Making Place for Health and Good Life: Tourism at the Intersection of Philosophy and Public Health

Tourism is increasingly promoted as a resource for health, and destinations market the well-being their landscapes are said to afford; yet the notion of well-being invoked where tourism and public health meet requires further specification, as the fields that converge there do not necessarily use the term in the same sense. The conceptual analysis clarifies well-being by distinguishing its psychological dimensions from its philosophical characterisation in terms of human flourishing, and frames health from a salutogenic perspective. Human flourishing and salutogenesis intersect particularly through meaningfulness and the ways persons engage with what places make possible. Drawing on the phenomenology of the tourist experience and on the literatures of therapeutic landscapes and restorative environments, the paper argues that places contribute to health through multiple and potentially interacting pathways involving characteristics of settings, activities and experiences, and their social and environmental contexts. Embodied pathways further show the interconnection of experiential and bodily dimensions of health. The paper draws out implications for public health and participatory destination design. Alpine tourism destinations provide a suitable context in which these relationships can be examined empirically.