Socio-emotional Approach to Sustainable Development in Urban Settlement

The aim of this study is to investigate the links between personal and interpersonal emotions, feelings and values in relation to urban experience; to discover how such relationship is construed, understood and negotiated by authorities, citizens and policy makers; and, using information on emotions, to identify key factors that may facilitate or hinder public participation, besides influencing mass behaviour change towards a more sustainable urban development along environmental, economic and social dimensions. In short, this project is concerned not only with the human perception in the context of a city, and its combination with emotional experience, but also and above all with the assessment of the potential environmental and social impact of these factors. It focuses on integrating people's affective responses - that is, their emotional feedback - to the urban environment into planning and development processes.
The research goals rest upon the recognition of the subjective nature of sustainable development efforts, as well as our own culturally informed assumptions regarding it.

This research focuses on the concept of urban liveability through the lens of citizens' social and emotional experience and aims to show how their perceptions of the environment have the potential to influence behavioural intentions towards sustainable practices and lifestyle. To detect these emotions/perceptions in the daily interaction between citizens and urban space, it is fundamental to mobilise different traditions of work/research and broaden the investigation of cities, in order to gain an informed, adequately articulated understanding of how people emotionally react to environmental issues and how these reactions subsequently affect their behaviour.

With this purpose in mind, the measurement and assessment of human feelings and perceptions in terms of urban circumstances like living conditions, transport and communication, public facilities and aesthetic surrounding represent the basis for the extraction of contextual emotion information. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in specific urban neighbourhoods, focusing on historical evidence, interviews, qualitative research as well as demographic and statistical material, and correlating crowdsourced and subjective data with context-depending forms of spatial practice, this research aims to study the production of a sustainable culture through the analysis of changing residential patterns, emotional perceptions and internalized meanings, norms and values.