LAUSR

The aim of this special section is to critically appraise health, wellbeing, and tourism through the lens of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which were adopted in 2015. In this special issue, we examine tourism and health through the mobilities perspective (Hannam et al., 2006). There are three general approaches to this topic. In traditional geography and medical geography studies, place plays a crucial role in health and wellbeing. Early studies focused on how a place’s charac-teristics, understood as the compositional and contextual effects of that place (Duncan et al., 1998), influence health and wellbeing (Michael et al., 2006). Recent studies have promoted an activity-based approach, arguing that places are not static and that people are not merely passively impacted by their environments (Kwan, 2009). This approach posits that human agency should be acknowledged in the relationship between human health and place, as people can take actions to avoid or seek out certain places for the sake of their health and wellbeing. In this view, health and wellbeing emerges from the process of people’s mobility (Schwanen & Atkinson, 2015), which is often regarded as physical movement from one place to another. Similarly, in the field of cultural geography, Gesler (1993) proposed therapeutic landscapes as an analytical framework to examine how people obtain health and wellbeing from places. Therapeutic landscapes consist of three components: physical environments, social environments, and symbolic environments. Gesler’s study prompted several follow-up studies examining various features of physical environments, social environments, and symbolic environments. For instance, green spaces and blue spaces are often found to benefit health and wellbeing. In his analysis, Conradson (2005) argued that places do not have intrinsic features that promote health and wellbeing and that the therapeutic effects derived from places are relational—that is, relations between the place and the people generate the health and wellbeing effects. However, these relations are often context-based and highly influenced by the culture of visitors motivated