Landscape and health

My colleague Laura Menatti defended her award-winning PhD dissertation at the UPV/EHU in late 2014; I was selected to serve in the evaluation committee and ever since it has been a pleasure to discuss and advance with her our common interests on landscape. We both want to account for both its culturalist and the naturalist aspects, giving each side its due. We argue that humans are in a co-determinant relationship with landscape: we perceive landscape as we live in it, but we also build it, and this double bind affects our health. How? To answer this question Laura and I have been working together for more than a year, and this is the first published result, in a top psychology journal:

Menatti L and Casado da Rocha A (2016) Landscape and Health: Connecting Psychology, Aesthetics, and Philosophy through the Concept of Affordance. Front. Psychol. 7:571. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00571

In this time not only I have learnt a lot from Laura, Leo, and Arantza; we are also building and developing this theory upon previous work published by members of our group such as Alvaro, Mateo, Xabier, Hanne, Ezequiel, and Argyris (check the references in the paper). It is not usual to find in the humanities such a good team work!