Happy Cities.

Appreciation of the built environment in the planning of competitive cities.

• Happiness seems, at first sight, a term too broad to employ in the field of urbanism. A growing attention to liveability, health and social safety in specifically European inner cities has drawn attention to theories from the field of psychology tough. The expectation is that insights into the subjective well-being of people help to identify and explain behavioural patterns evolving in the built environment and to design urban development strategies that respond to what is appreciated. Graduation projects that investigate the happy city explore relations among spatial conditions and socio-economic indicators of well-being on several scales. They turn these into tangible urban form and morphologies, exemplary transformation strategies and critical remarks on policies that aim at increasing the international competitiveness of cities but often neglect their intrinsic qualities.

Organisation

• Rotterdam: Graduation projects addressing the happy city in Rotterdam will be carried out in collaboration with the research group Urban Competitiveness & Resilience (UCR) at the Institute for Housing & Urban Development Studies (IHS), Erasmus University Rotterdam.
• The project ‘The Happy City’ is a joint graduation platform of ‘Complex Cities’ and ‘Design of the Urban Fabrics’.

For more detailed information, see link