HABITARSE
Space is not only inhabited. It also takes part in how we attend, perceive and relate to our own experience.
This relationship is neither automatic nor the same for everyone. What a place allows depends on its physical, social and environmental conditions, but also on whether there are real opportunities to recognise its qualities and limits, notice how they take part in our experience and choose how we relate to the place.
Habitarse researches how public space can widen those opportunities. To do so it creates and evaluates small interventions tied to specific places —questions, cues, routes or sensory invitations— that first invite us to stop, observe or listen to one quality of the place and, from that attention, to recognise how we experience it, contemplate and reflect.
It is an independent project-platform for research, representation and design, with a transdisciplinary outlook. It draws on knowledge from public health, environmental psychology and research into the relationships between the environment, attention and recovery from stress or mental fatigue, and aligns with the WHO's general health promotion framework. It integrates that knowledge into concrete, accessible and assessable urban experiences, designed to produce new urban evidence.
Existing evidence · new urban application · rigorous evaluation
An urban question
The city as a space for practice
Urban research has extensively studied how environments can support or harm health, physical activity, stress, attention, social interaction and perceived restoration —the subjective assessment of how far an experience helps in recovering from mental fatigue or tension—. Habitarse opens a complementary question:
Can the city stop being only a set of conditions acting upon us and also become a place where we learn to recognise and interpret those conditions, notice how they take part in our experience and choose how we relate to them?
This perspective lets us think of streets, squares, parks, routes and facilities not only as physical infrastructure, but also as everyday supports for exercising capacities related to attention, perception, self-regulation and reflection.
But what exactly does it mean to exercise these capacities in relation to a place?
Fields of practice
Capacities for inhabiting better
Habitarse starts with four interrelated capacities, run through by bodily awareness and contemplation. They are not an arbitrary selection: they rest on established fields of research, although their specific relationship with urban design still needs to be studied.
Habitarse does not study these capacities as personal skills separate from the environment. We pay attention, perceive, self-regulate, contemplate and reflect always in relation to our situation and to specific physical, social and environmental conditions.
Space does not create these capacities or guarantee their development, but it can make it easier or harder for us to activate and exercise them. Habitarse researches how the design of public space and the experiences tied to each place can widen those everyday opportunities, and what this knowledge can contribute to urban design.
These capacities do not act separately, nor do they exhaust everything that inhabiting better means. Habitarse studies them because they can contribute to a more conscious relationship with one's own experience and with the environment, and because exercising them can yield knowledge useful for urban design.
Attention
Deliberately directing, sustaining and redirecting attention towards aspects of the environment or of our own experience.
Perceptual awareness
Noticing and distinguishing qualities of the environment —light, sound, texture, temperature, depth, movement or rhythm— that usually stay in the background.
Everyday self-regulation
Recognising our state and exploring how to relate to it through personal, social and environmental resources. It is not framed as clinical regulation or treatment.
Reflection and metacognition
Observing how we attend, perceive, feel and choose, and asking ourselves what changed when we stopped.
Bodily awareness runs through these capacities: breathing, posture, tension, temperature and movement are also part of our experience and of how we interpret space.
Contemplation is an integrative practice: remaining receptive and not immediately instrumental before a place or an experience. It can bring together attention, perception, bodily awareness and reflection without being reduced to a single measurable capacity.
The practice
Returning attention to the place
Habitarse turns its foundations into simple actions. A question may invite you to look at a shadow; a cue, to pick out the most distant sound; a route, to compare how your experience changes from one place to another.
These small interventions make sense because they are tied to what can be perceived in that specific place. They are not trying to hold your gaze the way an advertisement does:
They capture only the attention needed to return it to the place.
A brief experience can redirect attention and change which aspects of the place become salient at that moment. In its simplest form, the practice proposes a sequence: interrupting the automatic route for a moment, directing attention towards one quality of the place, observing it and recognising what was perceived or what changed in the experience. That is not yet the same as developing a lasting capacity. Speaking of learning requires repetition, reflection, follow-up, less dependence on the intervention and transfer to other contexts.
Observing, listening, walking or pausing all allow the place to be explored. Documenting and comparing those experiences helps to formulate questions that can inform urban design.
When these experiences are documented and compared, the overlaps and differences can make visible different ways of perceiving and experiencing a place. Records make it possible to preserve the conditions, the observations and the interpretations without turning one particular experience into a general conclusion.
