ABSTRACT
The concept of everyday life is a useful way of introducing social, age and gender diversity into understandings of health and landscape. Typically urban planning does adequately not take into consideration what happens at the street scale, and in the spaces and landscapes where adults and children live, work, play, meet each other, consume, interact, and construct their identity (Vaiou and Lykogianni, 2006). As Hubbard (2006) points out, studying everyday practices brings to the surface the rubbish, noise, traffic, fumes, and smells; it allows us to take into account the people who walk and those who transgress urban space; and it reveals the possibility of resistance inherent in everyday life. That is, it gives meaning to the formulation of policies of everyday life which unquestionably affect people’s health. In this regard, the role played by nature in people’s-and particularly children’s-health and wellbeing has been asserted in numerous studies (Atkinson, Fuller and Painter, 2012; King and Church, 2013; Pretty et al., 2009; Skar and Krogh, 2009). These authors state that the indicators of physical and mental health improve when people have regular contact with, or do activities in, natural settings. In urban contexts natural settings can include trees and gardens in streets and squares, parks, and waterfront sites. These studies and experiences have led to the definition of the concept of therapeutic landscapes. This concept, which was used by Gesler (1996; 2005) for the first time and later developed by other authors (Andrews, 2004; Dyck and Dossa, 2007; Wakefield and McMullan, 2005), refers to a landscape where the combination of built elements, social conditions and human perceptions give rise to an atmosphere of healing in a general sense. Based on this, other nature-related concepts identified with the adjective “green” have proliferated, such as green healing, green design and green education (Pretty et al., 2009: 4).
