Urban Wellbeing: The Impact of Spatial Parameters

Dear Colleagues,

Urban environments face the serious challenge of having to comply with relatively tight constraints regarding land and tenant density. In fact, this has become a key limitation in both current and future urban designs around the globe. Density and densification processes may influence the residents’ perceived density, creating a negative perception of overcrowding. Moreover, residents’ well-being is strongly impacted by urban planning and design decisions, especially in relation to the physical parameters of the urban environment, and on a range of scales.

The purpose of this Special Issue of Buildings is to consolidate knowledge from current international research, with an emphasis on the spatial parameters that are reflected in urban planning and design decisions, and how they affect the perceptions, emotions, behaviors, quality of life, and wellbeing of urban residents.

The questions that arise are related to the influence of various layers of the physical urban design and on different scales, and in relation to the urban residents within their private and public domains. For example, the geometry and morphology of the urban fabric, buildings, and facades; vegetation and its positioning within the public space; and the distribution of public spaces for different usages, on the micro-, mezzo-, and macro-scales. Issues that must be addressed include: What (and to what degree) will be seen from the residents' housing units? Will residents have adequate access to facilities and services (such as healthcare, education, and culture)? Is the cultural and geographical location of the urban setting an influencing parameter in relation to the residents’ well-being? And finally, are there global “rights” and “wrongs”?

Considering the increasing age of populations around the world, as lifespans continue to increase, the effect of the design of urban public spaces on wayfinding should be examined, especially in the older age-groups.

Answers to these questions and others could be provided by researchers from a range of disciplines, including from the fields of urban geography, planning, design, and architecture, as well as environmental psychology, sociology, and ecology. At present, however, links are lacking between the accumulated knowledge and insights achieved through academic research and the actual practice of urban planning and design.

We hereby invite researchers from a wide range of disciplines to submit their novel studies, including their unique research goals, tools, and findings, to contribute to a corpus of global knowledge on how spatial parameters influence urban wellbeing. The outcome of this Special Issue could significantly contribute to both theory and practice—and to the combining of the two—in the field of human-centered architecture and urban design.

This is a unique opportunity to create a pool of cutting-edge knowledge that will be readily accessible to urban planners and designers, with a set of spatial principles that they can apply in their future work—with the aim of maintaining the residents’ sense of wellbeing.

Prof. Dafna Fisher-Gewirtzman
Prof. Dr. Efrat Blumenfeld Lieberthal
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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• urban wellbeing
• impact of spatial parameters
• neuro-architecture
• urban density and densification
• perceived density
• urban morphology
• building morphology
• façade geometry and design
• street section
• urban greenery
• impact of culture and geography
• experiments in VR
• walkability