Urban healthscapes

On this page, SLU Urban Futures continuously shares the platform's work with urban healthscapes. While not exhaustive, it highlights our main initiatives and collaborations. If you would like more information or wish to join the conversation, please reach out to our hub coordinator. Contact details are available further down the page.

Status

The healthscapes discourse was explored through dialogues with internal SLU researchers, contemporary publications, and participation in, and organization of, events exploring interconnections between people+environment+health. This work revealed how particular disciplinary epistemologies and nomenclatures inform different discursive understandings and practices. Exploring urban healthscapes can reveal otherwise overlooked complexities by integrating different disciplinary lenses and prompting a critical reassessment of current practice and knowledge regarding, for example, planning systems and equality issues. SLU has strong research on the environmental design and environmental aspects of health and wellbeing. Researchers at SLU bring a strong focus on natural science and landscape planning to their health-related work looking for instance, at animals and plant needs, human sociology, or a one-health perspective that takes up climate issues. Nature and health are two buzzwords which are used with different understandings that encompass different needs and interests. It still has a siloed disciplinary division of perspectives, and there is a lack of an integrated approach to these complex layers of the related topics of healthscapes; critical studies that address differently scaled ecosystems, psycho-social individual factors, with societal and cultural health, well-being beyond a disease/unhealth focus. 

Progress

The Alnarp Hub engaged with international initiatives, different disciplinary groups and SLU departments, shaping dialogue on connections between place, people, fauna, flora, health and wellbeing. In particular, the urban healthscapes workshop demonstrated the potential for a more elaborated, inter and transdisciplinary discourse to reveal how different epistemologies and traditions shape different understandings, nomenclatures, approaches to and outcomes of processes for sustainable Healthscapes. A stronger connection of interdisciplinary perspectives looking into environmental factors in connection to the psychosocial, human, and One Health needs, with a sustainable perspective, would benefit the development of research towards a more complex understanding that can deal with the actual problems of climate change and sustainable development. 

Next steps

Key challenges highlighting the need for a criticality lens include: A dominant anthropocentric perspective combined with euro-centric and western-focused research that impedes and ignores the complexities of the needs of other cultural and ethnical groups (children, elderly, sick, or the non-Europeans) and of the ecosystem. This ignores current problematizations that are high on the sustainability agendas, regarding to aspects of climate change, extinction, and health and wellbeing of all. Further, the lack of discourses that understand the complex impacts of healthscapes creates a situation where there is a lack of visibility of aspects from research in media and research agenda.

A traditional health vs a health-beyond-disease perspective that proposes different disciplinary understandings of validity and reliability limits the collaboration of interdisciplinary projects that could resolve research questions with a more complex and nuanced understanding. Currently, there is a siloed understanding between the positivistic understanding, the medical perspectives, and the humanities, which poses challenges and limitations to the developments of research. Prioritising in a hierarchical way disciplinary venus affects our ability to understand healthscapes by limiting the uses of methods and scientific design. Rather, there should be one understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of methodological approaches that is more open, connected and acceptable. Research agendas guided by journals funding initiatives, and international rankings that measure outcomes, can limit other sustainable approaches relevant to contemporary development.