In this paper we address a frontier topic in the humanities, namely how the cultural and natural construction that we call landscape affects well-being and health. Following an updated review of evidence-based literature in the fields of medicine, psychology, and architecture, we propose a new theoretical framework called “processual landscape,” which is able to explain both the health-landscape and the medical agency-structure binomial pairs. We provide a twofold analysis of landscape, from both the cultural and naturalist points of view: in order to take into account its relationship with health, the definition of landscape as a cultural product needs to be broadened through naturalization, grounding it in the scientific domain. Landscape cannot be distinguished from the ecological environment. For this reason, we naturalize the idea of landscape through the notion of affordance and Gibson’s ecological psychology. In doing so, we stress the role of agency in the theory of perception and the health-landscape relationship. Since it is the result of continuous and co-creational interaction between the cultural agent, the biological agent and the affordances offered to the landscape perceiver, the processual landscape is, in our opinion, the most comprehensive framework for explaining the health-landscape relationship. The consequences of our framework are not only theoretical, but ethical also: insofar as health is greatly affected by landscape, this construction represents something more than just part of our heritage or a place to be preserved for the aesthetic pleasure it provides. Rather, we can talk about the right to landscape as something intrinsically linked to the well-being of present and future generations.

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This paper analyses how the current concept of landscape, which overcomes a scenery-based characterisation and a confinement to classical aesthetics and art, relates to the notions of the common good, commons and commons pool resources (CPRs). I consider landscape as a complex process in which human beings (with their history and culture) and their environment are mutually defined. On the basis of this approach to landscape studies, and by considering contemporary documents on landscape (i.e. the European Landscape Convention, the Latin American Initiative for Landscape and the UNESCO Florence Declaration) I analyse the similarity between the notion of landscape and the concepts of common good, the management of commons and the commons pool resources institutions. Through theoretical research supported by practical examples (e.g. community gardens) I argue that landscape can be defined as a common good, can include the commons, and the collective management of lands and common pool resources institutions. The paper relies on an excursus through the theories and legal documents, with a specific regard to the theoretical foundations of these different notions. The analysis carried out in the paper leads, in the end, to the possibility of defining the 'right to landscape'. Even if the concept is new in the literature, and a right to landscape is not recognised as a right per se, it is already implicated and studied in many international rights laws. Three approaches to landscape as a right have been distinguished: the right to landscape as a perceived landscape (a collective right), as a right to the environment and a right for addressing human rights. I integrated these approaches by arguing that landscape is a domain in relation to which human rights can be claimed, and that landscape can be considered as a right to which human beings are entitled.