Abstract
Few people would deny an intuitive sense of increased wellbeing when spending time in beautiful locations. Here, we ask: can we quantify the relationship between environmental aesthetics and human health? We draw on data from Scenic-Or-Not, a website that crowdsources ratings of “scenicness” for geotagged photographs across Great Britain, in combination with data on citizen-reported health from the Census for England and Wales. We find that inhabitants of more scenic environments report better health, across urban, suburban and rural areas, even when taking core socioeconomic indicators of deprivation into account, such as income, employment and access to services. Our results provide evidence in line with the striking hypothesis that the aesthetics of the environment may have quantifiable consequences for our wellbeing.
Highlights
Few people would deny an intuitive sense of increased wellbeing when spending time in beautiful locations
We find that inhabitants of more scenic environments report better health, across urban, suburban and rural areas, even when taking core socioeconomic indicators of deprivation into account, such as income, employment and access to services
As color naming varies from one individual to another[42], we draw on crowdsourced data generated through an online survey of 1.5 million participants to determine to which color a pixel should be allocated
Summary
Few people would deny an intuitive sense of increased wellbeing when spending time in beautiful locations. We draw on data from Scenic-Or-Not, a website that crowdsources ratings of “scenicness” for geotagged photographs across Great Britain, in combination with data on citizenreported health from the Census for England and Wales. We use data from Scenic-Or-Not[38], a website that crowdsources ratings of “scenicness,” in order to develop a better understanding of how the aesthetics of the environment may impact our health. We evaluate to what degree scenicness relates to an objective measurement, green land cover, as several studies analyzing green land cover data indicate that an abundance of greenspace results in increased human wellbeing[11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20]
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