More and more people are moving away from the countryside and into urban centers. This global urbanization comes with a multitude of challenges. Studies have shown that city dwellers are more likely to suffer from mental illnesses but the mechanisms behind this are still poorly understood. The burgeoning field of Neurourbanism (which developed as a subfield of Environmental Neuroscience) aims to address, through inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration, the question of how cities can be made more liveable and what urban design decisions might harm or promote wellbeing.

In our lab, we apply neuroscientific methods to investigate how urban density factors influence people’s emotional and stress experiences in urban environments, using stationary, as well as MoBI protocols in VR and the real world. Another focus lays on the investigation of methodological implications in neurourbanistic research.