By Sarah Laskow

Place affects mood. Walk into a park on a sunny day, and your soul may feel lighter. Spend just a couple of minutes battling a crowd on a slushy sidewalk, and a happy day can turn sour. But scientists have only recently begun to tease out how place and mental health are intertwined — how more trees might help prevent or alleviate depression, for instance. There’s relatively little solid data available on how the physical environment might affect people’s mental health, and particularly not how it might nurture or prevent addictions from forming.

How is your desire and decision to check Facebook, smoke a cigarette or have a drink connected to place? Will a place that is busy and windy encourage addictive behaviors in a way that a place that’s comfortable and sunny might not? (Or vice versa?) For its new “Ecologies of Addiction” project, New York City’s Van Alen Institute is examining how vulnerability to addiction is related to environment. By looking at this less obvious connection between people and their surroundings, says Anne Guiney, Van Alen’s director of research, the institute hopes to shed light on “how we are shaped by urban environments — our minds, our psyche, our well-being.”

In the project’s first phase a neurologist, two landscape architects and an artist are developing a mobile tool to collect data about how place affects people and their impulsivity, a risk factor for addictive behavior. Launching at the end of this month, the project’s pilot will include 200 London volunteers. Each will download the “Urban Mind” app and commit to answering questions seven times a day, at somewhat random intervals, about how they’re feeling, where they are and what sort of place that is.