1. Landscape and Health: Connecting Psychology, Aesthetics, and Philosophy through the Concept of Affordance
- Author
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Antonio Casado da Rocha, Laura Menatti, Passages, Université de Bordeaux (UB)-Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication (MCC)-Université de Pau et des Pays de l'Adour (UPPA)-Université Bordeaux Montaigne-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), École nationale supérieure d'architecture et du paysage de Bordeaux (ENSAP Bordeaux), Universidad del Desarrollo, and Antonio Casado da Rocha
- Subjects
media_common.quotation_subject ,lcsh:BF1-990 ,Agency (philosophy) ,[SHS.PSY]Humanities and Social Sciences/Psychology ,perception ,050105 experimental psychology ,ecological psychology ,naturalistic aesthetics ,Pleasure ,03 medical and health sciences ,0302 clinical medicine ,well-being ,Hypothesis and Theory ,Ecological psychology ,Natural (music) ,Psychology ,0501 psychology and cognitive sciences ,Architecture ,Affordance ,Landscape archaeology ,Naturalism ,General Psychology ,media_common ,05 social sciences ,[SHS.PHIL]Humanities and Social Sciences/Philosophy ,health ,[SHS.ART]Humanities and Social Sciences/Art and art history ,landscape ,affordance ,Epistemology ,lcsh:Psychology ,agency ,Social psychology ,030217 neurology & neurosurgery - Abstract
International audience; 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. 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. 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. Landscape cannot be distinguished from the ecological environment. For this reason, we naturalize the idea of landscape through the notion of affordance and Gibson's ecological psychology. In doing so, we stress the role of agency in the theory of perception and the health-landscape relationship. 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. 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. Rather, we can talk about the right to landscape as something intrinsically linked to the well-being of present and future generations.
- Published
- 2016