Therapeutic Landscapes as Health Promoting Places

The Elephant Vanishes: Impact of human–elephant conflict on people's wellbeing

“…Such spaces are articulated through the concept of 'therapeutic landscapes' (Conradson, 2005;Williams, 2010b). The authors of this paper argue that in addition to shaping landscapes as therapeutic and health-promoting, asymmetric interactions between people, elephants and institutions as revealed through this research, generate landscapes that are actively 'counter-therapeutic' to both people and elephants.…”

“…Both people and wildlife are vilified (Wilbert, 2006). The domino effects that result from human-elephant conflict disrupt the development of personal skills and strong community action, factors that are essential to fashioning health-enhancing spaces (Williams, 2010b). Further, the clinic by shrinking its gaze, edits out the ecological context of suffering and limits the potential for creating supportive environments.…”

“…The proposition, that landscapes can be counter-therapeutic, enriches the growing scholarship on the impact of place and ecology on health. The authors argue that the concept of counter-therapeutic landscapes differs from the more passive notion of 'non-therapeutic' landscapes (Williams, 2010b), as it actively scapes spaces that generate morbidity.…”

Blue space geographies: Enabling health in place

“…An essential aspect of the cultural turn saw health geography shift from biomedical towards social models (Kearns, 1993). Health promotion, developed strategically through the Ottawa Charter (WHO World Health Organisation, 1986), extended that narrow biomedical approach and recognised broader and more critical holistic understandings of health (Williams, 2010;Lovell et al, 2014). Social, political and socio-ecological models of health and disease have been widely adopted that additionally focus attention on place (Illich, 1976;White, 1981;Kearns and Moon, 2002).…”

Urban-indigenous therapeutic landscapes: A case study of an urban American Indian health organization

“…Since the introduction of the construct 20 years ago (Gesler, 1992), therapeutic landscapes have been conceptualized in terms of treatment and prevention of illness as well as health enhancement (Conradson, 2005;Williams, 2010b). According to Williams (2010b), the burgeoning therapeutic landscapes literature has been predominantly concerned with three domains: physical spaces associated with health (e.g., Gesler, 1996), formal sites of health care delivery (e.g., Andrews, 2004), and sites that are specific to marginalized groups and special populations (e.g., Wilson, 2003).…”