Your Emotional City
Get the App and Become a Citizen Scientist!
The city that never is and always will be. We ask ourselves: What does this city actually feel like? Together we want to collect exactly these feelings with you and create a city map of emotions. For this purpose, we have developed an app with which you can take part in the citizen science project “Your Emotional City”.
Get the app and join in!
Download the App now from your App Store!
You? Us? Urban Researchers!
Cities trigger emotions in us – pleasant and unpleasant. On the one hand, they offer opportunities for development, culture and prosperity. They are political, economic and scientific centers. But they also have another side, they are often anonymous or dirty, they contain injustice, crime and violence. Cities stimulate us and they challenge us. Sometimes they cause stress. Some even make them sick. But they also fascinate us. Everything has an impact on our psyche and health.
In the citizen science project “Your Emotional City” we want to find out how citizens feel, decipher the feelings in specific streets, squares, neighborhoods and parks and gain insights for cities in general. Together we will find out what will make cities of the future places worth living in.
From data to maps - and scientific knowledge.
With the data collected, we want to find out how our urban environment affects our psychological well-being. To do this, we use complex statistical procedures and various methods to eliminate disruptive factors and isolate factors that particularly influence our emotions in the city.
Are you interested in how exactly we approach the data? Then visit one of our citizen science workshops, which we regularly hold together with theFuturium - House of Futures in Berlin organize. UnderEvents you can always find the next scheduled appointments.
Which urban factors influence us, how - and at what point in time? And how is it all connected? In an article in the renowned journal The Lancet Psychiatry, van der Wal et al. (2021) attempt to systematize different urban dimensions.
International Collaborations
Bangalore, India
Together with researchers from Bangalore, India, we are exploring how the urban environment influences the emotions of its residents. To do this, we use our app and approach the participants directly - using qualitative research, we collect exploratory insights where real life happens.
We will use the findings to identify individual factors for Bangalore and also compare them cross-culturally.
Ibadan, Nigeria
In Ibadan, Nigeria, together with 500 enthusiastic participants, we have big plans: Together we collect authentic emotions and experiences through in-time queries to gain insights into the influence of urban factors on emotional well-being in real time.
Show us your city for a week!
If you take part in the study, our app will accompany you through your urban life for a week. We will send you a short questionnaire up to three times a day for 7 days. We ask about...
-
...your current emotional well-being,
-
...how your environment affects your emotions,
-
...how you feel about your environment at the moment (full, loud, or maybe very green?),
-
...a photo of the item or object that is most affecting your emotions at the moment.
We also collect your current location for every survey (of course only if you allow us to do so in the settings beforehand!). We then use the GPS data to add environmental data to each of your answers, for example about the current weather, traffic or air pollution at your location.
Ready for more? Take a look!
Get to know the team behind the app
Prof. Dr. med.
Mazda Adli
Research Director Charité
Chefarzt Fliedner Klinik Berlin
Professor für Affektive Störungen an der Charité Berlin
Leiter der Forschungsgruppe Affektive Störungen an der Charité Klinik für Psychiatrie und Psychotherapie
Dr. phil.
Joerg Fingerhut
Research Director HU
Humboldt-Universität, Berlin School of Mind & Brain
Prof. Dr.
Ulrike Kluge
Principal Investigator - Transcultural Psychology
Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Klinik für Psychatrie und Psychotherapie
Prof. Dr.
Dagmar Haase
Principal Investigator - Urban Studies
Humboldt-Universität, Berlin, Geographical Insitute, Landschaftsökologie und Biogeographie
M.Sc. Psych
Sephira Kolbe
Coordinator & Doctoral Student
Humboldt University, Berlin School of Mind & Brain
Dr.
Nassim Mehran
Senior Researcher
Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Klinik für Psychatrie und Psychotherapie
Dr.
Shadi Bagherzadeh Azbari
Senior Researcher
Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Klinik für Psychatrie und Psychotherapie
B.Sc. Psych.
Poul M. Schulte-Frankenfeld
Research Assistant
Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy
Amsterdam UMC, University of Amsterdam, Department of Psychiatry
Dilek Keskin
Research Assistant
Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy