The Importance and Application of "Urban Emotions" in Urban Design and Planning

How citizens perceive and understand their surrounding environment depends on several dynamic and static contextual factors. Such a subjective and context-based understanding can create different emotions and feelings in people, which has created a new and adjunct approach toward studying spatial and temporal structure of the city. Investigating the relationship between built environment as a physical dimension and behavioral and emotional aspects of human has received much attention in recent studies, especially in urban planning and design studies, and has become an urgent issue in recent years. The purpose of theoretical, empirical, and applied researches in this field is generally enhancing the quality of life in city through studying a new layer that focuses on emotional-behavioral aspects of individuals. This emotional-subjective attitude toward space and its impact on the individual’s behavior in space has become important and has been utilized in recent years under the title of “urban emotions” approach, as an interdisciplinary field. Therefore, the present study aimed to introduce the approach and research area of “urban emotions” and sought to examine the importance and application of this layer in the field of urban development as well as studying vacancies in this area, and providing suggestions for future studies. Thus, this was done by referring to library resources and reviewing more than 50 published studies consisting of basic theories on the subject, theories of intellectuals in the field of urban development, and recent projects and researches generally related to the last five years, through descriptive-analytic method and using library resources. The results showed that the studies in this area can be divided into two categories of theories and basic studies and new studies initiated by Christine Nold (2009). The basic view mostly focuses on effective environmental factors in a qualitative and highly general way based on traditional methods of emotion measurement, and is mostly focused on environmental psychology and landscape design areas, which has less influenced the area of urban design and urban development. But in recent years, the emergence of new methods of measuring emotions in the field of medical sciences, psychology, and computer sciences has provided the possibility of more precise studies in the field of environmental design. New researches (in the last 5 years) in terms of frequency include four domains: 1) focused on emotion measurement; 2) new methods of emotion measurement; 3) investigating the factors affecting emotion in the environment; and 4) applications of emotion. However, these studies mostly focus on emotion measurement in urban environments and emotion measurement methods, and few studies have also examined the factors affecting emotion in the environment and its application in the field of urban development as a pilot. Therefore, based on ongoing studies in the field of emotion monitoring methods, it has become possible to review and study the theories which are more basic, more applied, and exclusive in the field of urban environment. Also, review of basic theories and recent studies in the field of urban emotions showed the importance of the issue in the field of urban development. Despite the importance and application of this interdisciplinary field in urban studies, the scientific potentials of this new approach in all diverse aspects of urban use and analysis have not yet been explored which requires more precise and extensive evaluation in urban sciences. According to the conducted studies and its adaptation to different areas of urban study, the most important areas of application of this new layer can be: 1) mental health area, 2) happy city and pleasant urban spaces area, 3) Attachment to place area, and 4) area of collaborative urban planning and smart city. Also, evaluation and measurement of the built environment, evaluation of the psychological effects of a plan before its implementation, and providing new citizen-centered designing and planning opportunities are among the benefits of applying the subject in the field of urban development. Overall, the results showed that in recent years, the area of “urban emotions” has opened up a new meta-human approach to analysis and examination of dynamic interactions in time, space, and perception and emotions of human, especially in urban planning and designing processes. “Urban emotions” has proposed a human-centered approach as a mediator between research fields such as geo-informatics, computer science, computational linguistics, sensor technology, citizenship sciences, and spatial planning. The main purpose was to produce a layer of new information that visualizes the measured spatial emotions. This visualization allows for concluding about humans behavior in urban environments and creates a new citizen-centered perspective in designing and planning process. Over the past few decades, new advances have made the use of new methods and technologies possible. However, scientific potential of this process has not been fully exploited, and the possibility of using it for innovative analysis and simulation needs to be widely evaluated in urban sciences. These new data and information layers can provide new insights into the development of intrinsically complex and dynamic physical and social structures of urban environments. It can be used in the field of urban development and can be generalized and used in other related areas such as public health, traffic management, security, tourism, and more.