Marginalized Living and Disabling Spaces: A Bio-Cognitive Perspective

Abstract

This paper advances a novel bio-cognitive framework for understanding how urban peripheries function as disabling environments that systematically undermine human flourishing. Drawing on recent theoretical developments in predictive processing, 4E cognition (embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended), and biology, we propose that marginalization in urban contexts emerges not merely from socio-economic deprivation but from fundamental disruptions to cognitive, physiological, and embodied processes. Our analysis illustrates how peripheral spaces operate as neuro-affective ecologies that constrain agency through the breakdown of sensorimotor coupling, the generation of persistent prediction errors, and the activation of chronic stress responses. We argue that environmental features characteristic of urban peripheries, such as fragmented infrastructure, limited affordances, and unpredictable spatial configurations, create conditions where the dynamic interplay between body, brain, and environment systematically impairs inhabitants’ capacity for effective action and adaptation. This bio-cognitive perspective challenges conventional approaches that frame peripheries primarily through geographic or policy lenses, instead revealing how spatial injustice also operates at the intersection of neural, bodily, and environmental processes. Our framework contributes to emerging debates on spatial justice by providing a scientifically grounded account of how built environments become constitutively disabling, offering new conceptual tools for policy interventions that address the embodied and cognitive dimensions of urban inequality. The implications extend beyond urban planning to fundamental questions about how environments shape human potential and the ethical imperatives of creating spaces that support rather than constrain human flourishing.

1. Introduction: Reconceptualizing Urban Marginalities Through an Integrated Bio-Cognitive Lens

The escalating visibility of urban inequality demands a fundamental reconceptualization of how we understand peripheral spaces and the processes of marginalization they engender. Traditional geographic approaches that locate peripherality through simple distance metrics fail to capture the complex dynamics through which certain urban spaces become sites of systematic disadvantage. As Wacquant [1] demonstrates in his comparative analysis of advanced marginality, contemporary forms of urban exclusion emerge through the intersection of economic restructuring, state retrenchment, and spatial stigmatization, that is, processes that can take place in city centers as much as in geographic peripheries.

The inadequacy of center-periphery dichotomies becomes particularly apparent when examining contemporary metropolitan formations. Urban theorists have increasingly recognized that the idea of the urban has undergone a profound morphological transformation, evolving from hierarchically organized concentric structures to post-metropolitan configurations characterized by polycentric networks, edge cities, and hybrid urban-rural interfaces [2]. The concept of the “urban archipelago” captures this fragmentation, where islands of privilege and disadvantage are distributed across the metropolitan space according to a logic that transcends simple geographic gradients [3]. This archipelagic structure reflects a splintering urbanism, i.e., the selective unbundling of infrastructure networks that creates premium spaces alongside zones of disconnection [4].

Contemporary peripherality thus emerges through multiple, intersecting dimensions that produce peripheral conditions across diverse spatial contexts. Following Brenner and Schmid’s [5] call for new epistemologies of the urban, we identify several constitutive dimensions of peripheral experience. Infrastructural peripherality manifests in incomplete urban forms, namely spaces where basic urban systems function intermittently or require constant improvisation by residents [6]. This infrastructural precarity creates an infrastructural inversion, where the typically invisible substrates of urban life become foregrounded through breakdown and dysfunction [7].

Temporal peripherality represents another crucial dimension, emerging when neighborhoods experience power-chronography in terms of the differential distribution of temporal resources and constraints [8]. Peripheral residents often endure the mobility of the poor under the form of extended commutes that fragment daily life and limit participation in urban opportunities [9]. This temporal marginalization moreover intersects with time–space compression, where acceleration benefits primarily those with resources to take advantage of speed while condemning others to slowness [10].

The perceptual dimension of peripherality operates through territorial stigmatization: processes through which certain spaces become marked as degraded in the collective imagination regardless of material conditions [11]. This symbolic marginalization creates in turn a blemish of place, where certain residential locations become a marker of moral suspicion that residents must constantly manage [12]. Such stigmatization operates through affective economies, where emotions like fear and disgust circulate to mark certain bodies and spaces as threatening [13].

Urban morphology actively produces peripherality through specific spatial configurations that embody the social production of space [14]. Fragmentation manifests not merely as physical discontinuity but as constraints on spatial practice: the everyday movements through which inhabitants produce lived space [15]. Physical barriers multiply dead spaces, that is, zones that resist inhabitation and movement, creating friction in the urban fabric [16]. This morphological violence operates through wounded cities: urban forms that bear and perpetuate historical traumas [17].

Crucially, this multidimensional understanding reveals peripherality not as a fixed condition but as throwntogetherness: the ongoing, contested production of spatial configurations through the intersection of multiple trajectories [18]. Peripheral spaces emerge through multiple networked mobilities that selectively connect and disconnect different urban zones [19]. This relational production of peripherality aligns with improvised lives, where residents must constantly work to sustain livability within constraining environments [20].

The implications of this reconceptualization extend beyond theoretical speculation, to challenge fundamental assumptions in urban policy. Rather than treating peripheries as spaces awaiting integration into a presumed urban core, this perspective reveals them as actively produced through ongoing processes of differentiation and exclusion. As Roy [21] argues in her critique of urban informality discourses, peripheries are not deviations from urban norms but constitutive elements of contemporary urbanization processes. Recognizing this challenge necessitates a radical incrementalism that aligns with the unique dynamics of peripheral spaces [22]. Building on this perspective, we introduce a bio-cognitive framework that reconceptualizes urban marginalities by integrating state-of-the-art research from cognitive science, neurobiology, and environmental psychology. Our framework transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries to point out how peripheral spaces function as environments that may systematically disable their inhabitants through mechanisms operating at the intersection of neural prediction, embodied experience, and ecological constraint.

The theoretical synthesis we propose draws on three converging streams of scientific inquiry. First, contemporary biology observes how urban environments affect physiological functioning through multiple interconnected biological stressors. Second, the 4E cognition paradigm has fundamentally transformed our understanding of mind as a phenomenon that extends beyond the brain to encompass bodily, environmental, and interactional processes [23,24]. Third, predictive processing accounts reveal how the brain seamlessly generates models of its environment, so that well-being states depend on the successful minimization of prediction error through active engagement with the world [25,26]. Then, the Free Energy Principle provides a mathematical framework that reconciles internalist and externalist perspectives in the understanding of how living systems maintain themselves through constant negotiation with their environments [27,28]. When applied to urban contexts, these frameworks jointly provide us with the basis of a new conceptual synthesis to help us figure out how peripheral spaces may undermine the fundamental processes through which humans navigate, make sense of, and flourish within, their environments.

Our bio-cognitive approach characterizes urban peripheries as spaces where the ordinary coupling between perception and action breaks down, where environmental unpredictability generates persistent stress, and where limited affordances constrain the development of agency and capability. Rather than viewing marginalization as primarily a matter of resource distribution or geographic location, we understand it also as an emergent property of environments that fail to support the basic cognitive and physiological processes through which humans engage with their surroundings. This perspective aligns with a growing recognition in urban studies that space is not merely a container for social relations but an active force in shaping subjectivity, health, and possibility [29,30].

The contribution of this integrative approach lies not merely in documenting how degraded environments harm their inhabitants, a fact long recognized by environmental justice advocates, but in explicating the precise mechanisms through which spatial configurations interact with embodied and neural processes to produce systematic patterns of disability. Integrating insights from predictive processing, embodied cognition, and stress biology, we can understand peripheral spaces as environments that impose toxic stress while simultaneously undermining the cognitive and behavioral resources needed to cope with such stress.

This framework suggests that creating more equitable cities requires attention not only to resource distribution but to the subtle ways in which built environments support or undermine the embodied processes through which people make sense of, and act within, their living spaces, ultimately defining their room and capacity for agency.

