Känslorna bakom de isiga formerna : Att utforska emotionellt välbefinnande genom vintergatorna i Stockholm

This research explores the emotional well-being of people during the winter months and aims to investigate how the physical configuration of urban streets in Stockholm might impact it. Cities like Stockholm are shaped by dark, long winters, and mental health concerns such as Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) are drawing clinical attention. This thesis aims to extend this attention to inquire into how everyday public spaces support or erode emotional resilience during the coldest months. Winter changes how space is seen, used, and felt. Making even well-designed environments feel emotionally different. Thus calling for a more expanded understanding of well-being in urban planning, one that moved beyond the quantitative functional metrics to include a more qualitative sensory and emotional experience of space. Central to this inquiry is the role of urban form, and the physical configuration of streets, façades, vegetation, and surfaces that together shape how people move through and emotionally register space.This thesis responds to this need by drawing on theories from urban morphology, affective geography, and neurourbanism, and proposes the Urban Form–Emotion Table (UFET), a structured yet interpretive framework that traces how urban elements such as scale, rhythm, texture, and vegetation interact with winter’s constraints to produce distinct emotional atmospheres. The framework was later brought into conversation with real environments through selected site visits and short pedestrian interviews on three streets in Stockholm. It does not aim to predict emotion but to reveal the kinds of emotional atmospheres space might afford in winter. Rather than treating emotion as an individual or psychological variable, the framework positions it as a relational outcome shaped by the embodied experience of space in time. In doing so, the thesis contributes to emerging efforts in planning to integrate emotional well-being as a valid concern in urban planning. By foregrounding the experiential dimension of street environments, it offers a transferable yet situated framework for more emotionally responsive and seasonally attuned urban design.