Care and Design

Care and Design: Bodies, Buildings, Cities connects the study of design with care, and explores how concepts of care may have relevance for the ways in which urban environments are designed. It explores how practices and spaces of care are sustained specifically in urban settings, thereby throwing light on an important arena of care that current work has rarely discussed in detail.

Notes on Contributors ix

Preface xiii

1 Designing with Care and Caring with Design 1
Rob Imrie and Kim Kullman

1.1 Introduction 1

1.2 Care as a concept and practice 3

1.3 The problem of ‘good urban form’ 6

1.4 The collection 10

References 15

2 Age‐inclusive Design: A Challenge for Kitchen Living? 18
Sheila Peace

2.1 Introduction 18

2.2 The interface between age and care 18

2.3 The position of design 22

2.4 Environment and ageing 23

2.5 Learning from the NDA programme 24

2.6 Re‐designing the kitchen 25

2.7 Conclusion: the relationship between care and design 31

References 32

3 Curating Space, Choreographing Care: The Efficacy of the Everyday 37
Daryl Martin

3.1 Introduction 37

3.2 Maggie’s: care by design 39

3.3 The accommodation of the everyday 42

3.4 Working the table 45

3.5 Familiarity bonds and the communal encounter 49

3.6 Conclusion: hospitality, generosity and the practice of care 51

Acknowledgements 53

References 53

4 ‘I Don’t Care About Places’: The Whereabouts of Design in Mental Health Care 56
Ola Söderström

4.1 Introduction 56

4.2 The design/care nexus 57

4.3 Spaces of design/geographies of mental illness 59

4.4 Everyday urban geographies of mental health 61

4.5 Designing landscapes of mental health care 68

References 70

5 The Sensory City: Autism, Design and Care 74
Joyce Davidson and Victoria L. Henderson

5.1 Introduction 74

5.2 Methodology and meaning 78

5.3 Global sensory themes: connections, confusions and pressures to conform 79

5.4 Coming to our senses: pragmatic considerations 81

5.5 Making space for autism: discussion and recommendations 85

5.6 Closing thoughts: on being open to embodiments of autistic sensory difference 88

References 91

6 Configuring the Caring City: Ownership, Healing, Openness 95
Charlotte Bates, Rob Imrie and Kim Kullman

6.1 Introduction 95

6.2 Ownership 98

6.3 Healing 103

6.4 Openness 108

6.5 Conclusion 113

Acknowledgements 114

References 114

7 ‘Looking after Things’: Caring for Sites of Trauma in Post‐Earthquake Christchurch, New Zealand 116
Jacky Bowring

7.1 Introduction 116

7.2 Wounding 121

7.3 Dwelling 122

7.4 Fragility 123

7.5 Empathy 125

7.6 ‘Treatment’ 129

7.7 Re‐wounding? 134

Acknowledgements 135

References 135

8 Empathy, Design and Care – Intention, Knowledge and Intuition: The Example of Alvar Aalto 138
Juhani Pallasmaa

8.1 Preamble 138

8.2 The flesh of the world 140

8.3 Empathy in design 140

8.4 Architecture as a medical instrument 142

8.5 The acts of identification and homecoming 145

8.6 The promise of beauty 145

8.7 Synthetic design 146

8.8 Art and evidence‐based design 148

8.9 The power of intuition 150

8.10 The loss of empathic wisdom 152

References 153

9 Architecture, Place and the ‘Care‐Full’ Design of Everyday Life 155
Jos Boys

9.1 Introduction 155

9.2 What counts as care in architectural education and practice? 156

9.3 The care‐full design of place 160

9.4 Re‐imagining caring in architectural and urban design 164

9.5 Caring differently? 165

9.6 Conclusion: from places to practices? 174

References 175

10 Ageing, Care and the Practice of Urban Curating 178
Sophie Handler

10.1 Introduction 178

10.2 ‘Urban curating’ and the spatialised practice of care 179

10.3 ‘Making space for older age’ 181

10.4 Other stories on growing old 183

10.5 Acting ‘otherhow’: extending duties of care 186

10.6 A vocabulary of caring labours 189

10.7 Subverting the ‘hierarchy of needs’ 191

10.8 Conclusion: adopting the language of care 194

References 196

11 Caring through Design?: En torno a la silla and the ‘Joint Problem‐Making’ of Technical Aids 198
Tomás Sánchez Criado and Israel Rodríguez‐Giralt

