Healthscapes

The neologism Healthscapes, combining the words “health” and “landscapes”, brings together a wide range of issues related to how landscapes, in different ways, affect the wellbeing and health of living beings.

Consider, for example – and not only from an anthropocentric perspective – the healthiness or toxicity of air, water and soil, or the presence or absence, in cities, of spaces accessible to everyone for physical exercise and social interaction, for growing one’s own food or, simply, for being in contact with nature and enjoying its widely documented physical and psychological benefits.

Places also affect health when their condition turns them into sources of disorientation in the face of the trivialization of the landscape and of real malaise due to the degradation of environments in which those who live there no longer recognise themselves.

At a planetary level, we can consider the effects of climate on the health of living beings, and the impacts its variations have had throughout the history of life on Earth: all evidence of the connection between the health of the planet and that of its inhabitants, encapsulated perfectly by the One Health concept. This “single” health is being put under intense strain – especially for the younger generations – also by the psychological consequences of being aware of the disastrous effects that human behaviour is having on the ecological emergency (eco-anxiety).

Within this framework, landscape design, at various scales – beginning with one’s own garden – plays a decisive role in responsibly shaping places dedicated to the care of our bodies and minds and, more fundamentally, in the creation of urban environments conceived for individual and collective wellbeing, inclusive of the animal, plant and mineral worlds, and oriented towards the radical rethinking that the current environmental crisis demands.