The effect of vertical façade greenery in virtual urban environments on human emotion

Abstract. Already more than half of the global population is living in urban areas today. Rapid urbanisation during the past decades has brought about a significant loss of green space in the built environment across the globe. To mitigate the loss of horizontal green space, vertical façade greenery has been promoted as one promising way especially in increasingly densifying and expanding urban areas. Façade greening has also been promoted to strengthen (mental) health and wellbeing of the ever-increasing urban population in the expanding built environments. To investigate the contribution of façade greening to the wellbeing of urban citizens, we set out to empirically study the influence of green building façades, experienced in virtual reality, on human emotion using self-reports and psycho-physiological measurements. As hypothesized by prior work, we indeed find that participants feel less aroused and thus more relaxed in virtual urban environments experienced with green building façades compared to regular building façades without any greenery. With these promising empirically validated results we shed new light on mental health benefits of vertical greenery in urban environments.