Down memory lane: Eliciting affective geographies and sites of memory through participatory mobile biosensing. The UrBio experimental project.

Abstract

This presentation will analyse how participatory mobile biosensing can help identify affective geographies and sites of memory and inform urban and tourism planners about citizens’ emotional responses to the urban environment, hence contributing to the creation of spaces that increase people’s satisfaction, emotional engagement and well-being in cities. We will present and address the findings of UrBio – Making urban planning and design smarter with participatory mobile biosensing, an experimental project whose main goal is to develop and test participatory mixed methodologies that use biosensor data to plan and design tourism, consumption, and leisure areas following healthier, more convivial, and more sustainable perspectives. UrBio has included citizens from three different cities – Lisbon (Portugal), Warsaw (Poland), and Cuiabá (Brazil) – in the research process and has used wearable biosensor data in individual and pair transect walks to allow citizens to reflect upon the impact of the urban environment on their everyday experiences. By looking at the results of these transect walks and post-walk interviews, we will analyse how biosensing technologies provide insight into the emotional engagement of citizens with the urban environment through the identification of specific affective geographies and sites of memory, thus exploring how data provided by wearable biosensors can be used to enhance qualitative research on the experience of affective urban atmospheres. The results of this project show, indeed, that allowing subjects to interpret biosensing data creates moments of ‘bounded interference’ where individuals rethink their own experiences, yet retain an ‘agential super-position’ over the meanings of the data. UrBio provides an innovative perspective on the advantages of biosensing as a mixed-method research tool. We show how the elicitation of biosensors in interviews can spark in-depth reflection and discussions about aspects of the urban experience that often go unnoticed in conventional qualitative methods.