LANDSCAPES OF HEALTH – A REVIEW OF THE RESEARCH ON URBAN LANDSCAPES ASSOCIATED WITH HEALTH AND WELLBEING

Abstract

In the context of urban areas sheltering more than two thirds of the world’s population, providing health security within cities becomes a challenge. The outbreak of the SARS-COV-2 pandemic emphasized the urgency of assessing urban healthiness. Through our study we scoped the scientific literature published in the past 10 years that addressed the issue of health in relation with urban landscapes. We aimed to extract the scholars’ expertized concerned by this topic, determine the main methods and indicators used in researching the role of urban landscapes on health and wellbeing and to cluster the types of urban landscapes according to health approaches. A vast majority of the published papers were based on perception analysis, mainly self-perceived health assessments, literature reviews and environmental quality assessments. Greenscapes and bluescapes were tagged as therapeutic landscapes within urban structures. High density of built-up space or crowed residential areas were described as potential harmful landscape.