Emotiv Cities: Understanding Human Perception of Urban Spaces—A Case from South India

Neurourbanism is a less explored link, bridging the two streams of urban built environment studies and neuroscience, which are diverse yet connected in a cause–effect relationship. The advancements in neuroscience expose new ways to understand how individuals interact with the built environment, revealing new chances for innovation and improved experiences, leading to increased productivity, well-being and a better quality of life. This paper is an enquiry that explores human experiences in Indian urban spaces by drawing information from phenomenology, evidence-based design and academic literature. As a first step towards developing a neuroscience-based urban public space evaluation system in the light of understanding how humans experience urban spaces, this paper is a preliminary study that attempts to decipher how distinct urban settings influence human behaviour. This pilot study involved a small number of human EEG readings that were measured and recorded as the participants, equipped with a wireless 5-channel EEG measuring device, traversed through urban spaces in different urban contexts. These spaces were a combination of various degrees of street enclosures with or without natural features in the city of Calicut in the South Indian state of Kerala. These EEG readings are analysed explicitly into bandwidths of various frequencies like alpha, beta, delta and theta and classified based on various performance metrics interpreting the emotional states the participants experience, namely excitement, engagement, interest, relaxation and stress. It was observed that the values of these performance matrices changed significantly as the environment changed from busy to calm, narrow to wide, urban to green and crowded to less occupied. The outcome of this research can boost the design disciplines in formulating their scientific methods for exploring the behaviour of people in the physical environment and understanding their perception of urban places.