Abstract
Recent rapid urbanization is associated with increased stress and reduced sense of well-being. The environment where one lives, works, learns and plays affects us. Overwhelming research now links nature contact with positive mental and physical health and social outcomes. Healing landscapes provide the necessary nature contact. By combining new scientific evidence and ancient intuitive wisdom the potential of a healing landscape can be realised. Evidence-based therapeutic landscapes impact diverse outcomes, including heart disease, dementia and depression. Co-benefits of design for well-being accumulate upstream and down. Addressing socio-environmental factors through design interventions leads to better health outcomes, faster. Standard design practice no longer matches the multi-disciplinary theories that intersect at well-being, requiring a focused, new design culture to offset and mitigate impacts of urbanization. This chapter reviews the evidence to show well-being as a sound principle of design, to create a design paradigm on which designers are prepared to act.
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Souter-Brown, G. (2023). Urban Health: Applying Therapeutic Landscape Design. Methods, Design Strategies and New Scientific Approaches. In: Capolongo, S., Botta, M., Rebecchi, A. (eds) Therapeutic Landscape Design. SpringerBriefs in Applied Sciences and Technology(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09439-2_1
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