BBAR is an interdisciplinary group of researchers working with inspiration from architecture, neuroscience, urban design, urban mobilities, and sociology in order to explore the basic question:

How does the mobile human being experience and sense the contemporary city?

BBAR is hosted at the Department of Architecture, Design and Media Technology, and the Centre for Mobilities and Urban Studies (C-MUS) at Aalborg University.

Vision

We envision our future cities and architecture to integrate the built environment with the mobile human being in a socially and mentally sustainable manner. To achieve this, we aim to advance our understanding of how human experience, sensation, health and everyday wellbeing is affected by movement within the built environment. For instance, how human experiences and their related mentally felt states correspond to (neuro-)physiological responses and vice versa during interaction with the city. By exploring neuroscientific theoretical frameworks and interdisciplinary methodological strategies, we aim to highlight how psychobiological and sociocultural approaches to urban mobilities can advance the design sciences. The holistic and interdisciplinary approach to the interaction between mobile human beings and cities aims to develop new knowledge for the design of future cities and architecture.

Mission

In time, human perception of cities and architectural spaces have facilitated situations that afford specific behaviours and experiences by acting as a backdrop. It is necessary to discover how several overlapping perceptual and behavioural phenomena that are expressed in senses, affect, feelings, and cultural norms, contribute to the outcome. Our purpose is to discover these effects and their underlying neural origin of human interaction with the city and architectural spaces from an interdisciplinary perspective. We believe that relating to the built environment is fundamental to human beings and therefore expressed both in the body, brain, and behaviour. We apply a high-resolution approach by integrating and combining ‘classic’ and qualitative urban and mobile ethnographic methods, with neuroscientific methods to correlate behaviour and experience.