2. Methodological Notes

This paper adopts a theory-building approach aimed at developing a novel conceptual framework rather than conducting a systematic review or presenting new empirical findings. Its main purpose is to develop new conceptual tools for understanding urban marginality by integrating fragmented knowledge across disciplines to generate an explanatory framework that can guide future empirical research and policy interventions. Our bio-cognitive framework emerges from a critical realist epistemological position that acknowledges both the material reality of urban environments, and the interpretive, embodied ways humans experience them. This stance allows us to bridge naturalistic approaches from neuroscience and biology with interpretive insights from urban studies and phenomenology. The primary objective of our theoretical synthesis is to identify convergent patterns across disparate research domains that have not been previously connected. Through this integration, we build a conceptual model that highlights possible mechanisms linking environmental conditions to human flourishing, generating testable propositions for future empirical investigation and providing actionable insights for urban policy and planning interventions. Given the growing but fragmented body of research on the cognitive and biological impacts of urban environments, we employed an integrative conceptual synthesis approach. This method differs fundamentally from systematic reviews, which aim for comprehensive coverage, or narrative reviews, which summarize existing knowledge. Instead, our selection was guided by conceptual relevance and theoretical potential rather than exhaustiveness. The process involved three main interconnected stages. In the first stage, literature identification and selection, we conducted targeted searches across various interdisciplinary databases. Our focus spanned key conceptual domains: biological studies examining environmental health disparities, stress physiology, urban microbiome research, and the epigenetics of place; cognitive science research on 4E cognition encompassing embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended approaches, alongside work on predictive processing, the Free Energy Principle, and ecological psychology; environmental neuroscience including neurourbanism, architectural neuroscience, and environmental psychology; and urban studies addressing spatial justice, peripheral urbanism, critical geography, and urban morphology. Our selection focus prioritized theoretical innovation and conceptual clarity, cross-disciplinary relevance, empirical robustness for supporting studies, and applicability to peripheral or marginal urban contexts. We were less interested in purely descriptive studies lacking theoretical implications and papers focused exclusively on rural or suburban contexts without relevance to urban marginality. In the second stage, conceptual mapping and integration, selected studies were analyzed using a conceptual mapping technique to identify core concepts and their definitions across disciplines, mechanisms linking environment to human outcomes, points of convergence and tension between frameworks, and gaps requiring theoretical bridging. Starting from our refined understanding of multiple marginalities, we mapped relationships between environmental stressors such as pollution, noise, and infrastructure; spatial affordances including action possibilities and constraints; cognitive mechanisms involving prediction, embodiment, and attention; biological processes encompassing stress response, inflammation, and epigenetics; and their combined outcomes for agency and well-being. This mapping revealed patterns not visible within single disciplines, such as how architectural dis-affordances interact with predictive processing to produce learned helplessness. The third stage involved framework development and validation. The resulting bio-cognitive framework shown in Figure 1 was iteratively refined through internal coherence checking to ensure logical consistency between components, cross-disciplinary validation comparing with established models in each field, assessment of explanatory power testing the framework’s ability to explain documented phenomena, and evaluation of generative potential identifying novel research questions and hypotheses. The framework underwent multiple iterations based on identification of conceptual gaps or contradictions, integration of additional theoretical perspectives, and simplification for clarity without loss of explanatory power. This theoretical synthesis is necessarily selective rather than exhaustive. We acknowledge several important limitations in our approach. Our framework draws primarily from research in Western urban contexts, though we attempt to incorporate insights from Global South scholarship where available. While interdisciplinary in scope, we may have missed relevant work from fields outside our core domains. As a theoretical paper, empirical validation of the complete framework awaits future research. Additionally, we focus on contemporary urban conditions with limited historical perspective, which may constrain our understanding of how these patterns have evolved over time. The bio-cognitive framework advances beyond existing approaches by integrating levels of analysis typically studied separately, including neural, bodily, and environmental dimensions, and identifies specific mechanisms that link spatial configurations to human outcomes through embodied processes. The framework generates testable hypotheses about environment–body–mind interactions and offers practical implications for urban planning and policy interventions. This methodology thus reflects a theory-driven synthesis particularly suited for emerging transdisciplinary fields like neurourbanism, where scattered evidence requires integration to generate coherent explanatory models. All the components will be conceptually unpacked and critically addressed in what follows.

3. Background and Conceptual Foundations: A Path Toward a Bio-Cognitive Reading of Spaces

The transformation of our understanding of urban marginality requires moving beyond purely sociological or geographic analyses to incorporate insights from the biological and cognitive sciences. This transdisciplinary approach reveals how peripheral environments interact with fundamental human processes of perception, cognition, and physiological regulation to produce systematic patterns of enablement or constraint. While biological research illuminates the physiological toll of degraded environments, documenting how chronic stressors disrupt neuroendocrine regulation and compromise mental health [31,32] these effects cannot be understood in isolation from the cognitive and embodied processes through which organisms navigate their environments.

The emerging field of neurourbanism provides crucial insights into these dynamics. Adli et al. [33] demonstrate how urban stressors interact with neural vulnerability to produce differential mental health outcomes, while Lederbogen et al. [34] reveal distinct patterns of brain activation in urban versus rural dwellers when processing social stress. These findings suggest that urban environments literally reshape neural function, creating environmental stress that operates through multiple pathways simultaneously [35]. Yet to fully grasp how peripheries become disabling, we must integrate these biological insights with theories of embodied and situated cognition that explain how organisms actively construct their experiential worlds through sensorimotor engagement.

3.1. Biological Stressors and Environmental Injustice

Peripheral urban areas often concentrate multiple stressors, creating cumulative risk environments where biological systems face constant challenge without adequate opportunity for recovery [36].

Contemporary biological research has definitively established that urban environments profoundly shape physiological functioning through multiple interconnected pathways. The allostatic load model [37] provides a framework for understanding how repeated exposure to stressors produces cumulative physiological dysregulation. In urban contexts, this manifests through urban stress [38], a syndrome emerging from the interaction of physical stressors (noise, pollution, crowding) with social stressors (inequality, discrimination, insecurity).

Recent field studies demonstrate these biological impacts. Ward-Thompson et al. [39] conducted an exploratory study of 25 participants in deprived urban communities and found significant relationships between green space exposure and stress biomarkers. The percentage of green space in participants’ living environments was a significant independent predictor of circadian cortisol patterns, alongside self-reported physical activity, suggesting that greater residential green space access may be associated with healthier stress hormone regulation.

Similarly, research in Flemish urban areas found that boys from highly urbanized contexts showed higher cumulative hair cortisol concentration compared to peers living outside cities, whereas for girls the main determinant of cumulative cortisol was menarcheal status [40]. Evans et al. [41] found that in a Dutch sample of adolescents, those living in highly urbanized neighborhoods showed blunted biological stress reactivity.

Recent research utilizing ambulatory assessment and neuroimaging provides clues as to the precise mechanisms through which urban environments impact stress physiology. Steinheuser et al. [42] demonstrate that exposure to urban green spaces produces measurable reductions in prefrontal cortex activation associated with stress regulation, while Kühn et al. [43] show that forest versus urban walks differentially impact amygdala activation patterns. These findings align with stress reduction theory [44] and attention restoration theory [45], both suggesting that natural elements serve crucial regulatory functions for human cognitive and emotional systems.

The absence of such restorative elements in many peripheral urban areas creates environmental deprivation [46]. Multiple studies document how this deprivation manifests physiologically. In Delhi’s urban slums, where PM10 levels reach 198 μg/m³ (nearly 10 times WHO limits), researchers found that women exposed to combined indoor and outdoor air pollution showed 30–40% reductions in lung function parameters (FEV1 and FVC) compared to predicted values [47]. The inflammatory cascade triggered by such exposure was evident in elevated C-reactive protein levels, with residents showing inflammatory markers 2–3 times higher than those in less polluted areas. More generally, air pollution exposure correlates with increased inflammatory markers and altered stress hormone patterns [48], whereas traffic noise disrupts sleep architecture and autonomic nervous system function [49]. Light pollution interferes with circadian rhythms, affecting melatonin production and contributing to metabolic dysfunction [50]. This biological embedding of urban experience extends to epigenetic modifications, with Ladd-Acosta et al. [51] documenting for instance the adverse epigenetic effects of prenatal exposure to air pollutants.

Another major channel in biological disruption of the inhabitants of peripheral neighborhoods is the direct effect of socio-economic status (SES). Seeman et al. [52] find that SES has a profound impact on biological functioning through cumulative physiological dysregulation, conceptualized as allostatic load. While individual biological parameters show modest SES gradients, examining cumulative measures across multiple physiological systems, including autonomic nervous, cardiovascular, metabolic, and inflammatory processes, reveals substantially larger SES-related health disparities. Importantly, this cumulative physiological dysregulation serves as a key mediating pathway between lower SES and increased morbidity and mortality, with environmental factors and genetic endowment interacting to influence these biological processes.

Particularly significant is emerging research on the urban microbiome. The “Old Friends” hypothesis [53] suggests that reduced microbial diversity in urban environments contributes to immune dysregulation and increased vulnerability to both physical and mental illness. Hanski et al. [54] demonstrate lower microbial diversity among urban versus rural adolescents, correlating with increased atopic sensitization. In a Finnish study examining doormat debris from rural and urban households, Parajuli et al. [55] found that urbanization significantly impacts indoor exposure to environmental microbiota. The research demonstrated that bacterial diversity decreased with increasing built area coverage, while the relative abundance of potentially pathogenic bacterial families and genera increased in more urbanized environments. These findings suggest that people living in densely built areas have reduced contact with diverse environmental microbiota compared to those in sparsely built areas, potentially affecting immune function and health outcomes. The study supports the hypothesis that urbanization reduces beneficial microbial exposure while potentially increasing pathogen exposure.

