The Places and Flows Lab: Where people, places and data come together

This article was written for Uncover magazine – From Global to Ground (10th edition). You can read the full magazine here. 

Authors: Dr Ondrej Mitas and Dr Sait Durgun are researchers at the Places and Flows Lab, Breda University of Applied Sciences.

A lab born from a simple insight
Cities, landscapes and destinations are never static. People, goods, services and information flow through them continuously, shaping experiences and creating the conditions for both flourishing and friction. To design places that are truly sustainable, attractive and resilient, we need to understand these flows, not just as abstract data points on a spreadsheet, but as lived spatial realities that can be seen, touched and debated collectively.

That conviction is at the heart of the Places and Flows Lab, a research and innovation facility where researchers, students and external partners come together to explore spatial challenges using cutting-edge geospatial tools. The lab sits within BUas's broader commitment to creating meaningful experiences, but it approaches that mission from a distinctive angle: rather than asking only what people feel, it asks where they feel it, why people go where they go, and how design choices can redirect them.

The tangible landscape helps turning complex data into tangible insights
The centrepiece of the lab is the Tangible Landscape, an interactive system that feels as intuitive as shaping sand on a beach, yet is powered by sophisticated spatial analysis in the software GRASS running beneath the surface. A physical terrain model sits on a table; above it, a projector and scanner work in concert to capture every change you make and project updated insights back onto the model within seconds. Sculpt a small hill to understand sightlines from a proposed event stage. Place a few markers to watch how festival crowds might flow through a city square. The tool responds to your intuition and imagination, not your technical expertise, which is precisely what makes it so powerful in rooms full of people with different backgrounds and agendas.

The system supports collaborative exploration. Multiple people can work on the model simultaneously, making it an ideal tool not just for researchers but for participatory planning sessions involving local residents, policy-makers, event organisers and urban designers. The experience of physically touching a place while simultaneously engaging with data elevates the conversation around it. As the lab's motto puts it: "better places emerge when data becomes tangible."

Feeling the city: emotion mapping and emotion prediction
The Tangible Landscape is powerful, but the lab's ambitions extend beyond spatial visualisation into analysing the emotional dimension of place. Through emotion mapping, the lab captures how people actually feel as they move through real environments, not how they report feeling in a survey, but how their bodies respond in the moment.

Using the Shimmer GSR+, a wearable wrist device with finger sensors, researchers record subtle changes in perspiration, one of the most sensitive physiological indicators of emotional arousal. Combined with GPS tracking, these signals are geocoded and visualised, creating emotion maps that reveal where people felt tense, calm, excited or overwhelmed along a given route or within a given space.

In the SIA-KIEM Forts in Transition project, the method was put to work at green forts, sites that combine military heritage with rich natural landscapes, in the Netherlands and Belgium. Visitors wore the Shimmer device while exploring, generating detailed records of emotional responses across the terrain. In the picture you can see the Tangible Landscape of Fort Sabina: visitor emotion data projected onto a physical sand model, where warm colours reveal moments of high arousal and cooler tones show calmer areas of the site.

What made this project particularly groundbreaking, however, was the next step: rather than simply mapping what visitors had felt, our team of Places and Flows researchers and Data Science and AI students used these datasets to build a predictive model. By understanding the relationship between landscape features, the shape of the land, the type of vegetation, the presence of water or open fields, as well as contextual factors like time of day and weather conditions, and the emotional responses these tend to produce, the lab can now anticipate how a proposed change could be experienced before euros are spent and digging starts in the real world.

This prediction capability is directly connected to the Tangible Landscape. When a workshop participant shapes the landscape model to simulate planting a tree line, lowering a rampart wall, or opening up a new viewing point, the system does not just show the spatial change. It projects an updated picture of how those modifications would likely affect the emotional experience of future visitors. The loop between design intervention and human experience, which is normally impossible to close without costly and time-consuming field trials, is suddenly available in the room, in real time, on a tabletop.

Breda as a Living Laboratory
This brings us to Breda itself, and to what may be the most exciting frontier of the lab's work.

Breda is a city with remarkable leisure ambitions. It hosts Jazz Festival Breda, one of the Netherlands' most beloved urban festivals, drawing tens of thousands of visitors into the inner city each year. It is home to West-Brabant Gastronomic Week, the annual Nassaudag celebrations, a thriving cycling culture, and to a historic centre that is simultaneously a living neighbourhood, a tourist destination, and a commercial hub. Managing the flows of people, emotions and activities across all of these overlapping layers is a genuinely complex challenge, and one that the Places and Flows Lab is ideally positioned to support.

For Jazz Festival Breda, a Tangible Landscape model of the inner city could allow festival organisers, residents, and the municipality to explore together how different stage configurations, entry points, and routing options affect crowd distribution, and to do so in a way that is visually immediate and collectively owned. Emotion mapping along key festival routes could reveal which transitions between venues are calm, and which create unnecessary stress. And with the lab's predictive capability, proposed changes to the festival layout could be tested for their likely emotional impact before a single barrier is placed.

More broadly, the lab sees potential in using its tools to support Breda's ambition to become an Access City, inclusive, welcoming and navigable for people of all abilities. Overlaying mobility data, infrastructure quality, and emotional response data onto a tangible model of the city could help planners and community organisations identify where the gaps are and what interventions would have the greatest impact. Similarly, we could support the initiative to become a City in a Park, uncovering distances and sightlines to urban natural environments for all citizens, regardless of their residence type or location. 

From data to dialogue
What unites all of these applications is a conviction that runs through everything the Places and Flows Lab does: that the most important function of data is not to replace human judgement, but to enrich the conversations through which human judgement is formed.

A crowd flow model means little until people with different interests and perspectives gather around it and begin to argue about what it means and what should be done. An emotion prediction changes from a technical output into a genuine planning tool the moment a festival organiser, a local resident and a city official all stand around the same table and ask: “what if we tried it this way instead?”

For a city like Breda, which is actively building its identity as both a leisure destination and a liveable community, that kind of shared spatial intelligence is not a luxury. It is, arguably, exactly what is needed to ensure that the flows of the future serve everyone who calls this city home.

More information
The Places and Flows Lab is located in the Frontier Building (Fe0.016) at BUas. Contact: [email protected]