In autumn 2024, the urban-experience design studio for Cities and YAU held Urbanist Camp Tokyo 2024 across Tokyo’s Otemachi, Marunouchi, and Yurakucho districts. Under the theme “Emotional City,” the program looked beyond economic measures of urban value and reconsidered the relationship between people’s emotions and the city.
Twenty participants explored the emotions of the city through lectures, fieldwork, and discussion. They created original Emotional City Guides and Emotional City Tours, rediscovering the city through smell, sound, and touch and experimenting with ways to visualize feelings of discomfort or incongruity.
I mentored each team as it visualized research data, focusing on emotional-data visualization and the design of visual expression. This helped make the city’s less visible values perceptible and gave participants a deeper perspective on emotional value in urban environments.
The project offered a meaningful expansion of how cities can be evaluated and demonstrated possibilities for urban design grounded in human experience and emotion.