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

The paper addresses how to understand and research urban stress and emotions through an interdisciplinary Citizen Social Science approach. Against the backdrop of accelerating global urbanization and growing concern about the mental health impacts of city living, the authors ask how cities sometimes unravel people and how emotional experiences relate to urban environments. They argue that a biosocial, mixed-methods approach integrating biological and social sciences is needed to address the complex, contested constructs of emotion and stress. The introduction motivates the use of citizen-involved, mobile and wearable technologies while cautioning against their potential to individualize and commodify emotions. It frames the purpose as developing rigorous, ethical, and participatory methodologies that combine physiological ‘emotion sensing’ with contextual, interpretive social science to inform urban wellbeing policies.

The paper reviews interdisciplinary literature on urban emotions and stress. Prior work examines how environmental cues shape behavior (e.g., nudging), how urban form and design influence cognition, and how specific emotions (happiness, fear) relate to place. Studies have linked city dwelling to mental health risks, while social sciences explore emotional encounters, isolation, cohesion, and affective politics. Biosensing in urban research has used wearables to measure ECG, skin conductance, skin temperature, and heart rate variability, often paired with GPS, diaries, and questionnaires to map emotional responses for planning (e.g., cyclists’ stress maps; tourist emotive spaces). Environmental psychology has measured cortisol relative to green space access. Neuroscience literature discusses biomarkers (cortisol, HPA axis), fMRI evidence of heightened amygdala responses among urban dwellers, and mobile EEG indicating reduced relaxation in urban vs natural settings. Health geography emphasizes socio-spatial determinants and lifecourse ‘exposome’ approaches to allostatic load, while cultural geography centers embodied, situated meaning-making across intersecting social identities. Urban planning history reveals ‘moral environmentalism’ in design responses to perceived stressors (e.g., Garden Cities; ‘towers in the park’) and the pitfalls of emotion-blind planning. Across disciplines, constructs of emotion and stress are contested; physiological measures offer objectivity but lack context (‘what’ not ‘why’), underscoring the need for mixed methods and citizen participation.

The authors developed an interdisciplinary, mixed-methods protocol to explore workplace and commuter stress among university employees in Birmingham (UK) and Salzburg (Austria). The illustrative study included 31 participants and combined: (1) wearable biosensing using an Empatica wristband (collecting signals such as electrodermal activity and heart rate), (2) paper activity diaries to log activities and contexts, (3) two questionnaires (WHOQOL-BREF for quality of life and the Perceived Stress Scale), and (4) in-depth interviews to elicit narratives about stressors, appraisal, coping, and socio-political context. Ethical approval was granted by the University of Birmingham (ERN_17-1224 09), and informed consent was obtained. Population-level analyses were conducted to develop a methodology for identifying ‘moments of stress’ and to assess consistency of outcome measures; exploratory spatio-temporal comparisons considered commute duration and mode, differences between cities, inbound vs outbound commutes, and working-day periods. The primary analytic emphasis was individual-level integration of signals and narratives to map temporalities, spatialities, and psychophysiological ‘moments of stress.’ Qualitative interviews contextualized biosensor peaks, highlighting social determinants and personal histories. The design foregrounded participatory reflection; wearing the device prompted embodied awareness, and interviews enabled participant-led interpretation. The study reflects the paper’s broader principles around ethics (privacy, secure data handling), participation, and the value of ‘bio-elicitation’ to democratize analysis.

- Interdisciplinary Citizen Social Science is feasible and valuable for studying urban stress: biosensing provides high-resolution indicators of arousal (‘moments of stress’), while qualitative and participatory methods supply the necessary context and meaning. - Physiological data alone indicate ‘what’ but not ‘why’; integrating diaries, standardized scales (PSS, WHOQOL-BREF), and interviews is crucial to interpret stress drivers (e.g., commuting, workplace demands) and broader socio-political determinants (e.g., inequality, housing affordability). - Wearing biosensors encouraged participants’ self-reflection on embodied stress responses and coping, enhancing participant agency in interpretation. - Exploratory analyses add a physiological dimension to known relationships between commuting patterns and stress, complementing prior evidence that longer and car-based commutes may be detrimental. - Ethical and governance considerations are central: data privacy, security, ownership, and the risks of dataveillance/function creep must be addressed; professionally managed, secure sensor deployments and clear data-sharing agreements are recommended. - More participatory ‘by the people’ approaches (e.g., bio-elicitation, co-interpretation) can counter overly individualized and potentially commodified emotion capture, supporting more democratic and socially informed urban wellbeing strategies.

The findings demonstrate that combining physiological sensing with interpretive, participant-driven methods better addresses the research question of how urban environments relate to stress and emotion. This approach bridges disciplinary divides by acknowledging both biological arousal and social, political, and historical contexts that shape stress experiences. It cautions against relying solely on ‘objective’ emotion capture, which may individualize and commodify emotions, and instead advances Citizen Social Science to foreground participants’ expertise, ethics, and collective dimensions. For planners and policymakers, the mixed-method approach moves beyond environmental stressors alone to include structural determinants and lived experiences, reducing the risk that research and interventions inadvertently exacerbate urban stress. The study illustrates how participatory interpretation can enhance rigor, relevance, and trust, informing urban design and wellbeing policies that are responsive to community realities.

The paper contributes a framework for an interdisciplinary Citizen Social Science approach to urban stress and emotions, showing how mixed methods can integrate biosensing with narratives, appraisal, and socio-spatial contexts. It articulates ethical, political, and conceptual challenges in emotion sensing, emphasizing data protection, security, ownership, and meaningful participation. The authors argue that democratic, participatory models (including ‘by the people’ co-interpretation and bio-elicitation) can temper individualizing tendencies of wearable technologies and support collective action for urban wellbeing. Future research should: (1) deepen participatory involvement in analysis and dissemination; (2) refine ‘moment of stress’ detection methods and triangulation with standardized measures; (3) strengthen data governance and privacy-by-design; (4) connect individual-level sensing with lifecourse and exposome perspectives; and (5) evaluate impacts on planning and policy to promote equitable urban environments.

The illustrative study involved a relatively small sample (31 university employees) in two European cities, limiting generalizability and statistical inference. The design emphasized feasibility and methodological integration rather than hypothesis-driven quantitative effects, and no detailed inferential statistics are reported. Physiological markers of stress (e.g., EDA, HR) are non-specific and can reflect multiple arousal states, requiring careful contextualization. Wearable sensing poses privacy, security, and participation biases (e.g., attracting tech-savvy volunteers). Some neuroscientific tools (e.g., fMRI) are impractical for real-world Citizen Science, and short-term field sensing may not capture lifecourse or structural determinants without additional data linkage.