Shared reading is not about producing a single interpretation. It brings different experiences into relation in order to raise questions that may prove useful for understanding and informing urban design.
Conscious experience of the environment does not replace urban action, but it can offer new ways of understanding and informing it.
The place does not have to change. By turning attention back towards it, some aspects can become conscious and give rise to new interpretations and shared readings.
Basis and limits
What the evidence allows us to claim — and what Habitarse will research
Habitarse does not start from zero. We know that physical, social and environmental conditions influence health and everyday experience. We also know that certain environments can support perceived restoration, stress reduction and wellbeing, and that deliberately directing attention can change which aspects of the environment are prioritised and become salient in immediate experience.
These precedents support components of the project, not its complete model. The WHO endorses the general health promotion framework, but it has not evaluated Habitarse's particular method or its specific selection of capacities.
Health promotion framework
The Ottawa Charter brings together three lines Habitarse considers inseparable: creating supportive environments, developing personal skills and strengthening community action. The WHO also identifies a positive relationship between green and blue spaces and mental health, although its effects vary across people and contexts.
Precedents for the mechanism
There are experimental precedents for the initial mechanism: prompts situated in gardens and urban routes have directed attention towards natural qualities and have been associated with immediate improvements in wellbeing, perceived restoration or anxiety. These results support the research question, but they do not yet demonstrate the complete model.
What we already know
Environments can make certain responses, behaviours and opportunities easier or harder. Attention can be directed, and some urban experiences can support perceived restoration and stress reduction.
What Habitarse applies
Questions, cues, routes and situated experiences that direct attention towards specific qualities of a place, allow how they are experienced to be recorded, and can be combined with participation and evaluation.
What Habitarse must verify
Which interventions redirect attention and modify components of immediate experience, for whom, in which places and under what conditions; and whether repeating them can support learning that depends less on the cues and transfers to other contexts.
Initial application
The first pilot: attention and a shared reading of the place
Can a question, a cue or a stimulus situated in a place change what a person pays attention to and how they experience that place at that moment?
Pilot 0 is conceived as an urban laboratory tied to a specific territory. Residents, local organisations and professionals will take part in identifying the qualities, tensions and opportunities of the route, and in the initial design of small interventions that invite people to observe, listen to or perceive the place differently.
The study may find favourable, null or unfavourable effects. It does not set out to demonstrate the development of lasting capacities or a general improvement in health. Its purpose is to test a bounded mechanism, understand the conditions under which it works, and establish a rigorous basis for later pilots.
Pilot 0 is looking for a territory and an alliance between local, academic and professional actors to design, implement and evaluate this first test.
Current phase: Habitarse is setting up the territory and the collaborations needed to run Pilot 0.
Horizon
Learning to inhabit ourselves better
Habitarse's horizon is to contribute to cities that, beyond offering better living conditions, widen the everyday opportunities to recognise the qualities of places and notice how we experience them, through attention, conscious perception, contemplation and reflection.
Habitarse researches whether our relationship with places can be practised, learned and made progressively more conscious; whether understanding that relationship better also lets us recognise our own experience; and what this knowledge can contribute to urban design.
Not designing cities only to live better, but also to learn to inhabit ourselves better.
Frequently asked questions
Common questions about Habitarse
Is Habitarse urban mindfulness?+
No. It may share deliberate attention and the observation of our own experience with some practices, but its object is the situated relationship between people and places. The project combines urban design, participation and evaluation; it does not offer a clinical or therapeutic practice.
What does learning to inhabit ourselves better mean?+
It means exploring whether our relationship with places can be practised and made progressively more conscious: recognising their qualities and limits, noticing how they take part in our experience and having more to go on when choosing how to relate to them. It does not mean adapting to harmful conditions or shifting onto people the responsibility for correcting them.
What is scientifically supported and what will Habitarse research?+
There is evidence on the relationship between environment, attention, perceived restoration and experience, as well as precedents showing that a brief cue can direct attention towards qualities of a place. Habitarse will have to verify its particular method, its interventions, its immediate effects and, in later phases, whether repetition can support learning that depends less on the cues and transfers to other contexts.
Is Habitarse a therapeutic intervention?+
No. It is a research and urban design initiative. It does not diagnose or treat mental health problems.
How can I collaborate?+
Pilot 0 is looking for territories, institutions, universities, collectives and professionals interested in co-designing and evaluating a first situated test.