Fatsar, K., 2023.

Cure, Leisure, and Exercise: The Emerging Spa Landscapes in Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Hungary

This book offers a new, salutogenic, perspective on the development of early modern cities by exploring profound and complex ways in which architecture and landscape design served to promote public health on an urban scale.

This chapter investigates emerging design theories influencing spa landscapes at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th centuries. The concept that public parks provide health benefits was well known by the second half of the 18th century. Whereas the history of public parks in Central Europe is rather well documented, an important sub-genre, the spa park, acquired less attention. The surrounding designed landscapes of the emerging spa towns in the former Kingdom of Hungary, famously rich in mineral springs with health benefits, even less so, having almost entirely escaped any scholarly investigation, despite the ambition to transform them on an urban design scale to create pleasant approaches as well as exercising opportunities for spa guests. This chapter argues that spa landscapes are very early examples of systematic green infrastructure planning for the specific purpose of convalescence and wider health benefits.