Schools that heal: design with mental health in mind

Under the circumstances imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic that students have suffered great levels of isolation and loneliness as most schools are not designed to remain operational during a pandemic and to enforce social distancing, Claire Latané wrote Schools That Heal: Design with Mental Health in Mind. Since nature can help to mitigate the negative impacts of infectious diseases, a nature-based school design would suit the current pandemic crisis (Khalilnezhad et al. 2021). COVID-19 has provided the opportunity for Professor Latané to critique the inequitable system of school design that has lasted for decades. Her book has consistently shown that access to nature, large classroom windows and open campuses reduce stress, anxiety, disorderly conduct and crime and improve academic performance. However, few school designers and decision-makers have applied this research to create healthy school environments.

Claire Latané is a landscape architecture professor at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. The readers of Schools That Heal: Design with Mental Health in Mind (both decision makers and landscape architects) can learn how nurturing nature-filled school environments boost mental health, reduce crime, and give pupils a feeling of belonging. As a result, Latané’s book is not purely theoretical academic literature; rather, it is the outcome of professional and personal experiences that aim to bridge the gap between research and landscape professionals to design schools as welcoming, nurturing environments.

The author divides the book into nine chapters, the first of which outlines why schools should be designed with mental health in mind. She does not approach the subject of school design mechanically in this chapter but instead examines it from ecological, social, health, and systematic standpoints. The author discusses rebuilding school physical environments to support students’ mental, social, and physical well-being in chapter two. Interestingly, the reader can discover a link between school design and well-known ideas used in the built environment, such as Evidence-Based Design and Attention Restoration Theory.

As landscape architects, we found the heartland of the book to be in chapter three, which presents community-led, nature-based design concepts that support the mental health, safety, and welfare of the students. The author chooses examples and graphics that best communicate each method while also delivering various, layered benefits as well as nature-based-design schools. The author creates a hierarchical system of implementation to explain the adoption of 12 site design concepts, starting with shifts in thinking, small-scale physical changes, and large-scale physical changes. The next chapter considers 11 district-wide planning techniques that support the popular idea of re-designing schools, such as public health, equity, and climate resilience. Solutions such as constructing school gardens and parks and increasing school food security through urban agriculture benefit the public.

It is worth mentioning that this book does not merely revolve around physical intervention through industrial environmental design; instead, chapters five and six advocate the soft aspects of the subject. Chapter five discusses how to communicate with various parties (teachers, school teams, mental health professionals, architects, landscape architects, and engineers) who have an impact on school planning and design. Chapter six provides information to overcome a different challenge: financing school improvements. The author offers tactics for securing funding for the schools.

Chapter seven, with its rich illustrations, shares 10 schools selected from the United States, England, Germany and Japan that successfully support mental health and well-being. By reading this book, the audience learns that school design is not a topic that begins and ends at the site boundary or with the principal architect or landscape architect. Critical aspects of school design, such as school horticulture, environmentally focused schools, and design to support restorative justice, are explored deeply through the author’s conversation with the former and current teacher or specialist in chapter eight.

While previous publications such as those by Nicolet (2015), Nowatschin (2014), Abdel-Kader Hassan (2012) and Tai (2017) mostly focused on advocating the landscape architectural matters of school design, in this book, almost all the parties and initiatives who have a role in school construction, planning, design, maintenance and financing can find specific, relevant debates. Therefore, the author takes an integrative approach to the subject which makes the audience of this book broader than that of previous publications. Moreover, each party can find its role in school landscapes in a broader network of relationships which strengthen the appeal of the holistic approach to the matter of landscape architecture. In addition, landscape professionals and students also can adopt a novel approach to the subject of school site design by considering their profession in the context of the relations portrayed by the author. Other books, such as those authored by Foster (2006) and Danks (2010), were written under the paradigm of integrative thinking, which appeals to everyone involved in the process of school design, including teachers, governors, architects, local authorities, building professionals and sponsors. Conversely, the work of Johnson (2010), which focused on the education and health dimension of the school landscape, would not appeal to landscape professionals due to the lack of information regarding physical interventions.

While most landscape architects aim to change the world by designing parks and urban landscapes under the paradigms of climate change and sustainability (Amani-Beni et al. 2021, Khalilnezhad and Kopec 2021), which is the last section of a long chain, Claire Latané directs our attention to the landscape of schools as the first circle of that long chain: beyond being mere places, schools are the hubs for training the next generations of experts and leaders whose environmentally friendly education will foster other aspects of life on the planet. Backed by decades of research, Schools That Heal showcases clear and compelling ways to create schools that support students’ mental health and feelings of safety. Written in an accessible tone, this book reviews the evidence connecting design to mental health and makes design and advocacy recommendations to support students’ well-being and sense of safety.

Other merits of this book are its lightness and portability, and illustrative images and diagrams, which are presented especially in chapter 7. The important advantage of the book is that it presents the landscape architecture of schools in a broader context of environmental, cultural, economic and management issues of schools. But a serious criticism of this book is its relatively American atmosphere, which even many of the statistics presented by the author are based on the United States. Therefore, its application would be decreased to some extent in many countries where school design has a different culture from American school design.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grant No. 52150410414]; and Interdisciplinary Research Projects of Southwest Jiaotong University [Grant No. 2682021ZTPY085].

Notes on contributors

Majid Amani-Beni

Majid Amani-Beni holds a PhD degree in Natural Resource Science from the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS), China. He is a faculty member at the School of Architecture and Design, Southwest Jiaotong University (SWJTU), Chengdu, China. Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=hqh7YcMAAAAJ&hl=en

Mohammad Reza Khalilnezhad

Mohammad Reza Khalilnezhad holds a Ph.D. degree in Landscape Architecture from the University of Kaiserslautern (TUKL), Germany. He has been a faculty member at the University of Birjand (UoB), Birjand, Iran, for over 10 years. Most of his research in the field of urban agriculture for Iran emphasizes the role of Persian gardens. He has translated and published three books from English to Persian, and published more than 40 papers in the scientific journals and conferences of landscape discipline. Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=N3_ARpcAAAAJ