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 systematic 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.

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 behavior, 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.