On the other hand, there are significant differences across urbanized areas, and a key factor in terms of microbiome composition is the density of green spaces. Styles et al. [56] conducted a study in metropolitan central North Carolina examining how residential vegetation affects the ambient air microbiome and found compelling evidence for a beneficial impact of denser green spaces on microbial diversity. The research demonstrated that greater tree cover within 500 m of residences was significantly associated with increased microbial α-diversity (i.e., microbial diversity in a given location) in ambient air, with tree cover percentage showing a significant positive relationship with Shannon’s index of α-diversity (p = 0.03). Additionally, the study revealed that microbial β-diversity (i.e., the microbial diversity across different samples and locations) was distinctly different between residences with high versus low levels of both vegetated land cover and tree cover, with significant differences in bacterial composition observed among different quintiles of vegetated land (p = 0.03) and tree cover (p = 0.008). These findings suggest that urban vegetation, particularly trees, plays a crucial role in shaping the diversity and composition of airborne microbial communities in residential environments. As poorer and more marginal urbanized areas are typically characterized by lower endowments and density of green spaces, these results largely reflect on the relative deprivation of microbial diversity in peripheries, with various kinds of adverse consequences on well-being and health.

Another critical issue related to microbiota in peripheral areas is that of hygienic conditions, and especially so in conditions of extreme marginalization and deprivation. In Brazilian favelas, where sewage systems reach much less of the 62.5% of the population that is the Census 2022 figure for Brazilian population, a metagenomic study of a sewage system in Belém, Pará, Brazil, revealed a highly diverse bacterial community, with most identified species being pathogenic, particularly from the Enterobacteriaceae family. Resistome analysis demonstrated a high prevalence of antibiotic resistance genes conferring resistance to multiple drugs, aminoglycosides, and macrolides, with efflux pumps and drug inactivation as the primary resistance mechanisms, and several bacterial pathogens identified posed serious health threats according to CDC classifications. The sewage exhibited highly acidic conditions (pH 1.17) and contained total coliforms and E. coli, highlighting the urgent need for improved urban sanitation measures to prevent antibiotic resistance spread and water resource contamination [57].

The distribution of these biological stressors follows clear patterns of environmental injustice. The riskscape of peripheral areas shows how marginalized communities disproportionately bear the burden of environmental hazards [58]. This creates a double jeopardy under the form of a synergistic interaction of social stressors with environmental toxins that amplifies health disparities [59].

3.2. 4E Cognition and Embodied Engagement with Space

The biological impacts documented above cannot be fully understood without examining how organisms actively engage with, and make sense of, their environments. The 4E cognition paradigm, recognizing cognition as embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended, fundamentally reconceptualizes the relationship between mind, body, and environment [23]. This framework emerged from converging insights in phenomenology, dynamical systems theory, and neuroscience, challenging computational models that locate cognition solely within neural processes.

Embodied cognition research demonstrates that spatial experience fundamentally depends on sensorimotor capacities and bodily morphology. Varela et al.’s [60] groundbreaking work on enactivism proposed that cognition emerges through the history of structural coupling between organism and environment. This perspective, refined by Thompson [61] and Di Paolo et al. [62], understands perception not as passive reception but as active sensorimotor exploration [63]. The implications for understanding urban experience are profound: we do not simply observe space but enact it through embodied engagement.

Central to such embodied engagement is the body schema: the implicit, proprioceptive sense of bodily configuration that enables fluid action [64]. Research by Maravita and Iriki [65] demonstrates the plasticity of body schema, showing how tool use extends peripersonal space representation. In architectural contexts, this plasticity means that spatial configurations literally reshape our embodied sense of possibility. Jelić et al. [66] review neuroscientific evidence showing how architectural features modulate body schema and action preparation, while Vecchiato et al. [67] find differential neural responses to contemplating movement through pleasant versus unpleasant architectural spaces.

The discovery of mirror neuron systems provides a neurobiological substrate for understanding how we perceive space through implicit motor simulation. Embodied simulation theory proposes that we understand space by simulating potential actions within it, activating motor representations without executing movement [68]. This process, documented by Sbriscia-Fioretti et al. [69] in the observation of abstract art, implies that even in static, non-representational imagery, spatial features directly modulate motor cortex activity. They found that viewing Franz Kline’s abstract paintings elicited activation in premotor and primary motor cortices alongside reward-related orbitofrontal and categorization-related prefrontal areas, providing neurophysiological evidence that the motor system is directly involved when observers perceive static, meaningless brushstroke patterns. This pattern supports the idea that observers engage in embodied simulation of the artist’s gestures rather than simply processing visual form. On the other hand, the quality of the signal matters: behavioral measures demonstrated that participants judged the original paintings as embodying more movement and rated them as more aesthetically pleasing compared to visually altered control stimuli. They also reliably identified the original images as artworks while classifying the modified versions as non-original, indicating that sensorimotor simulation contributes to both the perception and evaluative judgment of abstract art. Although direct evidence is missing, it is reasonable to conjecture that the same kind of mechanisms are at work in the case of the perception of architectural spaces, where degraded or constraining environments might produce a kind of “motor pessimism”, i.e., a pre-reflective sense of limited action possibility.

Chatterjee et al. [70] provide some partial neural evidence of this complex relationship. They identify coherence, fascination, and hominess as central psychological dimensions that shape aesthetic responses in architectural interiors, each underpinned by emotional valence. Through reanalysis of fMRI data, the paper revealed that fascination correlates with activity in the right lingual gyrus irrespective of the judgment task; coherence is tied to the left inferior occipital gyrus specifically during beauty assessments; and hominess engages the left cuneus when participants make approach-avoidance decisions. These neural signatures underscore the visual system’s intrinsic sensitivity to distinct architectural qualities. They emphasize the role of natural elements in architectural design, drawing on the biophilia hypothesis and attention restoration theory to explain innate preferences for naturalistic spaces. Incorporating direct nature or natural patterns can evoke feelings of restoration and refuge, while spatial openness modulates activation in the parahippocampal place area beyond the mere presence of natural versus built features. At a higher cognitive level, interactions between low-level visual features and semantic content were shown to shape aesthetic experiences, with both positive and negative emotions, alongside conscious reasoning and memory retrieval, contributing to how individuals evaluate and engage with built environments.

3.3. Predictive Processing and Spatial Perception

Predictive processing accounts provide another crucial piece of the puzzle. The brain, according to this framework, constantly generates predictions about sensory input, with perception arising from the process of minimizing prediction error [25,26]. In spatial contexts, this means that we navigate environments through learned expectations about spatial regularities. Seriès and Seitz [71] show how statistical learning shapes spatial perception, while Kok et al. [72] show that expectation literally sharpens sensory representations of predicted stimuli.

Recent theoretical work has begun integrating enactivist and predictive processing frameworks. Bruineberg et al. [73] argue that the free-energy principle (FEP) should be conceptually separated from Helmholtzian accounts of the predictive brain, as the free-energy principle’s information-theoretic framing of biological self-organization does not support the notion of perception as unconscious hypothesis-testing typical of a Helmholtzian view. They propose that the FEP aligns more naturally with ecological and enactive approaches, emphasizing that it applies to the whole animal–environment system rather than solely to brain processes, that active inference under FEP cannot be reduced to unconscious scientific inference, and that the minimal notion of inference under FEP lacks the strength to sustain a Helmholtzian theory of perception. Drawing on the biological roots of the FEP, the paper highlights its relevance to embodied living systems, underscoring the continuity of mind and life championed by enactivist perspectives. This stance challenges dominant interpretations of Bayesian predictive coding that portray the brain as a hypothesis-testing scientist, advocating instead for a deflationary, dynamical-systems reading of probabilistic inference under FEP. A further key insight reframes free-energy minimization in terms of the organism’s regulation of interactions with its affordance landscape: surprise is minimized not by accurate world reconstruction but by maintaining attunement between internal and external dynamics. This reframing led to a critique of Hohwy’s conflation of the free-energy principle with the principle of efficient coding, arguing that only action, not representational accuracy, truly minimizes surprise.

Ramstead et al. [74] introduce a comprehensive framework for analyzing how human agents engage with cultural affordances by integrating embodied, cognitive, and affective dimensions of sociality and culture with sociocultural scaffolding of experience. This framework expands the traditional notion of affordance, originally grounded in ecological psychology, to encompass sociocultural forms of life, and provides a multilevel account of how agents learn and transmit affordances through patterned social practices and regimes of shared attention. In doing so, the authors argue that culture and context co-construct behavior, cognition, and experience by shaping contentless basic mental processes into content-bearing ones via immersive participation in normative social practices regulating joint attention and shared intentionality. A critical distinction is drawn between natural affordances, which rely on stable environmental correlations, and conventional affordances, which depend on shared expectations, norms, and cooperative social practices. The paper further contends that human biology is inherently cultural biology, implying that all affordances humans exploit are cultural affordances rooted in our biological capacities. Addressing tensions with radical enactivist and embodied approaches, which often eschew representationalism, they posit that basic cognitive processes may be contentless while still accommodating typically human, contentful cognition. Computational neuroscience is presented as complementary, offering neural-computational scaffolding for skilled engagement with both natural and conventional affordances. Central to the framework is the hypothesis that the acquisition of cultural affordances, especially those involving conventional, contentful meaning, is driven by looping feedback relations between shared intentionality and shared attention. These feedback loops, shaped by local ontologies and communicative practices, facilitate the internalization of social norms and expectations, thereby enabling agents to perceive and act upon culturally given possibilities for action. This mechanism provides a unified account of how sociocultural practices are both learned and perpetuated across individuals and communities.

