Innovative Approaches to Researching Landscape and Health

Open Space: People Space 2

Catharine Ward Thompson, Peter Aspinall, Simon Bell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136988363
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Our modern lifestyles often cause us to spend more time sitting behind a desk than being active outdoors. At the same time, our general health is deteriorating. The alarming rise in obesity, sedentary lifestyles and mental ill-health across the developed world has resulted in an urgent desire to understand how the environment, in particular the outdoor environment, influences health.

This book addresses the growing interest in salutogenic environments - landscapes that support healthy lifestyles and promote well-being – and the need for innovative methods to research them. Drawing on multidisciplinary approaches from environmental psychology, health sciences, urban design, landscape architecture and horticulture, it questions how future research can be better targeted to inform policy and practice in health promotion.

The contributing authors are international experts in researching landscape, health and the environment, drawn together by OPENspace directors who have a unique reputation in this area. This pioneering book is a valuable resource for postgraduate researchers and practitioners in both environmental and health studies.

1
Introduction

Catharine Ward Thompson, Simon Bell and Peter Aspinall

It is a strange paradox that the population of developed countries is living longer than ever before and life expectancy, at least for the moment, continues to rise, yet at the same time we are suffering from a serious range of health problems, especially associated with diet, lack of exercise and poor mental health. This is a result of our changing lifestyles, where most people are more sedentary than in earlier times yet consume a similar or greater level of calories, where modern living places different stresses on us as a result of changing family structures, travel demands and work–life balances, for example. Obesity levels are increasing and, with them, cardiovascular diseases and diabetes, while depression, especially among young people, is being diagnosed more than ever before. In a recent advertising campaign by the British Heart Foundation, a poster shows young boys reclining on a sofa surrounded by soft drink bottles and confectionery wrappers, with each one either talking on their mobile phone, watching television or playing with a computer game. The caption beneath reads, ‘The early signs of heart disease’. This image is both hard-hitting and accurate and shows how the risks associated with this modern lifestyle are not just affecting adults or older people but start with the young.

If we compare this lifestyle with that of 30 or 40 years ago, we can see that people spend less time outdoors doing activities that help to keep them fit and in good health. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the public health issues were infectious and communicable diseases or pollution, dangerous working conditions and poor housing, which combined to kill many thousands of people each year. Now that we have largely conquered these (at least in the developed world) through clean water, better drainage, pollution control, health and safety regulations, planning of building works and public parks, as well as mass vaccination programmes and better and more effective medical treatment, a new set of challenges faces the public health arena. In the same way that the environment had a major effect on the public health issues of bygone days, so it has an effect on the modern range of concerns, due to the way we have retreated indoors and into a reliance on motorised transport.

While many of the issues can be treated, at least to some extent, by medical interventions and health campaigns – diet advice and treatment to reduce obesity, drugs to reduce stress and alleviate depression, promotion of gyms to increase levels of exercise, for example – there seems to be something missing in the equation. This, we suggest, is the experience of being outdoors, engaged in activities and within an environment that can potentially provide multiple benefits.

Many people would agree with the notion that access to fresh air and green space or nature can contribute not only to a healthy body but also to a general sense of well-being and a richer engagement with place. However, there is much that we don’t understand about how outdoor environments can make a difference to health. What exactly is it about the landscape that brings benefits, and in what ways? What are the characteristics or qualities of green space necessary to make a difference in terms of people’s health for different ages or social groups? Whether we can adequately identify, describe and quantify these characteristics, and translate an understanding of them into practical policies which can be implemented by landscape architects and health professionals, is a matter of contention and debate.

This book arose out of the growing interest in salutogenic environments – environments that support healthy lifestyles and promote well-being – and the need in particular for appropriate methods to research the links between outdoor environments and health (taking the broad, World Health Organization (WHO) definition of health to include physical, mental and social well-being). In this context, the editors set out to explore the challenges that are thrown up in researching the relationship between landscape and health or quality of life and, in particular, the difficulties in understanding the mechanisms and patterns behind any such relationship. We are particularly interested in going beyond the conventional theoretical and methodological approaches that have been used to date, to explore what new approaches might offer, and to provide a tighter theoretical framework as well as examples of new methodological applications and implications in practice. For this reason, we invited international experts who have led the way with new conceptualisations and approaches to contribute their insights from diverse perspectives. The book thus brings together views from a range of disciplines to show how research on people’s engagement with the environment can illuminate links between landscape and health in different ways.

Since the book’s theme is about salutogenic environments, it has a focus on positive relationships between the outdoor environment and health, rather than on pollutants and environmental risk factors, although inevitably the latter are also implicated to some extent in understanding what benefits the landscape may confer on quality of life. We have taken a broad definition of the landscape, recognising that it includes urban and rural contexts, public open space and private gardens, urban streets, parks and squares, as well as woodlands and countryside green and natural spaces, including rivers and coastal landscapes. It also focuses on the multidisciplinary nature of the subject, where research and its associated practice must take into account both the person (as an individual and as part of a larger population) and the environment (as the neighbourhood where an individual or community lives as part of a larger city or region), using a range of approaches coming from the world of public health, environmental psychology, urban design, landscape architecture and horticulture, to name just some of the disciplines represented here.

