In this PhD-project we aim to understand the relation between the urban living environment and mental well-being. More specifically, between the city and urban stress, from the perspective of the entire complex dynamical system “person-community-living environment’. PhD-student David Habets combines experimental architectural design research with insights from ecological psychology and the philosophy of embodied cognition. Approaching stress in a way that takes the social, cultural, material and natural living environment seriously, we seek to understand how the urban landscape of possibilities (“affordances”) can induce and release stress in the life of people in the city.