MAB21 - Workshop on Visualising Urban Happiness

Creating urban environments that cater to health and happiness is one of the biggest challenges faced by city planners, architects, designers, and policymakers. Yet, people who live in cities often lack the tools to inform decision-making processes that affect their quality of life. For this reason, they do not realise the potential of what they can bring into decision-making processes.

Therefore, during the Media Architecture 2021, UNSx partnered with Squint/Opera to create a co-creative workshop on visualizing urban happiness.

The objective of this workshop was to develop a blueprint for making city dwellers aware of and involved in changes for city design and governance. The workshop was conducted as an immersive experience where participants from all over the world connected to harvest urban data and create a framework for happiness.

The workshop invited participants to look into the relationship between people, places, and technology, to then venture outside and analyse their neighbourhoods to gather urban data.

Stories, photos and videos, and even the daily interactions with people, spaces, and services of each participant were documented and then turned into visuals, considering how the generated urban data can reflect happiness.

With the opportunity to examine a variety of urban spaces, expanding the definition of happy places based on sensorial experiences that radically differ from location to location, enabled an understanding of different values and mindsets.

As a result, this digital collaboration workshop led to the creation of a visual framework and a digital toolkit for visualising urban happiness, where urban environments are pleasant and inspiring places to wander around.

Project Type

Amsterdam, The Netherlands
(online, worldwide)


Squint Opera

Held by
Beata Giermasińska, Filippo Lodi