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C. Capineri, H. Huang, G. Gartner:
"Tracking Emotions in Urban Space. Two Experiments in Vienna and Siena";
Rivista Geografica Italiana, 125 (2018), 3; 273 - 288.

Emotions have a spatial and relational character: they are a
means to understanding practices and interpretations of the surrounding environment. Indeed, humans perceive and evaluate environments emotionally: some places are experienced as risky or desolate, while others as attractive and exciting. The paper aims to study people´s affective responses, that is their emotional feedbacks,
to different urban environments by means of a mobile crowdsourcing approach, namely the free mobile application EmoMap, developed by Vienna University of Technology in 2014. The approach has been tested in Vienna and Siena for academic research and for learning purposes and two case studies have been developed to acquire people´s affective responses elicited by different urban contexts and selfreported
by users while walking through the city via GPS-enabled smartphones. The experiments explore two different spatial approaches to the collection and analysis of the affective responses. The first refers to three distinctive urban environments according to different levels of traffic and vegetation in Vienna, while the second aims at identifying which urban environments in Siena stimulate the emotional
response and the different levels of comfort and discomfort.
The results show how these affective responses can be collected through a location-based application and how volunteered geographic information may provide a better understanding of human-environment interaction, taking into account the rather homogeneous participant group (young people, students). The paper also discusses how the relationship between emotions and place may have direct implications
for the assessment of the subjective dimension of urban quality of life. The paper does not aim to define QoL but rather to show how the assessment of urban quality can be enriched by affective responses.