Therapeutic Landscapes

The metaphorical concept of 'therapeutic landscape' brings together the notion of landscape with principles of holistic health, and has been applied to a wide range of contexts to investigate how environmental, societal and individual factors 'interact to bring about healing in specific places'. This chapter explores how landscape, and the related notions of place and space, has been operationalised in the study of health processes. In addition, literatures in fields such as nursing studies and more community psychology exemplify the way that the therapeutic landscape framework has been applied and debated in other disciplinary contexts. Traditionally, medical geography had conceived of landscape mostly in terms related to epidemiology, space predominantly in terms of distribution of, and access to, health resources. The uncoupling of the therapeutic landscape metaphor from geographically defined places has been mirrored in literatures which emphasises the imagined and mobile nature of therapeutic engagements with places