Particularly relevant is work on embodied predictive interoception, showing how bodily states shape predictive processing, thus providing an abridging conceptual framework that appears promising. Allen and Friston [75] argue that predictive processing encompasses a diverse spectrum of theories ranging from traditional cognitivist interpretations to approaches that fully embrace enactive, embodied, and dynamic conceptions of mind, arguing that any coherent theory of predictive processing must acknowledge this continuum rather than treating it as a monolithic framework.

3.4. The Free Energy Principle and the Dynamics of Affordances

In this regard, the Free Energy Principle (FEP) [27,76] provides a formal mechanism for reconciling internalist and externalist perspectives by explaining how internal representations can emerge from autopoietic self-organization. The Free Energy Principle [27,76] provides a unifying mathematical framework suggesting that all adaptive systems minimize free energy (roughly, the divergence between predicted and actual sensory states). Originally formulated within the framework of predictive processing, and thus rooted in an internalist perspective, the FEP can be reinterpreted in embodied terms as a bridge between internalist and externalist accounts. From this standpoint, the embodied mind does not merely generate internal representations, but constitutes an active system that maintains its viability by reducing the discrepancy between expectations and sensory input through situated action. Within this model, the body plays three constitutive roles: it acts as a regulator, modulating cognitive activity in line with motor and affective demands; as a distributor, contributing to predictive computation by offloading part of the processing onto the muscular and perceptual systems; and as a structural constraint, delimiting the informational domain that can be processed according to its morphological and dynamic configuration. This embodied reading of the Free Energy Principle thus highlights how cognitive agents are not only prediction-driven systems, but are constitutively shaped by their ‘econiches’—the ecologically relevant environments in which they are embedded. Applied to urban experience, this implies that unpredictable, chaotic environments impose high metabolic costs as organisms struggle to maintain predictive accuracy. Constant prediction errors in degraded urban environments may contribute to uncertainty stress, that is, the physiological toll of navigating unpredictable contexts [77]. Interestingly, there is a relationship between uncertainty stress and the provision of green spaces. Analyzing a nationwide survey of 11,954 university students in 42 Chinese cities, Yang et al. [78] found that 31.1% experienced severe stress, with 19.6% reporting severe uncertainty stress and 11.7% reporting severe life stress. Multilevel logistic regression revealed that greater urban green space was significantly associated with lower uncertainty stress: compared to cities with less than 30 ha of green land per 1000 residents, those with 30–39 ha and over 40 ha saw a 39% and 29% reduction in the odds of severe uncertainty stress, respectively, and students in the highest quintile of green land proportion had a 34% lower likelihood of severe uncertainty stress. Although increased green space also corresponded to lower life stress in models adjusting only for individual characteristics, these associations were no longer statistically significant once university- and city-level control variables were included. These findings indicate that higher availability of urban green space is particularly beneficial for reducing uncertainty stress among Chinese university students.

This principle not only underpins empirically productive process models like predictive processing but also grounds Active Inference as fundamentally enactive and embodied, thereby offering a unified resolution to longstanding debates over the locus of cognition. By examining radical predictive processing, the authors highlight a connectionist account in which cognition is driven by a canonical microcircuit motif replicated throughout the cortical hierarchy, generating a pervasive top-down cascade of predictions rather than relying on classical comparator mechanisms. This approach underscores how large-scale predictive hierarchies can account for both sensory and higher-order cognitive functions in a unified framework. The extension of predictive coding into the interoceptive domain through models such as Interoceptive Predictive Coding (IPC) and Embodied Predictive Interoceptive Coding (EPIC) illustrates the centrality of body-related inferences. According to these models, predictions about internal bodily states play a critical role in coordinating global brain dynamics and underpinning experiences of bodily awareness. Addressing critiques that moderate embodied cognition reduces the body to passive representations, they argue that the FEP inherently mandates embodied predictive processing as a normative requirement for living systems to resist entropy. By deriving its first principles from the thermodynamic necessity to maintain organizational integrity, the FEP offers a principled account of why cognition must be both enactive and embodied, charting a formal path forward for enactivist theories of mind.

This complex theoretical debate suggests, among other things, that the chronic stress documented in peripheral urban areas may fundamentally alter predictive mechanisms, creating self-reinforcing cycles of environmental pessimism. More generally, the recent literature on the neurobiological dimension of lived architectural spaces connects meaningfully to the above themes. Jelić et al. [66] advocate for an enactive framework to investigate architectural experience, emphasizing that perception arises from a dynamic coupling between the body and environmental form. They argue that embodiment, motivation, and affordances jointly shape how individuals engage with architectural spaces, and recommend leveraging Immersive Virtual Reality (IVR) as a methodological tool to capture naturalistic interactions and underlying neurobehavioral dynamics in controlled settings. Emotion-evaluation systems reveal that aesthetic experience is fundamentally embodied and tied to adaptive processes. Empathy is reconceived as a sensorimotor grasp of form, preparing individuals for potential actions, while neuroscientific findings indicate that perception of art and architecture relies on implicit internal actions, emotional processing, and contextual influences. Investigations in virtual architectural interiors show moreover that greater subjective presence corresponds with heightened physiological responses, making these measures reliable indicators of immersive engagement. Crucially, a strong sense of presence is shown to be a prerequisite for eliciting genuine emotional reactions in virtual settings. Electroencephalographic data further reveal that presence activates frontal-midline theta rhythms associated with sensorimotor integration and attentional regulation, underscoring the neural mechanisms by which virtual spaces influence focused cognitive and bodily processes.

In addition, Djebbara et al. [79] demonstrated that variations in physical environment, specifically the affordances it offers, modulate cortical potentials in a manner reflecting the body’s potential movements. Early sensory brain activity recorded at central occipital sites differed according to affordances before any overt movement occurred, indicating that perception is shaped by anticipated action possibilities. Similarly, frontocentral evoked potentials revealed that impassable and passable door widths elicited distinct early brain responses, reinforcing the tight coupling of perception and potential action. Prior to traversing space, a motor-related negative component emerged that varied with the environment’s affordances, suggesting that readiness to move is preconfigured by the physical constraints of the setting. Beyond neural measures, subjective and behavioral data aligned with these electrophysiological findings. Participants rated narrow doors as less arousing and reported differences in dominance and valence across door sizes, while approach times were faster toward wide openings than narrow ones, highlighting how bodily affordances shape both experience and movement patterns.

Collectively, these results support the concept that cognition is intrinsically linked to the body’s action potentials, continuously predicting and responding to affordances in the environment. The findings suggest that architectural design can benefit from acknowledging how spatial affordances actively influence perception and behavior.

Despite the partial and fragmented character of these early results, there is therefore a promising basis to imagine a research program that systematically investigates the enabling/disabling potential of peripheral spaces in terms of how spatial layouts and the biopsychological features of the environment modulate the landscape of affordances and ultimately residents’ agency.

4. Results

The proposed framework advances a more comprehensive characterization of urban peripherality, conceptualizing it not solely in architectural and social terms but also as environments in which the bio-cognitive mechanisms discussed in the following sections come into play. That is the reason why the framework is intended not as a full-fledged theory but as a generative scaffold for future research and intervention development, providing a foundation upon which empirical studies can build and test specific propositions about how urban environments shape human flourishing or constraint.

Our framework, which has been presented and discussed in detail in the previous sections, can be synthetically represented in Figure 1, whose diagram can be read as follows. On the left side, we find the input factors: environmental stressors (noise, pollution, precarity, etc.), and spatial affordances (affordance poverty, architectural dis-affordance). At the center, there are the central processing mechanisms: 4E Cognition (embodied, embedded, enactive, extended processes), Predictive Processing (prediction errors, uncertainty stress), and Stress Biology (allostatic load, inflammation, epigenetic changes). On the right side, we find the outcomes: disabling effects (learned helplessness, reduced agency, health impacts), but also transformative potential (community agency, resilience building). As to the key relationships, the hypothesized direct causal pathways are drawn with solid arrows. The “Marginalized Living Stress Loop”, which is the core of our system dynamics, is shown as a dashed feedback loop, and the bidirectional transformation pathways indicate a potential for positive change.

5. Discussion: Bio-Cognitive Framework on Disabling Spaces

The theoretical frameworks discussed above show a promising level of convergence in illustrating how urban peripheries function as environments that systematically undermine human flourishing through interconnected biological, cognitive, and spatial mechanisms. This bio-cognitive perspective transcends traditional approaches that treat environmental disadvantage primarily through socioeconomic or infrastructural lenses, revealing instead how marginal urban spaces operate as complex assemblages that disrupt fundamental processes of perception, action, and adaptation. Our analysis builds on emerging work in cognitive urbanism [80,81] while extending it specifically to conditions of peripherality and marginalization.

