Rethinking Urban Corners as Leftover Spaces: An Emotional Mapping Approach Within the Context of Urban Resilience

Leftover spaces, often associated with neglected urban corners, bear physical and conceptual similarities to ignored parts of designed wholes. This study proposes an analytical approach to develop resilient intervention strategies by analyzing the production of leftover spaces through users’ emotional experiences. An experimental pilot study was conducted along Söğütlüçeşme Street in Kadıköy, Istanbul, where all corner points were typologically classified based on morphological characteristics. To measure the impact of these configurations on spatial emotional characters, a survey was implemented using Plutchik’s wheel of emotions. Following a quantitative analysis of emotion frequencies and intensities, findings were visualized via radar charts and spatialized using QGIS 3.40 to generate an emotional map. The resulting emotional maps were further used to identify spatial vulnerabilities and resilience priorities across the study area. By making the gaps between point-based emotional clusters continuous through the IDW interpolation method, the emotional topography of the study area was modeled, thereby presenting an analytical framework that identifies emotional thresholds, spatial vulnerabilities, and resilience priorities. Results indicate that as the physical boundaries of corner voids expand, influenced by angling and massing decisions, public diversity increases, creating a positive emotional atmosphere. Conversely, compressed voids demonstrate a higher potential for producing leftover spaces. This study reveals that mapping user emotions as a data layer is critical for constructing more inclusive and resilient urban environments.