Project description
Rethinking time in the city
City life moves quickly. Compared with quieter rural settings, urban centres are crowded and noisy, and many people report feeling constantly rushed. Studies link this sense of time pressure to poorer health, lower well-being and riskier behaviour. However, spending time in nature appears to change how people experience time. The ERC-funded NATURETIME project will explore this connection. Using virtual reality experiments alongside citizen science data, it will explain how different landscapes shape people’s sense of time in urban settings. The project will also consider whether shifts in time perception influence everyday choices, including environmentally responsible behaviour. Overall, the project sheds light on how access to nature might support healthier lives while helping cities move toward more sustainable futures.
Objective
Time is a central dimension of the human experience; our perception of time influences how we feel and act upon the world. A growing number of people living in fast-paced urban environments report feelings of time scarcity, which have been associated with risky behaviours and poor well-being. Yet, mounting evidence suggests that nature experiences can regulate how urban dwellers perceive time, positively impact their well-being, and promote more sustainable behaviours. This raises the thought-provoking possibility that human and environmental well-being are influenced by a feedback loop driven by the interaction between nature and human sense of time. NATURETIME will test the connected hypotheses that natural environments positively influence human time perception and that such changes in time perception can enhance pro-environmental and sustainable behaviours. The project will adopt an ecosystem services framework and a multidimensional characterisation of time, including dimensions of perceived temporal duration and perspective, to explore nature’s contributions to human sense of time. It will use virtual-reality experiments to understand how specific landscape features and nature experiences influence human time perception, and validate experimental results using real-world data obtained with citizen science. The project will also model the effects of nature on time perception at the landscape scale under different scenarios. Finally, the project will employ behavioural experiments and Big Data analytics to understand how changes in time perception influence pro-environmental and sustainable behaviours. NATURETIME launches a new research area on time perception ecology and will generate actionable knowledge that can inform the design of cities and other living environments in a manner that improves human time regulation, boosts well-being, and stimulates the positive and sustainable behaviours needed to address ongoing environmental challenges.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2025-COG
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
20014 Turku
Finland
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