Predicting Urban Pleasantness: Can Cities Anticipate How People Experience Everyday Travel?

As part of the GreenTravel project at the Digital Geography Lab, researchers explored a bold question: can we predict how people experience cities during everyday walking and cycling? By combining participatory mapping, GIS, and advanced spatial modeling, the study demonstrated that human perceptions of urban pleasantness can indeed be predicted from environmental conditions such as greenery, traffic exposure, and the surrounding urban structure.

The research represents an important breakthrough in human-centered urban analytics by showing that subjective experiences, long considered too complex and personal to model reliably, can be meaningfully connected to objective spatial data. At the same time, the findings also revealed important “blind spots” where human emotions and experiences cannot be fully captured through conventional environmental indicators alone, highlighting both the power and the limits of predictive urban modeling for future planning and mobility research.

— Kamyar Hasanzadeh, Digital Geography Lab