Landscapes that foster well-being can play a vital role in promoting recreation, social interaction, and nature engagement. However, their positive effects are themselves increasingly threatened by the impacts of climate change. This dissertation investigates how well-being-supportive landscapes can be identified, analyzed, and protected in the context of climate change through the application of digital and participatory methods. The study adopts a multi-perspective research approach, grounded primarily in health geography as well as in transformation and transformative research. It draws on theoretical frameworks such as salutogenesis, resilience, and therapeutic landscapes, and applies these through a mixed-methods design. This design integrates digital instruments, geospatial analysis techniques, qualitative and quantitative methods, and participatory approaches. To identify landscapes relevant to human well-being, this dissertation presents the Space Log App, a digital tool that captures multimodal data on the everyday influence of environmental factors, recorded in real time to avoid memory-related bias. Based on that, an image-based analysis method is developed to identify specific color ranges in photographs and to quantify their proportion and spatial distribution. This method is effectively applied to data collected via the Space Log App in order to examine the relationship between green space exposure and human well-being. It enables a distinction between the effects of directly and indirectly perceived green spaces. The exploratory findings support existing assumptions about the positive impact of green spaces on well-being and highlight considerable potential for targeted green integration in densely built urban areas. The method is subsequently extended to include entropy-based image metrics in addition to color characteristics. This enhanced approach is successfully applied in a larger-scale study and demonstrates both scalability and reliability. In general, the study centers on the question of how varying green space characteristics contribute to well-being and mental restoration, particularly under conditions of heat stress. The overall results represent an expansion of the evidence base for urban planners and policymakers to better argue for nature-based solutions in urban environments. Findings of this thesis further suggest that places of well-being cannot be explained by ecological parameters alone, but are strongly shaped by social and relational factors. Moreover, these places are already undergoing noticeable transformations in response to climate change. The results indicate a widespread awareness of the need for collective efforts to preserve and adapt such well-being-related spaces. Despite the availability of concrete policy recommendations, implementation is frequently hindered by limited municipal capacities. Accordingly, this dissertation emphasizes the need for supportive structures to enable local implementation. A regional network was strengthened through targeted interventions. Participatory formats, close collaboration with local stakeholders, and transparent communication among residents, administration, and policymakers are suggested as key levers for fostering resilience-oriented transformation processes. Additionally, an interactive web tool is presented that maps places of well-being that were identified using interviews. Overlaying this data with additional information about heat exposure enables the visualization of the vulnerability of these places in the context of climate change. This dissertation contributes to the growing body of evidence on the relationship between environmental perception and subjective well-being in the context of climate change. Furthermore, it addresses gaps in existing research methods. By systematically combining app-based experiential data, image analysis, interviews, and web-based visualization, it enables a deeper understanding of landscape-related factors that promote well-being. In addition, the dissertation offers methods-related impulses that may inform transdisciplinary research and practice-oriented approaches to implementing well-being-oriented and climate-resilient measures at the local level.
Andreas Neuner (Thu,) studied this question.