Colléony, Clayton and Shwartz use pandemic restrictions as an involuntary experiment in the withdrawal of everyday nature. Their iconic proposition is that deprivation becomes socially legible when ordinary access collapses: nature interaction declined across the sample, but well-being fell most clearly among residents of the least green neighbourhoods. The theoretical contribution is to distinguish ecological affinity from ecological access. Attachment to nature and environmental attitudes remained comparatively stable, while the material opportunities through which those dispositions sustain well-being were interrupted. Methodologically, the study compares the same metropolitan respondents before and during lockdown, linking frequency, duration and quality of nature encounters to personal and social well-being. Its conceptual operation is deprivation by subtraction: the value of an environmental relation is inferred through its enforced absence. The work bridges environmental psychology, biodiversity conservation, public health and urban inequality by showing that nature contact is not merely an individual preference but a spatially allocated capacity whose suspension exposes pre-existing differences in neighbourhood provision.
URBANISM MEETS ART