Tracking emotions in urban areas. Two experiments in Vienna and Siena.

Emotions have a spatial and relational character: they are a means to understanding practices and interpretations of the surrounding environment. The paper explores people’s affective responses to different urban environments by means of a mobile crowdsourcing approach (EmoMap, developed by Vienna University of Technology in 2014). The approach has been applied in Vienna and Siena. The first case study has collected emotions in three distinctive urban environments according to different levels of traffic and vegetation in Vienna; the second show case indentifies emotional stimulators in Siena and different levels of comfort and discomfort. The results show how volunteered geographic information may provide a better understanding of human-environment interaction and the relationship between emotions and the subjective dimension of urban quality of life.