Episode 3: Environments for human flourishing - time to steer the research agenda away from stress?

Professor Caroline Hägerhall from SLU shares her vision as part of a new research initiative to gain an improved understanding of the dynamic experience of outdoor environments and its relationship with human behaviour and health through establishing the Sensola Lab at SLU.

This episode is the third in a series about how green and natural spaces can support resilient societies. We apply an Environmental Psychology perspective to understand current issues and what actions can be taken by talking to specialists and practitioners in the relevant fields. In this episode, we explore how a broader research lens rooted in an exploratory approach, could help reframe how we understand supportive environments that capture a more holistic approach to human wellbeing that can support creativity and human flourishing which can be translated in design.

In this episode, entitled ‘Environments for human flourishing: time to steer the research agenda away from stress?’ Hannah Arnett and Amanda Gabriel discuss with Caroline Hägerhall in the Department of People and Society at SLU the context of the newly established SLU Multisensory Outdoor Laboratory, the Sensola lab. The current research and economic agenda in environmental psychology has been focussed on solving current health problems with a required medical lens, which has helped to investigate the value of nature in relation to stress. However, we explore if we are on the cusp of a new phase within the discipline, with a need to foster a more preventative approach to health within societal landscapes. This new approach is offering an opportunity for new theoretical developments!

In October last year, 2021, the UN Human Rights Council recognised access to healthy and sustainable environments as human rights. This was done in context to the growing planetary threats of climate change, pollution and nature loss, which were described by the UN as ‘greatest human rights challenge’ of our time. We as a society are now to cultivate healthy environments as a recognised human right. What does this mean beyond the protections required as part of wider systemic threats to the planetary system that threaten human health, as well as sustainability of the planet we inhabit? How can science and how can research be  shaped to help inform design of health environments?

This podcast explores:

• Research can enable a greater understanding of the value of environments in our everyday lives and how they can be planned to promote health more broadly. We discuss how environmental psychology research can be developed for theories to be rooted in a wider concept of human wellbeing and creativity that will influence landscape design.
• Current research in environmental psychology knows a lot about nature vs built environments. However, environments are really dynamic and are often a complex combination of nature with built environments. There is a need to move away from this nature versus built environment dichotomy to really understand how environments can support wellbeing.
• How fractal pattern theories may help broaden a neuroscience perspective of the relation between nature and health.
• We present and discuss the SLU Multisensory Outdoor Laboratory, the Sensola Lab. Since 2019, researchers from SLU are developing knowledge about human-environment interaction, with research based on smart and portable technology. The laboratory is financed as a SLU research infrastructure project.

We hope you enjoy exploring this topic with us and we hope this is an opportunity to inspire urban planners and researchers!

Play the episode on Soundcloud

Play the episode on Spotify