Scenario Discovery for Urban Planning: The Case of Green Urbanism and the Impact on Stress
It addresses the need for systematic scenario-based analysis in urban planning to guide policies for mental health, though it is incremental in applying an existing framework to a new domain.
This study tackled the problem of optimizing urban vegetation interventions for stress reduction by applying a Scenario Discovery framework to evaluate their effectiveness across different urban environments, revealing that increased vegetation generally lowers stress but its impact is reduced in high-density areas and by individual traits.
Urban environments significantly influence mental health outcomes, yet the role of an effective framework for decision-making under deep uncertainty (DMDU) for optimizing urban policies for stress reduction remains underexplored. While existing research has demonstrated the effects of urban design on mental health, there is a lack of systematic scenario-based analysis to guide urban planning decisions. This study addresses this gap by applying Scenario Discovery (SD) in urban planning to evaluate the effectiveness of urban vegetation interventions in stress reduction across different urban environments using a predictive model based on emotional responses collected from a neuroscience-based outdoor experiment in Lisbon. Combining these insights with detailed urban data from Copenhagen, we identify key intervention thresholds where vegetation-based solutions succeed or fail in mitigating stress responses. Our findings reveal that while increased vegetation generally correlates with lower stress levels, high-density urban environments, crowding, and individual psychological traits (e.g., extraversion) can reduce its effectiveness. This work showcases our Scenario Discovery framework as a systematic approach for identifying robust policy pathways in urban planning, opening the door for its exploration in other urban decision-making contexts where uncertainty and design resiliency are critical.