5.1. Public Spaces, Affordances, and Unequal Access

Public spaces serve as critical sites where the abstract principles of embodied cognition and environmental affordances become concretely manifest in everyday experience. Gibson’s [82] ecological approach to perception introduces affordances as the action possibilities that environments offer to organisms with particular capacities. In urban contexts, Heft [83] has extended this framework to show how built environments structure behavioral possibilities through their physical configurations and social meanings. Public spaces in peripheral areas often exhibit what we could call affordance poverty: a systematic limitation of action possibilities that constrains human agency and development.

Contemporary research on urban affordances reveals their fundamentally relational character. The landscape of affordances notion describes how skilled individuals perceive rich fields of possibility within their environments [84]. This landscape is not equally accessible to all; rather, it depends on abilities and bodily skills developed through histories of interaction. In peripheral public spaces, the impoverishment of affordances creates constrained action repertoires, that is, limited sets of behavioral possibilities that become habituated over time [85].

Empirical work in diverse peripheral contexts illustrates these dynamics concretely. In the banlieues of Paris, Lepoutre [86] documents how young residents transform hostile public spaces through embodied practices of occupation and movement yet remain constrained by the fundamental poverty of environmental affordances. Loukaitou-Sideris and Fink [87] study how women in marginalized urban areas develop defensive spatial practices, altering their routes and travel patterns to avoid dimly lit areas, deserted transit stops, and spaces they perceive as threatening, a form of constrained mobility that limits access to urban opportunities. Caldeira [88] illustrates how residents of peripheries in the Global South engage in ongoing autoconstruction, an improvisational process of bricolage that generates a shifting array of action possibilities tied to incremental building phases and infrastructure delivery. This produces highly heterogeneous environments where affordances for habitation, mobility, and social interaction evolve unevenly across space and time, reflecting both the provisional nature of dwellings and the slow arrival of services. Political mobilization further reshapes these affordance landscapes as residents organize to regularize land tenure and demand improvements, thereby co-governing the field of possibilities with state and market actors, highlighting the participatory character of affordances in peripheral contexts, striving to support residents’ capacity to continually negotiate and transform their built environments.

The 4E cognition framework explains how this affordance poverty operates through multiple channels simultaneously. As Di Paolo and De Jaegher [89] argue in their enactive approach to social understanding, intersubjectivity emerges through participatory sense-making: the process by which individuals coordinate their sense-making activities in shared spaces. Public spaces with limited affordances for social interaction thus impair not only individual agency but also collective meaning-making processes. This insight aligns with the ecological approach to psychopathology, which understands mental distress as emerging from disrupted organism-environment relationships rather than purely internal dysfunction [90].

The concept of affordance justice thus emerges as a critical consideration. While environmental justice traditionally focuses on the distribution of environmental hazards and resources [91], affordance justice concerns the distribution of action possibilities across urban space. Peripheral public spaces often manifest disablist geographies, that is, spatial configurations that systematically exclude certain bodies and modes of being [92]. This exclusion operates not through explicit prohibition but through spatial rhetorics that implicitly define who belongs and what actions are possible [93].

Empirical studies increasingly document these dynamics. Roe and Aspinall [94] demonstrate how restorative experiences in urban green spaces depend on complex interactions between environmental features and individual capacities. In particular, walking in rural settings produced greater affective and cognitive restoration and enhanced reflection on personal project planning for adults regardless of mental health status, with the poorest mental health group showing the largest benefits, whereas urban walks proved particularly restorative for those with poorer mental health, demonstrating that nature promotes restoration across mental health states and that outcomes vary by individual and environment. Paradoxically, however, those who could potentially benefit the most from such resources, such as marginalized groups with poor mental health conditions, are often those who are unable to access restorative benefits due to lack of availability, safety concerns or cultural barriers.

Another key point is that the microdynamics of public space design (bench placement, lighting, vegetation) profoundly impact older adults’ capacity to maintain independence and social connection. Coman et al. [95] show how poor affordances related to public seating such as inappropriate seat height, angle and compressibility, may severely limit elderly people’s capacity to inhabit these spaces while not being exposed to embarrassment, discomfort, and pain, as well as maintaining their motoric independence. Accordingly, Shishegar and Boubekri [96] found that a whole-day lighting scheme mimicking the natural light/dark cycle, with bright blue-enriched light in the morning (500 lx, 6500 K) tapering to dim yellowish light in the evening (100 lx, 2700 K), produced significantly greater improvements in mood and cognitive performance in older adults compared to a constant correlated color temperature lighting condition (LP: varying illuminance at 2700 K). Moreover, participants with higher baseline depression experienced even larger benefits under the natural cycle lighting scheme, suggesting its particular efficacy for enhancing well-being among depressed seniors. Also, Zhang et al. [97] study public space interactions among elderly women in Beijing communities, noting that they engage predominantly in family-centered activities such as chatting, strolling, and group exercises in small-scale neighborhood squares and green spaces, especially during morning and afternoon hours, favoring familiar and secure environments. Based on these insights, the authors propose that age-friendly urban spaces be shaped around principles of security, convenience, and comfort to provide safe, accessible, and comfortable settings that support diverse social needs across open, semi-closed, and closed public forms, ultimately strengthening social networks, enhancing well-being, and promoting community participation.

These findings show very clearly how for fragile or marginalized subject and communities affordances play a particularly crucial role in supporting livelihood and suggest that affordance poverty in peripheral public spaces contributes to environmental overload, that is, situations where environmental demands exceed individual capacities. As argued by Buffel et al. [98] with specific reference to elderly citizens, the focus must shift from defining, say, an ideal “age-friendly city” to evaluating how well cities actually accommodate older adults amid demographic shifts, the desire to age in place, and rapid urban change, revealing constraints such as physical and cognitive vulnerabilities, changing spatial use, and dependence on community ties alongside opportunities in social and cultural assets, neighborhood attachments, and benefits for marginalized residents such as migrant ones—in a nutshell, designing a dynamic, adaptive landscape of affordances that evolved with livelihood needs rather than a set of static principles reflecting abstract criteria of quality of life.

The temporal dimension of affordances also requires particular attention. As Anderson’s [99] time-geography demonstrated, and as more recent mobility studies confirm, space-time budgets uncover the temporal regularities underlying spatial behavior and social organization by offering a comprehensive depiction of individual activity routines and their constraints, emphasizing how access to urban affordances depends on complex coordination of movement through space and time [100]. Peripheral public spaces often suffer from territorial isolation with the consequent disconnection from the temporal rhythms and spatial flows that animate urban life [101]. This isolation means that even when physical affordances exist, they may remain inaccessible due to temporal constraints or safety concerns that vary by time of day.

5.2. The Architecture of Learned Helplessness: How Peripheral Spaces Train Bodies into Constraint

While peripheral urban areas lack affordances that support human flourishing, they do more than simply deprive. These spaces actively dismantle agency through a process of spatial conditioning that trains inhabitants into embodied patterns of self-limitation. Drawing on research into learned helplessness and embodied cognition, this section reveals how peripheral architectures function as behavioral training grounds where repeated encounters with hostile spatial configurations progressively extinguish normal patterns of exploration and engagement, replacing them with defensive, constrained movement repertoires that persist even when environmental conditions improve.

The concept of learned helplessness, originally identified through experiments where animals exposed to inescapable shocks eventually ceased attempting escape even when it became possible, provides a powerful lens for understanding spatial conditioning in peripheral areas [102]. In urban contexts, this manifests not through electric shocks but through what we could call “urban defeats”, namely repeated micro-failures of normal spatial engagement. A crumbling sidewalk that forces pedestrians into traffic; a park gate locked without explanation; a building entrance that proves inaccessible despite appearing open: each instance trains the body to expect disappointment and constraint rather than successful action completion, compounding with the others.

This training operates through embodied mechanisms. When spatial interactions repeatedly fail to achieve intended outcomes, the brain’s predictive systems undergo recalibration. The medial prefrontal cortex, which normally supports goal-directed behavior through top-down control, shows reduced activation in conditions of uncontrollability [103]. This neural signature of helplessness emerges not from single traumatic events but from cumulative exposure to environments where action-outcome contingencies prove unreliable. In peripheral spaces, where infrastructure maintenance is sporadic and spatial rules ambiguous, inhabitants experience chronic violations of expected environmental regularities.

The temporal progression from initial resistance to embodied resignation follows predictable patterns. Early encounters with architectural hostility provoke active problem-solving, as residents seek alternative routes, test different approaches, maintain hope for environmental improvement. However, sustained exposure to spaces that resist inhabitation produces mental fatigue and anti-social behavior [104]. The body learns, through repeated disappointment, to pre-emptively constrain its own possibilities and to live in a permanent hypervigilant mode. This manifests in observable changes: shortened stride lengths in areas with unreliable surfaces, defensive posturing when approaching ambiguous spaces, reduced exploratory behavior even in relatively benign environments [105].

