Newton’s Notes with Dr. Agnieszka Olszewska-Guizzo
To all architects, designers, landscape architects, planners, researchers, scholars, mental health professionals and neuroscientists looking to unlock healing powers through neuroscience – ADD this book to your reading list!
This interview and book help to utilize Neuroscience to create a healthy living environment for Mental Health and Well-being utilizing the practical application of the Contemplative Landscape Model.
Written by Dr. Agnieszka Olszewska-Guizzo, with lived experience, this book explores evidence-based design methods, as well as neuroscience testing, to analyze and address (very specifically) how green space can be used to improve well-being and mental health. The pages delve into untapped possibilities, and technically clarifies the difference between scientifically proven healthy landscapes and the everyday urban model of a park somewhere in a city, empty and scary, that ends up meeting a required quota, though fails to improve the lives it was developed to serve.
“Urban parks and gardens are where people go to reconnect with nature and destress. But do they all provide the same benefits or are some better than others? What specific attributes set some green spaces apart? Can we objectively measure their impact on mental health and well-being? If so, how do we use this evidence to guide the design of mentally healthy cities?
The Contemplative Landscape Model unveils the path to answer these questions. Rooted in landscape architecture and neuroscience, this innovative concept is described for the first time in an extended format, offering a deep dive into contemplative design and the science behind it. In the face of the global mental health crisis, and increasing disconnection from nature, design strategies for creating healthier urban environments are what our cities so sorely need.”(Routlege)
Dr. Agnieszka Olszewska-Guizzo is a landscape architect and neuroscience researcher specializing in Landscape Architecture & Urban Ecology, and Neuro-psychophysiology. She serves as the President and a co-founder and lead researcher at NeuroLandscape NGO and is a fellow of the Centre for Urban Design and Mental Health.
Interview Excerpts
ESN: If you were to highlight your own book, what would be the parts we would find in yellow?
DR. A: If I had to highlight only one page it would be the attached table with the full CLM model (Attachment 1 at the very end of the book). I would print it out to have it easily accessible when I go to site visits, to brainstorm, or use through any step of my design process. This entire book is basically an explanation of the scientific background behind this practical tool. It is key for breaking down any landscape view into the spatial features most beneficial from the neuroscience standpoint. Being able to understand and design with it should be the main takeaway from the book for any student, architect or landscape architecture professional.
The sections delving into the neuroscience background for processing landscape scenes would also be worthy of highlighting, even though they are more theoretical. The descriptions of the interactions between the environment and the human brain are quite novel and might prove to be the most interesting for architects.
ESN: What did you learn while writing?
DR. A: I learned much more about Frederick Law Olmsted and his claims and pursuits. It turned out that my work and the very concept of contemplative landscapes echo his theory of the power of the scenery. I learned a great deal about his struggles to convince 19th-century city halls in the US and Europe that green space exposure should be an integral part of health policies. I discovered how much of a visionary he was with ideas ahead of his time. Unfortunately, he did not have the appropriate scientific tools to support his claims and demonstrate to naysayers that specific types of landscapes bring considerable health benefits. I feel very fortunate that these neuroscience tools now exist. But most of all this discovery makes me very proud that I have been able to intuitively carry on his work and his legacy in this area.
ESN: What was the most challenging?
DR. A: The most difficult part was to adjust the style of the book to readers from different disciplines: designers, academics but also mental health professionals. I stepped out of my writing comfort zone, which so far was the academic style, to be more digestible for students and the general public. Generally, I had to sort of go back in time and revisit arts and humanities, joining together poetry, history, and art with a scientific style.
ESN: Did you change your mind about anything along the way?
DR. A: After the book's publication, there were some advancements in the area. One thing is that we might be closer to providing more evidence on neuroscientific mechanisms explaining why some landscapes are healthier than others. This is related to the inherent search for safety, which our brains are strongly hardwired for. This notion links to the Attention Restoration Theory and challenges it to some extent. But this is still a work in progress.
DR. A: I believe that landscapes can work as well as medicines, and with the right dose and prescriptions, they can serve the needs of individuals, groups of patients, and people at risk.
I have always intuitively believed that the sensory environment we surround ourselves with really matters. And I mean the elements that we may not even pay attention to on an everyday basis. For example, during our daily commute to school or work we look at the gray asphalt, colorful cars, and infrastructure around the roads. In dense cities, we mostly look at the screens, fonts, and objects that are close to us, not often at faraway views. I was intrigued by the idea that the nervous system did not have enough time to adjust to the fast-paced urbanization, and while humans seem to cope quite well in the urban environment, their brains really do not. This is likely one major reason why we have an epidemic of mental illness, especially in cities. I felt that contact with nature had a tremendous potential to soothe the negative influences of urbanization, but my landscape architecture studies taught me that there are so many different landscapes. And some of them are not even that interesting to replicate.
Then, for my Ph.D. thesis, I wanted to study what gives the landscapes this "WOW effect," what makes a landscape beautiful, soothing, awe-inspiring... beyond personal bias. I knew that there are some aspects of the scenery that can stimulate a specific reaction in most people. And it is a question of researching them to optimize the scenery composition to the most desirable outcomes.
ESN: How could architects benefit from reading your book?
DR. A: There is an increasing interest public and private clients of architects in incorporating the health benefits in their designs. This book paves the way for doing this in a way that is based on scientific and rigorously established evidence. I am sure any architect will find something for themselves, while also discovering that many of these practices and design solutions were part of their practice for years. This time however they may discover the neurological and psychological basis for these solutions and be able to base their design on more than personal style, intuition, or aesthetics.
ESN: What are you the proudest of in this book?
DR. A: I am very happy that I got all the pieces together in time. In other words: the research outcomes from my studies were out, published in peer-reviewed journals, and had found appreciation from the research community first. I really wanted the claims made by my book to have a solid basis in scientifically reliable journals. I am also very proud of the final product and how it came out in terms of layout and graphics. I am very happy with the outcome and I am glad that all the hard work behind it (mine but also of persons involved) has paid off, and we were able to put all this together in a final product!
ESN: Thank you very much for your time and for sharing your book, inspiration, and intelligence!
More about the book’s author:
Agnieszka Olszewska-Guizzo is a landscape architect and neuroscience researcher specializing in Landscape Architecture & Urban Ecology, and Neuro-psychophysiology. She serves as the President and a co-founder and lead researcher at NeuroLandscape NGO and is a fellow of the Centre for Urban Design and Mental Health. She conducted her interdisciplinary research at the University of Porto, Portugal, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, USA, and the National University of Singapore.
Contemplative Landscape Model (CLM)
CLM and mental health: CLM is a tool for Urban Green Space visual quality evaluation, addressing the existing need for mitigating the burden of mental health resulting from urbanicity and filling the gaps in knowledge on UGS for mental health.
CLM measures the extent to which a given landscape view has the potential to positively influence the mental health and well-being of individuals passively exposed to them. According to its original premise the landscape components considered most contemplative, when aggregated within the scene, would trigger an increase in low frequency brain activity associated with momentary decreased cognitive strain, increased relaxation and positive affect during an act of just a passive observation of the landscape [1] This experience could balance out the opposite brain reactivity, arising with high information processing typical with the exposure to urbanized environments [2]. Such brain response patterns have been linked to number of conditions including mood and anxiety disorders [3]. Based on this evidence, we refer in what follows to these effects using the terms “salutogenic”, “positive mental health outcomes”, and “mental health and well-being”.
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Architecture, Design, Humanity, Mental Health, Behavioral Health, HealthCare Matters
