Health Geography
摘要
Health geography focuses on intersections of environments and health, seeking to understand the ways that physical, social, and meaning environments interact with all aspects of health. Health geography has an important role to play in contributing to understandings of health inequities, health behavior, health promotion, and illness prevention. Contexts, settings, or places shape (and in turn are shaped by) individual and collective health beliefs and behaviors and are, thus, key resources for enabling people’s abilities to improve and increase control over their health and its determinants. Context is a key resource for intervention. Environments shape well-being and health, not just through shaping behaviors but also as resources in and of themselves. Places are also helpful units for understanding, measuring, assessing, and improving collective health behaviors and resources for health. This chapter will focus on some key examples from health geography, including the distribution and accessibility of resources for health, interactions of composition and context, therapeutic landscapes, third spaces, home, and attachment to place. These demonstrate the movement of health geography research from a focus on biomedical and material elements, to increasingly incorporate more social and relational and later symbolic and meaning elements. A good understanding of the complexity and richness of place and space and how these are settings, determinants, and reflections of the health experiences and outcomes of individuals and groups is vital to effective interventions that focus on settings and environments.