Developing a Citizen Social Science approach to understand urban stress and promote wellbeing in urban communities

This paper explores the potential and challenges of using an interdisciplinary, mixed-method Citizen Social Science approach to research urban emotions, focusing on urban stress. It reviews the use of mobile psychophysiological and biosensing technologies in urban environments to capture the geographies of emotions. Methodological reflections are drawn from a study of workplace and commuter stress for university employees in Birmingham (UK) and Salzburg (Austria). The paper discusses the difficulties of defining scientific constructs within Citizen Science, particularly concerning the conceptualization and measurement of urban stress from various disciplinary perspectives (psychology, neuroscience, urban planning). It highlights ethical, political, and conceptual challenges related to defining and measuring emotions, stress, behavior, and urban space, and emphasizes the importance of incorporating critical Citizen Social Science perspectives to avoid overly individualised data collection and promote wellbeing in urban communities.

Jessica Pykett, Benjamin Chrisinger, Kalliopi Kyriakou, Tess Osborne, Bernd Resch, Afroditi Stathi, Eszter Toth, Anna C. Whittaker