GEMOTT pre-doctoral researcher Iker Echarte participated in the IAPS 2026 Conference, held at the University of Surrey (United Kingdom), where he presented the poster Applying Moral Foundations to Better Understand Public Acceptability of Urban Spatial Transformations.
The work presents the design and preliminary results of a Factorial Survey Experiment carried out in the Barcelona Metropolitan Area with the aim of analyzing whether the moral framing used to justify urban transformations, such as pedestrianization or the implementation of bike lanes, influences their acceptance by the public.
Preliminary results indicate that, although none of the moral frames analyzed generate a significant effect on the average acceptability of the interventions, they do modulate the public response differently depending on the type of action and the direction of the proposal (implementing or removing it). The study also shows that pedestrianization projects gain higher acceptance than bike lanes and that, in general, the public is more in favor of introducing these types of interventions than removing them.
His participation in the conference has been an opportunity to share these first results with researchers from various fields, as well as to learn about new perspectives and lines of research in the field of the relationship between people and the built environment.
