The Faculty of Human Geography and Planning cordially invites you to an open lecture by Daniel Paiva, PhD from the University of Lisbon, entitled. ‘Participatory mobile biosensing: a tool for co-designing streets’.
The lecture will be held on 30 September at 9 a.m. in room 103 (Collegium Geographicum).
Summary: The success of public spaces depends on the urban community’s emotional and affective attachment to them, but the factors that influence such attachment are complex. In recent years, urban scholars have started to explore the potential of biosensing devices to capture physiological data that can explain the emotional relationship between people and public spaces. However, as biosensing techniques are increasingly used for approaching emotional phenomena in urban studies, there are growing concerns about the ethical and political outcomes of such use. While biosensing offers new insightful data on bodily responses to the urban environment, it does not offer detailed explanations on how or why people respond to the environment in the complex ways they do. For this reason, there is potential to integrate biosensing techniques with collaborative methodologies in urban design and planning as a way to foster stakeholder participation in the co-creation and co-design of more meaningful and common-shared future spatial visions. With this in mind, in this talk, I explore the introduction of biosensing techniques in participatory scenario co-creation in the context of urban design. Drawing on a case study in Lisbon’s Metropolitan Area, I revisit the concept of visioning in urban design and planning to argue that biosensing techniques can contribute towards emotionally-aware visioning in urban design, as biodata can elicit citizens’ emotional experiences and reconstruct ideas about the public space. I conclude by discussing the potential and limitations of applying biosensing in participatory methodologies.
Bio: Daniel Paiva is a Researcher at the Centre of Geographical Studies of the University of Lisbon and Co-coordinator of the Research Group ZOE – Urban and Regional Changes and Policies. Daniel holds an European PhD (2019) in Geography by the Universidade de Lisboa (Instituto de Geografia e Ordenamento do Território). Daniel Paiva was PI of the research project UrBio – Making urban planning and design smarter with participatory mobile biosensing, funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, and has collaborated in several internationally (URBAN-NET, Secretaria Geral Ibero/Americana, CAPES-FCT, Axencia Galega de Innovación) and nationally (FCT) funded research projects. His research focuses on affective urbanism and the design and management of urban experiences in tourism, consumption and leisure areas in Europe and South America. Daniel is the author of Affective Urbanism, published by Springer in 2024, and co-edited the volume Ambiance, Tourism and the City, published by Routledge in 2023.
Photo by Universidade de Lisboa