Particularly insidious is the phenomenon of architectural gaslighting: spatial configurations that present false affordances [106]. A bench appears inviting but proves deliberately uncomfortable through hostile design; a plaza suggests public gathering but surveillance and policing make lingering unattractive and anxious; pathways seem to connect destinations but dead-end unexpectedly. These false affordances are hallmarks of unpredictable uncontrollability, the most potent condition for inducing helplessness [107]. Unlike consistently hostile environments that at least permit accurate prediction, spaces that unpredictably shift between invitation and rejection maximize psychological disruption.

The social dimension amplifies individual conditioning through embodied contagion. Mirror neuron systems that normally support learning through observation may become mechanisms for transmitting spatial constraint. When children observe adults navigating peripheral spaces with defensive, restricted movements, they internalize these patterns before developing their own spatial repertoires [108]. This creates what Bourdieu termed “habitus”: embodied dispositions that seem natural but reflect historically specific conditions [109]. In peripheral areas, the habitus of spatial constraint passes between bodies through unconscious mimicry, creating neighborhoods where limited movement becomes the unquestioned norm.

Research on emotional contagion reveals how spatial behaviors may spread through communities via automatic synchronization [110]. In well-functioning public spaces, this synchronization supports positive social coordination: the rhythmic flow of pedestrians, the collective ease of plaza users, etcetera. In peripheral areas, inhabitants unconsciously attune to ambient patterns of vigilance, hurry, and avoidance, which also reflect into psychophysiological features such as sleep quality [111] and are aggravated by more fragmented and distributed movement patterns to reach jobs and services [112].

Critical thresholds emerge where temporary adaptations crystallize into permanent embodied dispositions. Neuroplasticity research shows that repeated motor patterns create lasting changes in neural organization [113]. In peripheral dwellers, this might manifest as altered body schemas, i.e., fundamental changes in how the body perceives its capabilities and boundaries. These alterations may persist through behavioral momentum as established patterns continue even after environmental contingencies change [114].

The persistence of spatial conditioning manifests when inhabitants of peripheral areas encounter improved environments. Rather than immediately expanding their movement repertoires, they maintain defensive patterns acquired through years of architectural disappointment, which also prevent them from actively participating to the regenerative activities [115]. This behavioral inertia reflects deep embodied learning that resists conscious override [116]. Former residents of degraded neighborhoods may establish a form of symbiotic coexistence with urban dysfunctionality that may make them feel “out of place” in well-designed public spaces, as their bodies retain hypervigilance and spatial constraint despite improved safety [117].

Architecture thus operates as what Foucault might have recognized as a disciplinary apparatus, but one that functions through embodied habituation rather than explicit rules [118]. The genius of this system lies in its invisibility, as inhabitants come to police their own movements, maintaining spatial constraints without external enforcement. This self-limitation appears as personal preference or cultural difference, obscuring its origins in systematic spatial conditioning.

The concept of “motor pessimism” introduced earlier gains new significance in this context. Beyond immediate perceptual effects, architectural conditioning creates enduring changes in affordance detection, i.e., the capacity to perceive environmental possibilities [82]. Inhabitants of peripheral areas may suffer from measurable deficits in recognizing positive affordances even when present, as their perceptual systems have been tuned through experience to notice barriers rather than opportunities [119].

Recovery from spatial learned helplessness requires more than environmental improvement. Rebuilding agency demands structured experiences of environmental mastery, i.e., carefully calibrated challenges that restore confidence in action-outcome relationships [120,121]. In spatial terms, this might involve graduated rehabilitation: protected spaces where movement can be safely relearned, architectural sequences that reliably reward exploration, communities of practice where expansive movement patterns can be observed and mimicked in order to reduce stress and improve coping [122].

The implications challenge fundamental assumptions about urban inequality. Peripheral disadvantage operates not merely through resource deprivation but through the active production of diminished subjects, that is inhabitants whose very bodies have been trained into constraint. This embodied inequality persists across generations as children absorb parental movement patterns, creating inherited spatial trauma that no amount of individual resilience can fully overcome.

Understanding peripheral architecture as a training ground for helplessness reveals why conventional improvements often fail. Adding amenities to spaces that have systematically trained inhabitants into defensive disengagement does not automatically restore agency. This is why amenities in dysfunctional neighborhoods often remain unused or even vandalized by the inhabitants [123]. The bodies that might use these amenities have been shaped through years of architectural conditioning to expect disappointment, to pre-emptively limit engagement, to navigate space with learned constraint.

This analysis points toward interventions that address embodied conditioning directly. Beyond material improvements, peripheral areas need to be redesigned to progressively rebuild inhabitants’ confidence in their environment. This might involve temporary installations that guarantee positive outcomes, community events that collectively practice expansive movement, or careful architectural programming that ensures early spatial interactions succeed rather than disappoint.

The architecture of learned helplessness ultimately reveals how power operates through space at the most intimate level, shaping not just where bodies can go but how they learn to move, what they learn to expect, how they come to understand their own capabilities. In peripheral urban areas, this process systematically produces subjects whose embodied self-limitation maintains their marginalization more effectively than any external barrier. Recognizing this mechanism is essential for understanding how spatial inequality reproduces itself and why its effects persist even when circumstances change. Only by addressing the embodied dimensions of learned helplessness can we begin to imagine peripheral spaces that build rather than diminish human agency.

5.3. The Marginalized Living Stress Loop

The convergence of environmental stressors, affordance poverty, and architectural dis-affordance in peripheral urban areas creates self-reinforcing cycles that progressively undermine human flourishing. This process, which we can denote as the marginalized living stress loop, operates through the recursive interaction of biological stress systems, predictive processing mechanisms, and environmental constraints. Understanding this loop requires integrating insights from stress biology, predictive coding, and ecological psychology to reveal how marginal environments become progressively more disabling over time.

Contemporary stress research has moved beyond simple stimulus-response models to understand stress as an allostatic process, namely in terms of the adaptive mobilization of resources to maintain stability through change [124]. In peripheral urban environments, residents face various forms of harshness and unpredictability, as examples of environmental conditions that require constant vigilance and adaptation, systematically reshaping neural processing of, and responses to, environmental signals [125]. This chronic activation of stress response systems produces allostatic load: the cumulative physiological toll of repeated adaptation [126]. Importantly, allostatic load is not merely additive but interactive; multiple stressors synergize to produce effects greater than their sum [127].

The predictive processing framework reveals how chronic stress becomes embedded in perceptual and cognitive systems. Uncertainty itself functions as a profound stressor, taxing the brain’s predictive machinery [77]. In unpredictable peripheral environments, the constant generation of prediction errors creates anticipatory anxiety, embedding people in mental states where the expectation of threat becomes self-fulfilling [128]. This anticipatory stance narrows the perceptual field, biasing attention toward threat detection and amplifying emotional response at the expense of exploratory behavior, with clear negative consequences in terms of well-being and flourishing [129].

Crucially, the marginalized living stress loop operates through embodied mechanisms that link environmental exposure to neural adaptation. Tost et al. [32] offer valuable insights into how urban environments shape neural and behavioral changes related to stress coping and response in residents. Their central discovery is that urban exposure creates distinct patterns of brain alterations that reflect both heightened stress sensitivity and compromised stress regulation mechanisms. Current urban residence corresponds directly to increased amygdala activation during social stress challenges, suggesting that the degree of urbanization in one’s immediate environment enhances the alertness of neural threat response systems. This finding indicates that urban dwellers maintain a state of heightened stress vigilance compared to their rural counterparts. More concerning are the developmental effects of urban upbringing. Exposure to urban environments during the first 15 years of life associates with increased perigenual anterior cingulate cortex (pACC) activation and decreased gray matter volume in the prefrontal cortex. Urban upbringing also relates to reduced pACC volume specifically in males, who show disproportionately higher rates of schizophrenia incidence in urban contexts. These alterations occur in brain regions that are prime sites for structural and functional abnormalities in first-episode schizophrenia, suggesting that urban upbringing may alter the development of higher-order stress regulatory areas in ways that converge with schizophrenia pathophysiology. The mechanisms underlying these urban effects appear multifaceted. Urban environments serve as proxies for complex aggregations of psychosocial stressors, including fragmented social support networks, increased social isolation, wider socioeconomic disparities, higher crime rates, and repeated infringement of personal space that triggers evolutionarily conserved neural threat systems. The combination of close physical proximity with fragmented social support and greater adversity exposure represents a core component of urban risk. Likewise, Haddad et al. [130] show how urban upbringing affects brain structure in ways that may compromise stress management and coping abilities. They find a strong inverse correlation between early-life urbanicity and gray matter volume in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). The DLPFC is particularly important for stress management as it is highly sensitive to stress exposure, showing rapid stress-induced impairments of prefrontal cognitive functions and reductions in neural activity. Architectural changes in prefrontal dendrites have been repeatedly observed in rodent models exposed to chronic stress and have been directly linked to stress-induced deficits in cognition. This suggests that urban upbringing may fundamentally alter the brain’s capacity to handle stress effectively, and social fragmentation and lack of social bonding in urban environments may mediate the increased risk for mental health problems. The cumulative effect appears to be that urban upbringing creates lasting structural changes in brain regions essential for stress processing and emotional regulation, potentially compromising an individual’s lifelong capacity for effective stress management and coping. These neural adaptations are instances of biological embedding whereby environmental experiences become literally incorporated into biological systems [131].

