![]() There is, in fact, a large body of evidence attesting to the role played by landscape in the treatment, recovery and maintenance of human health. It might be true that walking through the surrounding landscape, to name just an instance, has a positive or restorative effect on health, but how can we understand the myriad of studies and literature reviews on that topic? And if there is a connection between nature and human health, what is the theoretical framework in which we can understand this hypothesis? To answer these questions, we have analyzed the existing literature on the landscape-health relationship in order to gain a comprehensive idea of the different research areas currently being explored, and to discuss their implications. But how are we to understand this connection? A recent Frontiers in Psychology article ( Kuo, 2015) identifies several environmental factors, physiological and psychological states, behaviors or conditions, each of which has been empirically tied to nature and has implications for specific physical and mental health outcomes. It is common to hear that contact with nature, in its many and diverse forms, promotes human health. Rather, we can talk about the right to landscape as something intrinsically linked to the well-being of present and future generations. 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. 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. In doing so, we stress the role of agency in the theory of perception and the health-landscape relationship. For this reason, we naturalize the idea of landscape through the notion of affordance and Gibson’s ecological psychology. Landscape cannot be distinguished from the ecological environment. 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. 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. 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. 2IAS-Research Center for Life, Mind, and Society, University of the Basque Country, Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain.1Faculty of Sciences, Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile.Laura Menatti 1* Antonio Casado da Rocha 2
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