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, understand how they affect us, use them and choose how to 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 invite us to stop, observe, listen, notice how we respond, contemplate and reflect.
It is an independent project-platform for research, representation and design, with a transdisciplinary vocation. It draws on knowledge from public health, environmental psychology and research on attention and restoration, and aligns with the WHO's general health promotion framework. It brings that knowledge into concrete, accessible and evaluable urban experiences, designed to produce new urban evidence.
Existing evidence. New urban application. Rigorous evaluation.
The city as a space for practice
Urban research has extensively studied how environments can support or harm health, physical activity, stress, restoration, attention and social interaction. 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, interpret and consciously use those conditions?
This perspective lets us think of streets, squares, parks, routes and facilities not only as physical infrastructure, but also as everyday supports for exercising human and collective capacities.
Habitarse also includes a shared dimension: reading a place collectively, comparing experiences and making visible the different ways of perceiving and inhabiting it. Conscious experience of the environment does not replace urban action, but it can offer new ways of understanding and informing it.
Pause · Observe · Listen · Walk · Contemplate · Explore · Record
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 change what we attend to and how we perceive a place at that moment. 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.
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 restoration, stress reduction and wellbeing, and that deliberately directing attention can change what a person notices and some components of their immediate experience.
The WHO's Ottawa Charter brings together three lines of action that Habitarse considers inseparable: creating supportive environments, developing personal skills and strengthening community action. The WHO also reports an overall positive relationship between green and blue spaces and mental health, while noting that no single type of space works the same way for every person and context.
There are also experimental precedents directly related to the initial mechanism. In a garden, participants guided by prompts towards natural and restorative features showed greater immediate improvements in wellbeing, positive affect and perceived restoration than other groups. On an urban route, greater visual attention to green elements was associated with lower anxiety and higher perceived restoration, although it produced no cognitive improvements.
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 restoration and stress reduction.
What Habitarse applies
Questions, cues, routes and perceptual practices related to the specific qualities of a place, combined with participation and evaluation.
What Habitarse must verify
Which interventions work, for whom, in which places and under what conditions; and whether repeating them can support more autonomous and transferable learning.
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.
Capacities for inhabiting better
Habitarse begins with four interrelated capacities. They are not an arbitrary selection: they rest on established fields of research, although their specific relationship with urban design has yet to be studied.
These capacities do not depend on each person alone, nor are they exercised apart 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 nor guarantee their development, but it can make activating and exercising them easier or harder. 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.
Attention
Consciously choosing, sustaining and redirecting what we pay attention to.
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 own state and exploring how to relate to it through personal, social and environmental resources. This is not proposed 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 the way 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.
These capacities do not act separately, nor do they exhaust what 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 to urban design.
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.
After this co-design phase, a stable version of the intervention will be defined in order to assess whether it genuinely changes what people pay attention to. Possible immediate changes in perception, perceived restoration and the relationship with the place will also be studied.
The pilot will produce an experimental route, a first family of micro-interventions and a documented method for turning individual and collective experience into knowledge that is useful for designing public space.
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.
Current phase: Habitarse is setting up the territory and the collaborations needed to run Pilot 0 during 2027.
The 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 pay attention, perceive consciously, contemplate and reflect in relation to places.
Habitarse researches whether our relationship with places can be practised, learned and made progressively more conscious, 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
Is Habitarse urban mindfulness?+
No. Habitarse is in dialogue with knowledge from contemplative and attentional practices, but its question is different: what happens when the environment itself and its design become an active part of the experience. Rather than necessarily removing the stimuli of everyday life, it researches how to attend within the real conditions in which we live.
What is scientifically supported and what will Habitarse research?+
There is evidence that environments influence experience and wellbeing; that certain kinds of contact with nature can support restoration and stress reduction; and that certain prompts can change what people notice and some immediate outcomes. It has not yet been shown that a specific Habitarse intervention on its own produces lasting, transferable capacities. That is why Pilot 0 will first measure attention and immediate experience, and later phases will be able to study repetition and learning. Habitarse is experimental in the integration and urban application it proposes, not in the whole of its scientific basis.
Is Habitarse a therapeutic intervention?+
No. It is a research and urban design initiative, not a clinical treatment. It can study responses related to attention, perception, restoration and everyday experience, but it does not diagnose or treat mental health disorders.
Is Habitarse an academic or a commercial project?+
It is an independent research and design project, open to collaborations with universities, institutions, public administrations, collectives and local organisations.
How can I collaborate?+
You can collaborate in defining, implementing or evaluating the pilots, provide a site, contribute specialised knowledge, take part in the collective reading of a place or support the project's development.
Does Habitarse have its own social media?
For now, Habitarse is shared as a strand within Liliana Salaverry's Instagram and LinkedIn accounts.