The inflammatory dimension of chronic stress provides another pathway through which marginal environments become disabling. Psychological stress links to inflammatory processes through social signal transduction: specific molecular pathways causing social-environmental experiences to reflect into gene expression [132]. In peripheral urban areas, the combination of air pollution, noise exposure, and psychosocial stress creates inflammogenic environments that promote systemic inflammation and associated health risks [133].

Recent research on the gut–brain axis has brought to light additional mechanisms linking degraded environments to psychological distress. We have already mentioned how urban environments are characterized by reduced microbial diversity, which in turn disrupts immunoregulation and stress resilience. Messaoudi et al. [134] demonstrate that probiotic interventions can reduce psychological distress, suggesting a bidirectional communication between gut microbiota and neural stress systems. This emerging understanding of the psychobiome indicates that peripheral urban environments may undermine mental health through multiple biological pathways simultaneously [135,136,137].

The temporal dynamics of the stress loop deserve particular emphasis. Adverse experiences produce time-dependent biological alterations, with sensitive periods where environmental impacts are particularly profound [138]. In peripheral areas, the accumulation of stress exposure across the life course creates chains of risk, namely sequences where early disadvantage increases vulnerability to subsequent stressors [139]. This temporal accumulation means that the marginalized living stress loop intensifies over time, creating increasingly constrained possibilities for breaking free from cycles of disadvantage.

The epigenetic dimension provides perhaps the most troubling aspect of the stress loop. Environmental stress produces heritable changes in gene expression without altering DNA sequence [140]. McGowan et al. [141] demonstrate epigenetic differences in suicide victims with histories of childhood abuse, while Borghol et al. [142] show associations between childhood socioeconomic condition and DNA methylation patterns in adulthood. These findings suggest that the biological impacts of marginal environments may transmit across generations, creating biological memories of disadvantage [143].

Importantly, the marginalized living stress loop is not deterministic but probabilistic. Resilience research identifies protective factors that can buffer against environmental stress, including social support, meaning-making, and access to restorative experiences [144]. However, these protective factors are precisely what degraded peripheral environments often lack. The absence of green spaces eliminates opportunities for soft fascination, the effortless attention that promotes restoration [145]. Limited social infrastructure reduces access to stress buffering through social support [146]. This creates fundamental causes of health inequality: conditions that persistently associate with poor outcomes because they influence multiple risk factors and access to protective resources [147].

5.4. Agency, Resistance, and Environmental Transformation

While our analysis has emphasized how peripheral environments constrain human flourishing, it is crucial to recognize that residents are not passive victims but active agents who creatively resist, adapt to, and transform disabling spaces. The bio-cognitive framework must account for learning the city [148]. by means of the embodied practices through which urban dwellers develop skills for navigating and reshaping challenging environments. This learning represents a form of skilled practice [149], where repeated engagement with environmental constraints can paradoxically generate new capacities and possibilities [150].

Empirical studies document remarkable instances of such environmental transformation. In a comprehensive case study on urban resilience in Medellín, Colombia, Samper [151] shows how connections between individuals, communities, and the State influence resilience conditions in informal settlements that have historically served as battlegrounds for armed actors. Despite ongoing security challenges, individuals, communities, and public authorities have worked together to foster positive resilience that strengthens communities and builds connections with the State, ultimately contributing to violence reduction. These interactions between State security agents and community organizations create broader scopes of resilience than either could achieve independently. In this vein, Medellín’s city government implemented innovative security approaches that included investments in urban infrastructure to improve access to informal settlements and participatory budgeting initiatives, which unexpectedly enhanced security outcomes. These strategies were designed to bridge the physical and social distance between informal communities and formal state structures. Spatial conditions, particularly urban informality, emerge as crucial factors in understanding the complexity of armed actors who have historically used informal territories as urban battlefields. The study finds that violence concentrates in segregated areas due to social, economic, and spatial segregation, which isolates these neighborhoods from economic production and State institutions, creating environments where violence entrepreneurs can contest State legitimacy. State-community synergies are dynamic processes where each cycle produces new and enhanced resilience mechanisms. These interactions yield two critical outcomes: they provide the State with testing grounds for new security strategies that can be implemented city-wide, and they enhance the power of existing community governance institutions, giving them legitimacy to contest State-induced violence. These urban upgrading programs have enabled communities to view the State as a non-repressive actor, enhancing the legitimacy of public institutions. These projects, largely funded by municipal sources and requiring community acceptance, have led to advanced community participation in urban upgrading and created new, sustainable lines of communication between communities and the State.

State-community interactions fundamentally reshape urban affordance landscapes in Medellín’s informal settlements through several interconnected mechanisms that transform both physical and social accessibility. First, urban upgrading projects create new affordance landscapes by establishing “collective spaces” and public infrastructure that generate opportunities for community interaction. These physical interventions, such as metro stations, libraries, schools, community centers, do not merely add amenities; they signal forms of non-oppressive State-sponsored security that fundamentally alters what actions become possible within these territories. The infrastructure investments improve mobility, sanitation, and create spaces for public interactions, expanding the repertoire of activities residents can engage in. The affordance landscape therefore shifts dramatically when the State transforms itself from an oppressive force to a collaborative partner. Previously, residents described traveling to the city center as going “to Medellín,” reflecting their sense of exclusion from urban citizenship. State projects that focus on improving the conditions of the collective above and beyond those of individuals create sustained interaction opportunities, fundamentally altering the relational affordances between communities and formal governance structures. The creation of public spaces generates crucial security affordances by establishing neutral territories where individuals and groups of all kinds can meet face-to-face. These spaces become environments where security strategies are transferred across organizations and where crucial State-community informational exchanges happen. This transforms informal settlements from contested battlegrounds into spaces of collaborative governance. As a consequence, community organizations develop enhanced institutional capacities through these spatial transformations, creating stable institutional arrangements that improve local governance. On the other hand, these organizations can operate outside tight legal boundaries to better understand and negotiate with the criminal armed structures, representing new affordances for security governance that neither State nor community could achieve independently. This suggests that urban affordance landscapes in contexts of informality are not fixed but emerge through ongoing negotiations between multiple actors operating across legal and illegal boundaries.

Similarly, in Delhi’s informal settlements, residents engage in occupancy urbanism [152] where poor urban groups fundamentally transform urban affordance landscapes through autonomous political processes that appropriate institutional spaces and real estate surpluses beyond formal policy frameworks. Benjamin shows how these practices make land highly politicized and socially embedded local government circuits help shape public investments and regulation, generating an interconnected economy of small firm production and retail. This occupancy urbanism enables poor communities to divert potential profits from globalized financial institutions and large developers into small business economies, while simultaneously fueling autonomous political processes at the municipal level that subvert high-end infrastructure and mega projects. The implications for urban affordances are profound: rather than cities functioning as passive stage sets acted upon by macro-economic forces, occupancy urbanism creates fluid, open-ended political spaces where land incrementally settled by communities becomes a conceptual entry point for revealing extensive forms of political consciousness that resist neoliberal globalization. These processes fundamentally challenge the legitimacy of master planning and “planned development” narratives by creating alternative urban affordances rooted in popular political consciousness, complex alliances with municipal bureaucracy, and territorial claims that predate formal planning interventions. The research suggests that urban affordances in the Global South emerge not through top-down policy implementation but through bottom-up appropriation of institutional and spatial resources that create new possibilities for economic activity, political participation, and territorial control that remain autonomous from state disciplinary mechanisms.

These transformative practices operate through mechanisms that align with our bio-cognitive framework. When residents collectively alter their environments, they engage in distributed cognition [153], harnessing collective problem-solving strategies that extend across multiple minds and environmental structures. For instance, community gardens in Detroit’s abandoned lots not only provide food but create “therapeutic landscapes” [154] that measurably reduce stress biomarkers while fostering collective efficacy. On a different but complementary level, the Gezi Park protests in Istanbul demonstrated how reclaiming public space can rapidly transform stress-inducing environments into “spaces of hope” [155] that generate new forms of political subjectivity.

