The Landscape Foundation of Australia (LFA) strongly supports your proposition that “All public spaces should be considered an opportunity to create a landscape that alleviates communities’ significant issues and is open to all.”
Your view aligns with the mission of LFA, which is to help shape healthier and more sustainable urban landscapes that benefit people and nature. LFA empowers practitioners, researchers and communities to develop innovative and scalable nature-positive solutions, while advocating for nature to be fully valued as essential urban infrastructure.
Increased urbanisation and screen time on electronic devices are widely associated with reduced mental health, but the factors contributing to this trend are multiple and not well understood. At the same time there is increasing recognition that engagement with nature in urban environments provides positive mental health benefits that may include reduced stress and anxiety. But there is limited understanding of how the mental response occurs or the specific landscape elements that generate positive mental responses.
Research in the field of environmental psychology is beginning to provide some understanding of how contact with nature generates positive metal health benefits. Ecotherapy is increasingly being used to help people with significant mental health issues, including stress, anxiety and ADHD. This is in addition to the benefits of engaging with nature as a preventative means of maintaining mental health and sense of wellbeing.
Landscape architects and others involved in the planning, design and management of urban landscapes have the potential to make a significant contribution to the creation of urban environments that improve the human-nature interaction to provide health and wellbeing benefits to people of all ages. However, we need a better understanding of how particular components of urban landscapes are experienced to make a positive contribution to mental health and wellbeing. It is then vital to identify which aspects, types and components of natural environments should be incorporated and maintained within the city, and what specific effects they have on human mental health and well-being.
One organisation addressing this gap is NeuroLandscape, which is a non-profit research NGO based in Europe. It brings together landscape architecture, neuroscience and computer science to advance the knowledge about the relationship between human health and the urban environment to improve the quality of life of people. NeuroLandscape is seeking to identify specific landscape types that are most beneficial for mental health, investigating the dose-response mechanisms and testing new self-care interventions. The findings are shared with a wide international audience of academics, designers, decision makers and urban communities.
In Australia LFA is supporting the Schoolyard Greenprint research project, which is being undertaken by a research team at the University of Canberra. Funded by Hortinnovation, the research project is investigating how schoolyards can be better designed to improve the sense of wellbeing for high school adolescents. The project aims to identify what evidence and guidance are required by designers and school leaders to improve schoolyard design in Australia.
In a broader context the role of high-quality urban landscapes to benefit mental health and wellbeing needs to be integrated into national public health policies. It is crucial to raise the awareness and understanding of governments and decision-makers across the globe about the impact of evidence-based landscape design on public health. Landscape architects should be at the forefront of this movement.
