Walking on Colors
2026/05/26
How do colorfully designed sidewalks affect our well-being in urban spaces? This is the question Dr.-Ing. Lanqing Gu pursued in her dissertation at the Institute for Urban Design and Planning – and she has now been recognized for it with the 2026 Award for Outstanding Academic Achievement (Dissertation) by the Vereinigung von Freunden der Technischen Universität zu Darmstadt e.V. The award was presented on 20 May 2026 at the Friends of TU Darmstadt Spring Festival in the garden of the Georg-Christoph-Lichtenberg-Haus.
Supervised by Professor Dr. Martin Knöll, Dr.-Ing. Gu dedicated her dissertation “Walking on Colors. Investigating the Impact of Sidewalk Color Interventions on Restorative Experiences Using Edited Images and Virtual Reality” to a topic at the intersection of urban design, environmental psychology, and public health – delivering findings that are relevant well beyond the field of architectural research.
About the Dissertation
In her dissertation, Dr.-Ing. Gu investigates how temporary and low-cost color interventions on sidewalks – known as ground floor murals – can promote well-being in urban traffic spaces. Such interventions have gained worldwide attention through prominent examples such as the Superblocks in Barcelona or the Superkillen plaza in Copenhagen, and are now being implemented in numerous major cities. To date, however, empirical studies on how urban residents perceive these design measures have been lacking.
This is precisely the gap that Dr.-Ing. Gu's work addresses: through experiments using 2D images and virtual reality simulations of the busy Rheinstraße in Darmstadt, the study is the first to empirically examine how colors and patterns on sidewalks affect participants' perceived restorativeness and positive emotional states – including joy, relaxation, and energy. The findings contribute new data on color psychology in public space and, for the first time, bring together methods from environmental psychology and urban design research.
The dissertation is particularly relevant to tactical urbanism and provides concrete recommendations for urban planning and health promotion – especially for dense, low-green urban environments where depaving and greening through trees and plants are only partially feasible. Several findings have already been published in leading peer-reviewed journals.
The dissertation is freely available via TUprints: tuprints.ulb.tu-darmstadt.de
About the Awardee
Lanqing Gu completed her Bachelor's degree in Architecture at Shengzhou University (2014) and her Master's degree in Architecture and Urban Planning at Tongji University in Shanghai (2017). After working as an architect in Shanghai, she joined the Department of Architecture at TU Darmstadt in 2018. From 2021 to 2025, she led the German Research Foundation-funded project “Urban Stress” as a research associate, in collaboration with Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin. Following her doctorate in 2025, Dr.-Ing. Gu took up a postdoctoral position in the junior research group SALUS, funded by the Peter Beate Heller Foundation.
About the Award
The Vereinigung von Freunden der Technischen Universität zu Darmstadt e.V. has been presenting annual awards for outstanding academic achievement since 1987. Each department of TU Darmstadt receives one award for the best doctoral thesis of the preceding year. The prize includes a monetary award, a certificate, and a complimentary one-year membership in the association.