with the environment, spatial, environmental, behavioural, physiological and neurobiological data will be collected. These outdoor experiments will be carried out in four sites – Copenhagen, Lisbon, London, and Lansing/East Lansing in the USA.
Participants will be asked to carry smartphones with apps specifically designed for customized adaptive stated perception surveys regarding context-specific built and travel environment, as well as for detailed data on daily travel and activity patterns across multiple days for use in travel behaviour modelling. In case you want to know more about the outdoor experiments and are interested to volunteer, please contact the project coordinators – contact details below.
The consortium of eMOTIONAL Cities is led by the Institute of Geography and Spatial Planning of the University of Lisbon (IGOT - http://www.igot.ulisboa.pt) and co-coordinated by Faculdade de Medicina da Universidade de Lisboa (FMUL - www.fm.ul.pt), and comprises of a total of 12 partners: Michigan State University (MSU - https://msu.edu/), The Chancellor Masters and Scholars of the University of Cambridge (CAMB - www.cam.ac.uk), CLIMATEFLUX (CLIMA - www.climateflux.com), Starlab Barcelona Sl (SLAB - www.starlab.es), NeuroGears Ltd (NGR - https://neurogears.org/), Danmarks Tekniske Universitet (DTU - www.dtu.dk), Tallinna Tehnikaulikool (TT - www.taltech.ee), EarthPulse (EP - https://earthpulse.pt), Sociedade Portuguesa de Inovação (SPI – www.spieurope.eu), and University of Tartu (UTARTU - https://www.ut.ee/en). The project commences on March 1, 2021.
For more information, please contact:
Paulo Morgado
Project Coordinator
Edificio IGOT, Rua Branca Edmee Marques, Lisbon, 1649-028, Portugal
E-mail: paulo@campus.ul.pt
Website: http://www.igot.ulisboa.pt/
Contact at Tartu College:
Lembit Nei
director, professor