ABSTRACT
The concept of therapeutic landscapes represents a valuable application to assess the relationship between health and place in a wide variety of spaces. W. M. Gesler introduced the concept to geographers as places with "an enduring reputation for achieving physical, mental, and spiritual healing". Gesler argued that scholars could examine sites of healing in health geography. Scholars tend to focus on three main types of therapeutic landscapes: physical environments, symbolic environments and social environments. These environments are convenient categorizations; in practice, therapeutic landscapes transcend boundaries. L. D. Baer and Gesler advocated for applying the therapeutic-landscape concept to difficult and contestable examples with potentially "less positive shades of meaning". Scholarship addresses increasingly broad relational experiences of health and well-being, including gendered, aged, cultural, emotional and multiscalar navigations of therapeutic landscapes. Scholarship to date has not sufficiently explored relational dynamics and individual agency contributing to the construction, navigation and maintenance of therapeutic landscapes.
