The territorial approach in Sustainable and Healthy Territories: a conceptual enlargement from anthropology

Abstract

Throughout the evolution of the concept of health, the notion of territory has undergone numerous modifications. However, none managed to satisfactorily develop its knowability as a socio-health phenomenon. In the context of promoting Sustainable and Healthy Territories, the territory was operationalized, based on its intersection between the environment, health and sustainable development. However, its excessive orientation towards the social determinants of health contributed to the distortion of its inventive and mobilizing capacity. However, aided by anthropology, especially by the foundations of its ecological thinking, we managed to rescue the relational tangle that describes the territory, as a being-in-the-world and not as a set of beliefs or representations. In this way, we propose the study of the territorial dimension, not from its concepts and stabilities, but from its flows, contours and resonances. Only then will we be able to follow their movements and understand the roles that each actor plays in the historical movement that open the ways for new development conditions.