11.1 Introduction: the issue of technical aids in post‐austerity Spain 198

11.2 An open‐source wheelchair kit: expanding the relationship between people in wheelchairs and their social and urban environments 201

11.3 Opening up space for a briefcase, unleashing the wheelchair’s possibilities 204

11.4 Radicalising design through small object interventions: care as ‘joint problem‐making’? 211

11.5 Concluding remarks: ‘joint problem‐ making’ as a careful design mode in post‐austerity times? 215

Acknowledgements 216

References 216

12 Design and the Art of Care: Engaging the More than Human and Less than Inhuman 219
Michael Schillmeier

12.1 Introduction 219

12.2 Re‐design as artful contrast 219

12.3 Evoking mess 220

12.4 Social wellbeing 222

12.5 The art of rift‐design 224

12.6 Design, care and temporality 225

12.7 Design, care and spatiality 225

12.8 Caring about and resisting the habitual 226

12.9 More than human and less than inhuman 227

12.10 The ‘more than human’ of ideas 228

12.11 Less than inhuman 229

12.12 Design as care 232

References 234

Afterword: Caring Urban Futures 236
Charlotte Bates and Kim Kullman

Index 241

Rob Imrie is Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has international expertise in urban governance, architecture and community development in cities, the impact and implications of urban policy in British and international cities, the geographies of disability and the built environment, and the body, embodiment and urban design. He is author of the books Disability and the City (Sage Pubs, 1996), Accessible Housing (Routledge, 2006), and co-author of Inclusive Design (Routledge, 2001) and Architectural Design and Regulation (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). His most recent book is the edited volume, Sustainable London? The Future of a Global City (Policy Press, 2014). He was formerly Professor of Geography at King’s College London and Royal Holloway University of London.

Charlotte Bates is a Researcher in the Sociology Department at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work touches on the body and materiality, everyday life, and sense of place. She is currently exploring the relationship between bodies, belonging and space through the European Research Council funded project ‘Universalism, universal design and equitable access to the designed environment’. Her work has been published in Sociological Research Online and Visual Studies, and her first book, an edited volume entitled Video Methods: Social Science Research in Motion (Routledge, 2014), was published in 2014.

Kim Kullman is a Researcher on the European Research Council project Universalism, Universal Design and Equitable Access to the Designed Environment at Goldsmiths, University of London. His previous research has explored everyday practices of mobility, concentrating on how these are learned, sustained and transformed across the life course. He has published on childhood, qualitative methods and geographies of care in journals such as Social and Cultural Geography, Children’s Geographies and Geography Compass. He has also co-edited a volume on children’s geographies in Finland, Lapsuuden muuttuvat tilat (Vastapaino, 2012), which, among other topics, engages with different arenas of care, from nurseries to urban spaces.

As an increasingly urbanised world is seeking to deal with recent social, natural and technological changes, Care and Design: Bodies, Buildings, Cities explores how concepts and practices of care can cultivate more responsive forms of design that attend to the fragile relations that constitute cites.
Combining different areas of enquiry, from human geography, sociology and performance to gerontology, architecture and disability studies, the book takes the reader through recent debates on care across the human and social sciences, further enriching these through theoretical elaborations and international case studies on design projects in urban settings. These include the construction of hospitals and homes, the planning of public parks and the design of mobility equipment, as well as urban curating and post-disaster recovery.
Exploring how the skills and sensibilities of caring can be expressed through design practice to enhance wellbeing among those who inhabit, and depend upon, cities, the book throws light on a timely set of questions that contemporary research has rarely discussed in detail.