Abstract for: Behavioral Leverage Over Infrastructure: Feedback Dynamics in Urban Environmental Comfort

Urban environmental comfort (UEC) encompasses thermal conditions, air quality, soundscape, spatial morphology, and socio-behavioral dynamics, yet prevailing frameworks treat these dimensions in isolation or reduce them to thermal comfort alone. This fragmentation leaves feedback mechanisms linking human behavior, spatial configuration, and environmental stressors unmodeled, and non-thermal policy leverage unquantified, a classic policy resistance problem in urban planning. A causal loop diagram (CLD) integrating three coupled subsystems, Spatial Context, Human-Social Dynamics, and Air Quality-Soundscape, was developed in Vensim through systematic literature review (n=72 sources, 2014–2023). The DPSIR framework structured causal pathways across subsystems. A leverage index was computed for each loop category based on cross-subsystem integration rates and state variable modulation. Of 113 feedback loops identified (68 reinforcing, 45 balancing), 47 cluster within the Human-Social subsystem, and 26 of 31 cross-subsystem loops are reinforcing. Behavioral interventions generate higher systemic leverage than infrastructure-only approaches. The dominant R1 loop is suppressed by a cross-subsystem B1 loop through pollution exposure, which is attenuated by green infrastructure, a policy-accessible dominance shift. This is the first multi-stressor UEC CLD structured around three coupled subsystems and validated against the SD-DPSIR integration principle, providing an SD-native conceptual architecture for urban DSS development. The counterintuitive finding that behavioral and participatory interventions outperform infrastructure investment reframes urban planning priorities. Quantification through stock-and-flow simulation across parameterized scenarios is the critical next step for policy operationalization. AI revising assistance in terms of language