Experiential Equity: Reconstructing Cities Through Intersecting Theories

Considering the unprecedented rate of global urbanisation, attention must be paid to the implications of city environments on human health. Urban infrastructures, like parks, greenspace, active transportation, and other forms of public space, are seen as health amenities. The concept of distributional equity acknowledges the disparities in access to these health-supporting spaces; however, more granularity is needed in understanding how these spaces themselves are experienced, and the impact of marginalisation and other forms of oppression on the health benefits must be examined. Experiential equity is a framework that can be used to conceptualise and quantify the energetic cost of experiencing unpredictable urban environments, using the free energy principle to unite the energetic costs of the emotional and cognitive burden of marginalisation, and views these costs through an Intersectional Theoretical lens to establish the energetic disparities that exist depending on aspects of identity. The cognitive and emotional costs of uncertainty in urban environments can be understood through the Theory of Constructed Emotion, the model is also informed by environmental prediction and provides a link to the psychophysiology of Racism-Related Vigilance and Stereotype Threat. Applying the Person-Environment-Occupation Model and Affordance Theory, in conjunction, we can conceptualise the environment and examine the ways in which it can constrain or enable engagement with it. Leveraging machine learning to quantify aspects of the built environment and using neuroscientific methodologies like electroencephalography, electrodermal activity, and heart rate variability, we can attempt to metricise the energetic costs of societal and systemic oppression; the consideration of the environment allows potential insights into how spatial variables mediate these experiences and can have implications on road, park, and general urban policy and design.