Landscape and Health: Connecting Psychology, Aesthetics, and Philosophy through the Concept of Affordance

Abstract

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.

Landscape: from common good to human right

“…One of the results of the analysis carried out in this paper is that people can be entitled to a right of landscape, and it may be considered as a human right. Given the correlation between landscape and health, both physical and psychological, which has been shown in many studies (for a review see Menatti and Casado 2016), I argued that every human being is entitled to the right to a culturally rich and healthy landscape. The right to landscape, even if it is not recognised as a right per se, is already implicated in many international right laws (Strecker 2011, 57).…”

“…This attempt at linking the ecology of perception with a cultural theory of landscape conceives of landscape as the product of the interaction between culture and the affordances of a place. It is exemplified in the idea of a 648 Laura Menatti processual landscape (see Menatti and Casado 2016). Through this theoretical framework, landscape is considered as a process.…”

“…In conclusion, the possibility to include the forms of management and the question of rights in the definition of landscape derives from the consideration that landscape is not just a beautiful scene, it is not confined to its scenery-based characteristics, but is is a complex process (see Menatti and Casado 2016), in which the human-beings and the environment are mutually defined.…”

Defending Oneself From Tourists: The Counter-Environmental Bubble

“…In such a sense, place attachment is based on the processual landscape of Menatti and Casado da Rocha (2016). …”

From landscape resources to landscape commons: focussing on the non-utility values of landscape

“…This extension is also based on the ecological approach to perception formulated by James Gibson (1979) using the concept of affordance. The latter is used by several authors today (for example Heft 2010;Rietveld and Kiverstein 2014;Menatti and Casado da Rocha 2016) to express the cultural and social dimension of the landscape with its ecological basis. Hence it enables the reconciliation of the cultural and phenomenological approaches to landscape conceived as a processual reality.…”