Restorative Boulevards – Urban design elements to promote mental wellbeing in inner-city arterial streets of the Frankfurt Rhein-Main agglomeration, Germany

• Applicant: Professor Dr.-Ing. Martin Knöll
• Subject Area: Urbanism, Spatial Planning, Transportation and Infrastructure Planning, Landscape Planning
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 437818133

Neurourbanism is an emerging research field that calls for more interdisciplinary collaboration between urban planners and neuroscientists to investigate how the social and built environment influences mental health and wellbeing. While a growing body of literature relates urban green spaces to mental health and wellbeing, only a few studies draw attention to urban "Grey" spaces such as streets, pedestrianized areas and squares. Many boulevards, i.e. inner city arterial streets, combine high volumes of pedestrian, cycling, public transit and car traffic and leave city dwellers exposed to air and noise pollution, and in turn, afford less physical activity, pedestrian safety, social interaction and poor mental health outcomes. We argue that there is a need to investigate how urban grey spaces can actively promote mental health and wellbeing in the face of dynamic urbanisation and that there is an opportunity to re-develop "restorative Boulevards" as the population in many European urban agglomerations shift towards more green travel modes. This basis research needed, we argue, requires a focus on investigating how Space Syntax can be used to study urban health, new experimental set ups that combine spatial analysis with psychophysiological effects in real world settings and conducting new empiric studies. Besides traffic calming and injecting urban greenery, we assume that there is an untapped potential for restorative effects in improving street network connectivity, diverse land use, building density, pedestrian visibility, visual complexity and ground floor programming. We propose to address these 6 hypotheses in a 36-month plan including 4 user evaluation studies, coupling spatial analysis with psychophysiological data. Based on developing a theoretical model, we will select 25 boulevards in the Frankfurt Rhein-Main area and construct macro-scale urban design factors (e.g. street network characteristics) using GIS and Space Syntax software. In the first user evaluation study (n=500), we collect mood self-assessment in an onsite questionnaire to identify urban design factors that best predict restorative effects. In the second and third user evaluation study (n=25) we will construct micro-scale factors (e.g. isovist characteristics) of 5 selected boulevards, which will be paired to mood self-assessment and heart rate variability (HRV). In the fourth user evaluation study (n=25), we will clarify restorative effects of selected urban design factors with the help of eye tracking and formulate design strategies from expert interviews. As a result, we aim to contribute to the emerging field of neurourbanism with a new methodology to study urban design in relation to mental health using Space Syntax, and a first model of urban design factors, guidelines and strategies to improve the restorative effects in urban boulevards validated based on new empiric data in an urban agglomeration in Europe.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: USA
• Co-Investigators: Professor Dr. Thomas Cleff; Professor Dr. Constantin Rothkopf
• Cooperation Partner: Professorin Jenny Roe, Ph.D.