The choice of authors for the book and the range of approaches and themes – theoretical, methodological and practical – reflect several factors of relevance. The first is the nature of the evidence acceptable to the different arenas of planning, public health and medicine and the robustness of the methodologies being used. The quality hurdle for health research has a high bar, and one with which researchers from a non-medical background may be unfamiliar, so that developing and supporting research excellence is vital. The second factor is the need to be able not only to demonstrate the links between nature or landscape and health, but also to begin to identify the causal factors so as to maximise the benefits. The third factor is the need for a better theoretical underpinning to the largely empirical evidence base.

The book is organised into four parts, plus conclusions, although there are many themes that span several parts and chapters. One of the key theories that runs through the book is that of ‘affordance’, as initially developed by James Gibson in the 1970s, linking environment and human behaviour, or opportunities for action. In Part I, Harry Heft’s opening chapter sets out the basis for this theory in the psychology of environmental perception and goes on to articulate the value of such a conceptualisation for researchers today. He emphasises the relational importance of the concept, arguing for an understanding of environmental perception that links the properties of the environment to their functional significance for an individual. He highlights the value of affordance in offering a dynamic understanding of how environments are experienced by users in the course of action, of key relevance to investigating healthy activity in the landscape. In Chapter 2, Robin Moore and Nilda Cosco take up the theme of affordance and apply it to children’s environments, reflecting Eleanor Gibson’s contribution to the concept through her work on infant and child development. They also draw on Roger Barker’s theoretical framework of ‘behaviour settings’ as the basis for their detailed exposition of behaviour mapping as a practical research tool. They show how such tools can be used to identify specific environmental features associated with higher levels of physical activity, or of imaginative engagement, through children’s play. Together, these first two chapters illustrate the value of a strong theoretical basis to inform practical tools for undertaking research on the links between landscape and healthy behaviour.

Part II of the book presents evidence on the relationship between landscape and health, moving from an overview of evidence for the different ways that landscape, especially green space, might benefit health at a population level, to a detailed exposition of one landscape and the evidence of its therapeutic effects on a very particular group of people. In Chapter 3, Sjerp de Vries examines four categories of potential mechanisms linking ‘nearby nature’ and health. ‘Nearby nature’ encompasses green space and natural or semi-natural environments near to people’s everyday living and work places. He looks at the evidence for such environments offering health benefits through mitigating air pollution, reducing stress, stimulating physical activity and facilitating social contact, and considers what the implications might be for landscape design. In Chapter 4, Fiona Bull, Billie Giles-Corti and Lisa Wood take the theme of landscape and physical activity further, outlining the many methodological issues and challenges in undertaking and interpreting research on this theme. They argue that an understanding of environments that support and encourage physical activity provides a strong basis for a population-level approach to health and this, in turn, should inform landscape and urban design. By contrast, in Chapter 5, Patrik Grahn, Carina Tenngart Ivarsson, Ulrika Stigsdotter and Inga-Lena Bengtsson explore links between landscape and health through stress reduction, and take a particular therapeutic garden and individual responses as the focus of their research. The value of action research is highlighted in this chapter, showing how a longitudinal programme of therapy within a landscape setting can contribute to knowledge and theory building, informing both our understanding of links between natural environments and well-being, and practical considerations for environmental design.

Part III explores different perspectives on methodology, highlighting approaches whose potential for researching landscape and health may not have been fully realised to date. In Chapter 6, Brian Little’s work on personal projects provides a valuable framework for understanding, at the individual level, how the environment may support or thwart plans and opportunities for action. He underlines the importance of understanding differences in the ‘fit’ between environment and each person’s needs and desires, their personal projects, and offers a method to help illuminate the motivations behind affordances for certain individuals or groups. This offers insights into the diversity of landscape experience that may be necessary in salutogenic environments and underlines the need for choice in the environments of daily life. Peter Aspinall, in Chapter 7, takes the theme of choice and examines the difficulties in researching people’s preferences and choice in meaningful ways. He then illustrates the value of conjoint analysis as a method to address some of these challenges through examples relating to choice in housing and in local park planning and design, showing how different subgroups’ preferences can also be elicited.

