Persuasive Cities: Health Behavior Change at Scale

Can you imagine a city that feels, understands, and cares about your wellbeing? Future cities will reshape human behavior in countless ways. New strategies and models of urban spaces are required for creating future cities to properly respond to human activity, environmental conditions, and market dynamics. Persuasive urban systems will play an important role in making cities more livable and resource-efficient by addressing current environmental problems and enabling healthier routines. Drawing on socio-psychological theories and integrating them with new concepts for urban design, the persuasive cities research focuses on improving wellbeing across societies. This research presents an ecosystem of future cities, describes three generic groups of people depending on their susceptibility to persuasive technology, explains the process of defining behavior change, and provides tools for social engineering of persuasive cities. Further research should continue exploring how urban design in combination with socially influencing systems could encourage healthy and sustainable behaviors at scale.