Empowering Cities for Sustainable Wellbeing

Quality of life in cities can be improved through reshaping and advancing urban spaces with seamless persuasive and socially influencing strategies for empowering people to succeed in achieving better lifestyles. This vision aims at helping people to acquire healthy and resource-efficient everyday routines, thus leading to prosperous and sustainable societies. Urban engineers and technology developers are oftentimes unaware of how diversely their innovations will affect lives of many people. Therefore, this research is focused on investigating and designing ways how urban environments can be retrofitted and complemented with persuasive technology and socially influencing systems to facilitate societal changes at scale. Outcomes of this research are instrumental for various contexts, including health, mobility, education, energy and water conservation, safety, emergency management, ecology, and economy. Ultimately, more refined scientific knowledge on how to design empowering cities has to be generated and translated into applicable guidelines for practice to foster their emergence.