Cities have played a central role in shaping the last century’s technological and economic acceleration. The share of individuals living in urban areas has itself accelerated, from 10% in the 1910s to a projected level of 68% by 2050. This development means cities will increasingly shape psychological well-being. The popularity of cities is largely driven by an “urban promise” of substantial social and economic opportunities. The opportunities arise from synergies between people, companies, ideas, and technology, resulting in significant wealth, innovation, creativity, and knowledge. A central question is if this "urban promise" translates into an urban psychological advantage in well-being, social satisfaction, and urban satisfaction. In this paper, we tackle this question by comparing people living in cities with the rural population. We do so through a large sample of 156k individuals aged 40 to 70 from the UK (Before the conference starts, we hope to have similar data available for the Netherlands). Our study employs a novel measure of urbanicity that can disentangle city, suburban, periurban, and rural parts. Using this novel measure we explore two research questions. First, how does the average well-being as well as social satisfaction and economic satisfaction vary across the urban-rural gradient? Second, we investigate the pervasive urban problem of inequality. We do so by studying how the variation/inequality in the three psychological domains changes with urbanicity. In terms of results, we find that urban residents have the highest incomes. However, we find no parallel psychological advantages. On the contrary, urban residents score worse on all psychological measures covering well-being, social, and economic satisfaction. We denote this stark contrast between the "urban promise" and the psychological reality the urban desirability paradox. Our second line of findings concerns the variation in the psychological measures. We find that urban residents show more variation in reported well-being, social satisfaction, and economic satisfaction. This pattern is consistent with the problem of urban inequality in domains such as income, health, and accessibility. Our last strain of results pertains to optimal distances. We identify distances from cities with the highest well-being, social, and economic satisfaction. These distances are city-size dependent but can be illustrated as follows. For UK cities with a population of around 100,000, the optimal distance is 6 km from the city center. For a city with a population of 1M, the optimal distance grows to around 20 km.

The Imperfect Peace of interstitial Spaces in Belfast:- Belfast, Northern Ireland is an imperfect, work-in-progress city that has seen its fair share of conflict over the last few centuries. The most recent conflict, euphemistically dubbed ‘The Troubles’, divided Belfast’s urban landscape along sectarian lines using defensive urban architecture known as peace walls, peacelines and interfaces. 25 years on from the infamous Good Friday / Belfast Agreement, and the beginning of the peace dividend, communities living along interfaces are, arguably, no more affluent than they were in 1998. Interfaces are most often found in the most deprived areas of the city, with one study finding that 86% of those living within 400 metres of any peace-wall in Belfast are in the lowest 20% of the city’s population as measured by the Multiple Deprivation Index. (Morrow et al, 2019). This is despite substantial foreign investment from both local and international governance, such as The European Union and The United States of America. Consequently, this research seeks to understand the ways in which interfaces in Belfast have manifested as interstitial spaces, and the substantial networks that exist to maintain them. In addition, this research seeks to unveil the subsequent relationship between reconciliation and deprivation, particularly in the context of Belfast, and how these processes interact with the built environment/wider planning processes in Northern Ireland. Key Concepts: Territoriality, deprivation, division, reconciliation, peacebuilding, segregation, interface.

Temporary placemaking through adaptive reuse is an evolving urban practice, originally stemming from informal occupations and progressively becoming more integrated into the planning and management of temporary unused properties. It arises through the organization of communities, more or less spontaneously, coming together to transform abandoned spaces into active and meaningful places. While these communities contribute to placemaking, they generate urban values that we can refer to as "nomadic values." This article, as part of the research project HORIZON-MSCA-2022-PF-01 NOMAD - Nomad Management of Urban Development - The complex value of temporary communities, explores how these communities play a part in redefining the urban environment within a specific timeframe of use and management of buildings and spaces in transition. This paper aims to answer the following research question: How do temporary communities engaged in temporary adaptive reuse contribute to the redefinition of urban environments by generating nomadic values? Within this analysis, various forms of resources and urban capital are examined, including social, cultural, and economic capital, all of which contribute to resignifying abandoned spaces and transforming them into places where new values are brought forth. Social capital emerges through a sense of belonging, social cohesion, and resource-sharing, while cultural capital is manifested through the enhancement of knowledge, art, traditions, and culture. Economic capital can be generated through the attraction of small or large investments, the establishment of small businesses, or the increase in the real estate value of the site and its surrounding area. The process of reactivation and placemaking involves a multitude of actors, including local communities, public institutions, property owners of unused spaces, urban activists, and citizens. These actors collaborate, often through agreements and negotiations that impact the management, use, and life of buildings and spaces. This interaction can lead to a balance between public and private interests, contributing to the creation of more vibrant and inclusive places, although challenges and issues are not uncommon. Through the comparison and analysis of active and past cases in Rotterdam and Brussels, this contribution aims to explore how temporary communities can generate a complex network of urban values involving various actors and resources and where these values manifest. This comparison is carried out through data analysis and maps of temporary placemaking processes, using both data collected from actors directly involved in temporary uses, as well as open-source information. By highlighting the nomadic values this research aims to better understand the impacts of temporary adaptive reuse through commons, facilitating dialogue among actors in decision-making processes, and promoting the availability of unused spaces as temporary places open to new possibilities while highlighting the challenges at hand.

By taking a closer look at the assumptions and methods driving the current citizen participation paradigm, this paper addresses the risk of tokenistic involvement of citizens and other stakeholders in approaches such as co-design and citizen science. These participatory processes are highly demanding to plan, difficult to manage, and can lead to serious misinterpretations of the citizens’ intentions and behaviour: reimagining participatory processes would be thus in order (Bannon & al. 2018). Encouraged by this, in this paper we look into 1) what type of alternative forms of participation might there be and 2) in which ways they restore ownership. We then proceed to ask further 3) how design can contribute to creating such alternative forms of citizen participation. As a case we refer to the sharp distinction distinguishable between the digital representation of urban existence and the lived experience of urban dwellers. The critical theoretical impetus can be traced back to (at least) the critical engagement with digital media in works such as “On the Internet” (Dreyfus 2001), which highlighted the absence of bodies and embodiment in digital environments. While we do agree that we need to remain critical about what aspects of human existence can be represented in digital media and which cannot, we also recognise that we are not merely the dot on a map, yet, “being a dot on a map” is part of our lived experience as urban subjects (Kingwell, 2008). In our paper, we will explore the role that digital representations of oneselves get in the participatory approaches to the experience of the city. We will address the everyday use of such services as digital maps as well as the potential use of such self-representations in artistic and educational practices to re-materialize our digital doubles and data traces. The proposed paper contributes to bridging recent developments in design ethics and participatory methods in a way which further underlines the importance of understanding the citizens’ perspective in urban design processes. This means also further emphasis on interpersonal and relational aspects of citizen participation as well as probing into more experimental forms of research design in the urban studies context. References: Bannon, Liam, Jeffrey Bardzell, and Susanne Bødker 2018. “Reimagining participatory design”, Interactions 26, 1 (Jan/Feb 2019), pp. 26–32. https://doi.org/10.1145/3292015 Dreyfus, Hubert L. 2001. On the internet / Hubert Dreyfus. London & New York: Routledge. Kingwell, M. 2008. Concrete reveries: Consciousness and the city. London: Penguin.