Saúde, bem-estar e arquitetura

Abstract

Although the space where people experience their lives influences their health, the professionals directly and indirectly involved in designing health promotion programmes and policies, and those who design these spaces, often ignore these relationships by working in isolation. In order to promote interdisciplinary dialogue and cooperation, we designed the Health, Well-being and Architecture curricular unit. The learning objectives of this course were to identify the main environmental and social determinants of health and to develop solutions for health-promoting spaces, integrating the basic concepts of public health and architecture. To this end, it combined theoretical and practical sessions, taught by lecturers from the fields of medicine, architecture, landscape design and geography, with field visits to green spaces and buildings and housing developments of different scales, identifying health needs and the relationship with the environment and opportunities for promoting a healthier environment. It also organised two seminars with international speakers and a public presentation of the work at the partner organisation (Domus Social). There were 101 applications for the three editions. The 61 participants successfully completed the course, getting actively involved in all the activities and showing a high degree of autonomy and commitment in the group exercises. More specifically, organised into multidisciplinary groups, they drew up diagnoses of the health situation of inhabitants in buildings managed by Domus Social, identifying proximal and distal determinants, and designed proposals for intervention at the levels of urban, collective and private space in the complexes under study. This interdisciplinary experience was positively received by the students, who recognised it as highly relevant to their professional training and personal development, and the exercises, developed in project-based learning, which were frankly positive, allowed them to think about health and architecture from a broad and articulated perspective