.top-header{ transform: scale(0.5); transform-origin: top left; width: 200%; } Unstable Installation Series: Kaplan, R. (1992) ‘The psychological benefits of nearby nature’, in Relf, D. (ed.) The Role of Horticulture in Human Well-Being and Social Development. Portland, OR: Timber Press, pp. 125–133.

Kaplan, R. (1992) ‘The psychological benefits of nearby nature’, in Relf, D. (ed.) The Role of Horticulture in Human Well-Being and Social Development. Portland, OR: Timber Press, pp. 125–133.



Rachel Kaplan’s decisive move is scalar. “Nature” is detached from wilderness and relocated within the proximate environments of ordinary life: street trees, gardens, window views, neighbourhood vegetation and small urban landscapes. Nearby nature becomes important precisely because it can be encountered repeatedly, often incidentally, and because its value is therefore embedded in daily routines rather than reserved for exceptional excursions. Kaplan also exposes perception as learned distinction: professional and non-professional subjects see, categorise and value environmental elements differently, making environmental experience inseparable from perceptual competence. The chapter’s conceptual operation is thus double: it expands what counts as nature while problematising what counts as seeing. This opens a bridge between environmental psychology, landscape architecture and epistemology. If minor spatial encounters accumulate psychological significance, then urban design cannot treat vegetation as decorative remainder. Small-scale environmental configurations become cognitive and affective infrastructures whose effects depend on frequency, accessibility, visibility and the cultural organisation of perception.