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.
Funded by the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 Framework Programme, the eMOTIONAL Cities is a 48-month project designed to fully characterise the intensity and complexity of urban health challenges and inequalities – in particular the field of mental health. The project is co-coordinated by by the Institute of Geography and Spatial Planning (IGOT) and the Lisbon School of Medicine (FMUL) of the University of Lisbon, and it comprises of a total of 12 international renowned partners. The project has started on the 1st of March 2021 with a total budget of nearly 5 million Euros.
Adopting a systematic approach, based on natural experiments and actual problems of case-study cities, the 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.
The project is also a member of the Urban Health Cluster of the European Commission, being responsible for two working groups: Health determinants and urban interventions (WG2); and Urban issues and epidemics (WG4).
The FMUL is the main responsible to bridge urban planning and the neuroscience (basic and clinical) studies, being the leader of the work package (WP) involving neuroscience experiments (WP5). These experiments will happen both in the laboratory as well as in the urban public space of three European (Lisbon, Copenhagen and London) and one American (East Lansing) cities. On one hand, we will take advantage of state of the art methodologies to study the human brain such as functional magnetic resonance and high density EEG. On the other side, through specific outdoor experiments, the eMOTIONAL Cities will invite adult volunteers to perform trajectories in the urban environment as if it was a regular working day. During their interactions with the environment, spatial, environmental, behavioural, physiological and neurobiological data will be collected.
In addition, the FMUL team will also make important contributions to all other WPs: having a co-coordination role for the project’s management (WP1); leading the scope review about the neuroscience evidence applied to urban planning and design (WP2); developing the requirements for data privacy and management for clinical and non-clinical research (WP3); providing support with relevant clinical and neuroscientific knowledge for the spatial analysis of the cities (WP4); analysing the evidence of the urban characteristics that particularly affect vulnerable groups (WP6); coordinating the specification of the case-studies to showcase the developed scenario discovery framework that will support policy related evidence (WP7); and helping on the dissemination and communication among the neuroscience and medical community (WP8).
Para saber mais informações sobre o projeto ou caso tenha interesse em contribuir com a sua participação em experiências, não hesite em contactar.