The neuroscience of environmental enrichment provides biological support for understanding how transformed environments can reverse some effects of chronic stress and lay the basis for collective agency. Enriched environments do not simply improve quality of life but also boost cognitive resources. They promote neurogenesis and synaptic plasticity even in adulthood [156], while physical activity enabled by free, unconstrained navigation of stimulating environments enhances cognitive function [157]. When peripheral communities create spaces for sports, arts, or collective gathering, they may literally reshape neural architectures kept at bay by chronic stress. This suggests that community-led environmental interventions operate not merely at social or political levels but through deep biological mechanisms. The following

Table 1. Bio-Cognitive Dynamics of Marginal Contexts.

Cluster—Marginal Context	Urban Examples	Bio-Cognitive Mechanisms	Outcomes
Environmental Deprivation & Toxicity	Peripheral neighborhoods lacking green/public spaces, infrastructures; Polluted and noisy peripheries, insecure environments; Industrial peripheries, heavy traffic, sensory overload.	Affordance Injustice Chronic Stress & Inflammation Toxic Environments & Cognitive Dysfunction	Reduced capacity for embodied engagement, diminished agency, exclusion from urban life Health deterioration, mental illness vulnerability, reduced resilience Cognitive decline, attentional deficits, emotional dysregulation
Spatial Fragmentation & Disorientation	Degraded housing blocks, fragmented architectures, barriers, incoherent circulation; Urban layouts with dead spaces, cul-de-sacs, fragmented street networks; Marginal spaces with degraded affordances and blocked body–environment coupling;	Learned Helplessness & Motor Pessimism Architectural Dis-affordance Spatial Disorientation & Predictive Failure	Internalization of constraint, predictive pessimism, restricted agency Cognitive stress, uncertainty, disorientation in navigation Breakdown of embodied meaning-making, restricted adaptation
Temporal & Social Marginalization	Long commuting times, temporal fragmentation, territorial stigma; Families living in precarious, marginalized environments across generations.	Social Desynchronization & Embodied Alienation Epigenetic Transmission of Stress	Embodied alienation, identity erosion, reduced social participation Intergenerational transmission of vulnerability, biological reproduction of marginality
Control & Stigmatization	Over-surveilled districts, censorship of behaviors and bodies	Neurocognitive Stress from Hyper-Surveillance	Heightened vigilance, anxiety, reduced trust, impaired well-being

synthesizes the urban contexts exemplified in the Discussion, the corresponding bio-cognitive mechanisms, and their outcomes on urban space and subjectivity. It highlights how degraded environments produce disabling effects.

6. Conclusions

This paper has advanced a novel bio-cognitive framework for understanding how urban peripheries function as disabling environments that systematically undermine human flourishing. Our contribution is primarily theoretical: we have sought to consolidate insights from neuroscience, cognitive science, and urban studies into a coherent model. This conceptual synthesis lays the groundwork for future empirical investigations and practical applications, encouraging cross-disciplinary dialogue on how to transform disabling environments into enabling ones. By integrating insights from predictive processing, embodied cognition, and stress biology, we have argued how marginal urban spaces operate through mechanisms that transcend traditional sociological or geographic analyses. The theoretical synthesis presented here implies that peripheral environments do not merely correlate with disadvantage but actively produce it through interconnected disruptions to cognitive, physiological, and behavioral systems.

Our analysis reveals three critical insights that advance both theoretical understanding and practical intervention. First, we have shown how the concept of “affordance poverty” in peripheral public spaces constrains not only immediate action possibilities but also the developmental trajectories through which individuals build capacities for effective engagement with their environments. This extends Gibson’s [82] ecological psychology into questions of spatial justice, revealing how unequal distributions of affordances create fundamental inequalities in human potential. Second, we have demonstrated how architectural configurations in peripheral areas produce “architectural dis-affordance” in terms of spatial arrangements that actively impede sensorimotor coupling and thereby undermine agency at pre-reflective levels. This finding challenges conventional approaches to urban design that focus primarily on functional provision while neglecting the embodied dimensions of spatial experience. Third, we have identified the “marginalized living stress loop” as a recursive process through which environmental stressors, cognitive overload, and biological dysregulation interact to create self-reinforcing cycles of disadvantage that can persist across generations, likely also through epigenetic mechanisms. The navigation of peripheral space calls for wayfinding, an embodied practice of moving through environments that becomes increasingly taxing when spatial legibility decreases [149]. This navigational burden represents what we propose to call “cognitive load inequality”, i.e., the differential mental effort required to accomplish basic urban tasks across different spatial contexts. When combined with affective atmospheres of neglect and abandonment, peripheral spaces generate embodied experiences of exhaustion and constraint [158]. These findings carry profound implications for urban policy and planning. The bio-cognitive perspective reveals that addressing peripheral disadvantage requires more than improved service provision or infrastructure investment, though these clearly remain necessary. Instead, effective interventions must engage with the deep structures through which environments shape consciousness, capability, and health. This suggests several concrete directions for policy innovation. Urban design must move beyond minimal functionality to create “rich landscapes of affordances” [84] that invite diverse forms of engagement and support human development across the life course. Planning processes need to incorporate understanding of how spatial configurations impact stress physiology and cognitive load, using insights from environmental neuroscience to create restorative rather than depleting environments. Perhaps most fundamentally, policy frameworks must recognize that spatial justice involves not merely equal access to resources but equitable distribution of the environmental conditions that enable human flourishing.

The limitations of our analysis point toward crucial areas for future research. While we have focused primarily on how environments disable, further work must elaborate the conditions under which marginal spaces can become sites of resilience, creativity, and collective agency. Future research should further expand its engagement with diverse global contexts where peripherality takes different forms than in well-studies Western urban contexts, and where indigenous or alternative knowledge systems offer different frameworks for understanding human–environment relations. Additionally, while we have emphasized universal mechanisms of embodiment and cognition, future work must better account for how these mechanisms interact with cultural difference, historical trauma, and structural oppression to produce varied experiences of peripheral life.

The bio-cognitive framework also opens new methodological possibilities. Traditional urban research methods that rely on surveys or interviews capture only the explicit dimensions of spatial experience which have already found a full-fledged narrative form. The embodied and pre-reflective processes we have identified require new approaches that can access implicit bodily responses, track physiological markers in everyday settings, and map the micro-dynamics of person-environment interaction. Developments in mobile sensing, ambulatory neuroscience, and ecological momentary assessment offer promising avenues for capturing the lived experience of peripheral spaces with unprecedented granularity.

The ethical implications of our analysis also demand careful consideration. By revealing how environments shape fundamental human capacities, we risk reinforcing those deterministic narratives that pathologize peripheral residents or justify further marginalization. Against such interpretations, we emphasize that the bio-cognitive perspective reveals not inherent deficits but systematic injustices under the form of spatial arrangements that deny certain populations the environmental conditions necessary for thriving. This understanding should motivate not paternalism but structural transformation.

The urgency of addressing peripheral disadvantage has only intensified in the wake of global crises that disproportionately impact marginal urban areas. Climate change threatens to exacerbate existing vulnerabilities through heat island effects, flooding, and resource scarcity [159]. The COVID-19 pandemic revealed how spatial inequalities translate into differential exposure to health risks and unequal access to spaces for restoration and social distancing [160]. Economic disruptions continue to concentrate disadvantage in peripheral areas while accelerating processes of gentrification that displace long-term residents. These converging crises make the development of new frameworks for understanding and addressing peripheral disadvantage not merely an academic exercise but an urgent practical necessity.

Looking forward, the bio-cognitive perspective suggests that creating just cities requires fundamental reimagination of how we conceptualize the relationship between humans and urban environments. Rather than viewing cities as containers for human activity, we must understand them as extended cognitive-biological systems in which human potential is either nurtured or constrained. This shift demands new forms of urban practice that are simultaneously more scientific and, in particular, grounded in a rigorous understanding of human biology and cognition, and more humanistic, being centered on creating conditions for diverse forms of human flourishing.

The ultimate promise of the bio-cognitive framework lies in its potential to ground arguments for spatial justice not in abstract principles but in concrete understanding of human needs and capacities. By revealing how unjust spatial arrangements literally diminish human potential through biological and cognitive mechanisms, this perspective provides powerful tools for advocacy and intervention. It suggests that the right to the city [161] must be understood not merely as access to urban resources but as access to environmental conditions that support the full development of human capabilities.

In closing, we return to the fundamental insight that motivated this inquiry: urban peripheries are not merely sites of disadvantage but active producers of disability through their interaction with embodied human capacities. This understanding transforms peripheral improvement from a mere matter of justice into a recognition of the profound ethical obligation to create environments that support rather than diminish human potential. As cities worldwide grapple with deepening inequalities and converging crises, the bio-cognitive perspective offers both analytical tools and moral clarity for the urgent work of creating truly inclusive urban futures. The question is not whether we can afford to transform peripheral urban environments, but whether we can afford not to, for in these spaces, the possibilities for human flourishing are either nurtured or foreclosed, with consequences that ripple across generations and throughout the whole social fabric of our cities.