Shannon Rose Branigin

This project explores how greenspace is integrated into healthcare provision in Scotland, with a focus on those experiencing homelessness, mental illness, addiction, and other forms of marginalisation. While greenspace is increasingly positioned as a remedy for mental health, critical research has pointed to the limitations of current understandings of its function and efficacy—highlighting how greenspace is often treated as a static variable, rather than a lived, relational ecology. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork across institutional and community greenspace initiatives—including psychiatric hospitals, homelessness and rehabilitation services, and affiliated green prescribing programmes of the National Health Service (NHS) Scotland—this research asks how greenspace becomes a modality of care, and for whom. It investigates how care is delivered, felt, and contested in and through greenspace, attending to the uneven geographies of access and the everyday practices that shape encounters with land, institutions, and others. By centring the voices and experiences of those navigating multiple forms of social precarity, this project contributes to critical debates on therapeutic landscapes, infrastructures of exclusion, and the complex entanglements of health, environment, and urban life.