Urban jungles: Human health and the shared imaginaries of urban greenspace

Abstract

‘Natural’ spaces as health-promoting features of the urban landscape continue to garner attention in applied medical and health geography research agendas. A growing literature indicating correlations between green-/bluespaces and individual self-reported health, resilience, and wellbeing recognises the urgent need for methodological plurality and advances in mixed-method approaches combining quantitative/geospatial modelling and qualitative techniques.

As these studies increasingly engage with the subjective nature of the health-environment relation, interdisciplinary efforts amongst researchers explore health, resilience, and wellbeing. Confronting the challenges implicit in epistemologically broadening a traditionally positivistic spatial-epidemiological paradigm poses significant challenges for researchers who are continually developing new evidence of the health-environment relation. The challenge is twofold: (1) Identifying theory-based concept spaces suitable to inform also the geospatial analyses in mixed-method and triangulation approaches, and; (2) identifying geospatial analyses that are scalable, but understandable and transparent enough to be intermixed in specific, ideally different theoretical frameworks. Therapeutic landscapes provide a functional framework that combines common means of epistemological data analysis with humanist geography explaining everyday individual sense-making in geographic environments. In developing a related research agenda, we encourage make-and-break experiments with rapid exploration spikes and post-evaluations to determine the quality of the fit for either (1) or (2). In this discussion, we sketch out the often divergent trajectories of health-greenspace in urban contexts, drawing on a range of case studies across the methodological and thematic spectra.