Public mental health implications of intelligent heritage environments for wellbeing: environmental-psychological pathways across SDG 3 and SDG 11

Introduction Heritage environments combine architectural space, cultural participation, and digital mediation, yet evidence on their environmental-psychological and public-health implications remains fragmented. This review pursued two linked objectives: to map the literature across time, geography, themes, methods, and environmental configurations, and to identify recurrent pathways linking environmental conditions to psychological mechanisms and wellbeing outcomes. Methods We screened Web of Science and Scopus records published from 2015 to 2025 using a PRISMA-guided procedure. The final corpus comprised 253 publications analyzed through scientometric mapping, full-text content coding, citation-neighborhood tracing, and independent reliability assessment. Results Objective 1 showed that publication growth accelerated after 2023, with output shifting toward Asia while cumulative citation influence remained concentrated in earlier European work. Keyword networks retained a person-environment core while differentiating environmental-perception, health, immersive, and computational themes. Content coding distinguished actual socio-physical heritage settings, virtual counterparts, hybrid technology-augmented settings, and transferable environmental-psychology evidence. Objective 2 identified recurrent pathways linking these configurations with affect/restoration, perception/cognition, place attachment, presence/embodiment, social participation, and restorative, affective, social, cognitive, and accessibility-related wellbeing outcomes. Policy evidence was concentrated in SDG 11 and integrated SDG 3-SDG 11 relevance. Discussion Intelligent heritage environments emerge as an environmental-psychology problem in which spatial conditions, cultural meaning, and digital mediation interact. The evidence-traceable framework is conceptual and is intended to guide hypothesis development, measurement, and comparative testing rather than serve as a validated causal, clinical, or policy-effectiveness model. Future tests should extend across diverse heritage contexts.