January 12, 2026
It was through daily encounters with the Rhine in Mainz that I began to notice a different spatial logic. I watched how the river functioned as a steady, quiet anchor for people jogging, sitting on the steps, joining festivals or simply watching the water flow. Without fully naming it at the time, I was experiencing what Wilbert Gesler (1992) describes as a therapeutic landscape, a place where well-being emerges through sensory experience, social interaction, and symbolic meaning. Reading the research of Sebastian Völker and Thomas Kistemann (2011; 2013) helped me articulate this intuition.