Part IV looks at applications of research methods in practice, with contributions from architecture and landscape architecture on themes of spatial structure, landscape design and landscape use. Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson were responsible for one of the great innovations in analytical tools for understanding spatial patterns of human use in the built environment – space syntax – developed at University College London in the 1970s. Ruth Conroy Dalton and Julienne Hanson, in Chapter 8, take the concepts and applications of space syntax, as they have been developed and refined in the intervening years, and explore their use in a more natural landscape context. They identify the challenges involved and argue for interdisciplinary collaboration to resolve ways of using space syntax to quantify the experience of being in and moving through the landscape. In Chapter 9, Catharine Ward Thompson brings a landscape architect’s perspective to such challenges, pointing to the particular qualities of the landscape and people’s engagement with it that must be taken into account. She illustrates how George Kelly’s personal construct theory and Brian Little’s personal projects approach can illuminate understanding of relationships between neighbourhood environments and older people’s well-being. She highlights the challenges in assessing the ‘walkability’ of built or natural environments and illustrates new approaches and tools developed at OPENspace research centre to assess how aspects of the landscape may support or inhibit use.

In the Conclusion, Simon Bell takes an overview of the book’s content and summarises the debates, challenges and opportunities identified. He makes a personal assessment of the key issues and possible ways forward for researching the relationships between landscape and health in the future. He highlights the need for a strengthening of the theoretical ground on which such research is based and for more work to understand the mechanisms behind any observed relationships. He also points to the opportunities that computer-based technologies such as GIS and virtual environment modelling offer in taking the research forward.

This book offers a basis for beginning to address the challenges of innovative research in landscape and health. The theories presented offer new insights across disciplines and fields of action with real opportunity for synergistic aligning of methodologies and, just as important, illuminating interpretation of results. Heft’s development of affordance theory has already inspired a number of researchers working in environment–behaviour landscape studies, as chapters by Moore and Cosco, Grahn and colleagues and Bell illustrate, since the transactional relationship between person and environment is at the core of the theory of affordance. Brian Little’s work helps us understand the motivations behind affordances and why the relationships between individuals, their projects and their environment may lead to stress or to restoration. Both Heft and Little remind us that these relationships are idiosyncratic and therefore the same place can have multiple meanings and, indeed, be experienced as a different place by different people. Heft, de Vries and Grahn and colleagues discuss theories about the evolutionary basis for perception of and engagement with the landscape, which may have an increasing role to play in our understanding of the therapeutic benefits of the landscape. This is especially important for a world population increasingly characterised by poor mental health and stress as well as physical inactivity.

Moore and Cosco underline how we need to understand and value a real, embodied experience of the physical environment for children today, since the omnipresent virtual world of computers and television increasingly offers the disengaged ‘looking at’ experience of life that Heft decries. Ecological models of engagement with the world are part of their approach and are, indeed, a common theme discussed by many authors in this book. Ward Thompson discusses the range of scales with which landscape researchers need to engage, and Bull and colleagues show how socio-ecological models have reinvigorated research approaches to environment and health relationships, with multilevel modelling increasing the sophistication of such approaches. These techniques highlight the importance of examining a range of scales and socio-spatial contexts if environmental design is to be effective in supporting human well-being.

Addressing the need to deliver evidence or guidance that planners and designers will use, Aspinall offers practical approaches to understanding how changes in the environment will impact on people’s choice, with particular emphasis on choice relating to action, rather than simply attitudinal change. The links with affordance and with personal projects are evident here, as in the work of Grahn and colleagues and Ward Thompson’s research. Conroy Dalton and Hanson’s research builds on the theories of space syntax towards developing better predictive tools for understanding patterns of landscape use and here, too, they emphasise the contribution from environmental psychology (including affordance theory) as well as practical methods from landscape architecture (including new information technologies highlighted by Bell) to record and characterise the landscape.

Ultimately, we are interested in how researchers can provide and present good evidence that is useful for policy makers and practitioners. The contributors have highlighted many fruitful opportunities for developing and enhancing research on landscape and health so that planning, design and management interventions in landscapes of the future can afford better opportunities for human well-being. This reflective examination of the field should help the research, policy and practice community in framing, commissioning, undertaking and applying the results of research in a more organised and focused way. In particular we hope that researchers working in the field will find the discussion within these pages of help in framing research questions and developing appropriate methods. We suggest there is much that landscape design, planning and management can offer for well-being, not only to support health and avoid illness but, further, to provide choice and options for human flourishing through support for individual fulfilment and meaningful engagement with the world. We hope that this book will inspire and encourage new research towards this end.

Part I
Affordances in the landscape: a theoretical approach

Chapter 1
Affordances and the perception of landscape:

an inquiry into environmental perception and aesthetics

Harry Heft

What is the nature of our experience in environments? Travel diaries and nature writing are filled with first-hand descriptions of environments. These accounts range from the pedestrian and mundane to the artful and even inspirational. However, for the purposes of systematic analysis expected of scientific inquiry and for the practical concerns of environmental design, we must also delve deeper than mere description. A more analytical path creating possibilities for experimental investigation is essential. This path, though, is not without its hazards.

Sometimes analyses of per...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Affordances in the landscape: a theoretical approach
• Part II Evidence on the relationship between landscape and health
• Part III Different perspectives on methodology
• Part IV Applications in practice: spatial structure, landscape design and landscape use
• Part V Conclusions
• Index