Care and Design: Bodies, Buildings, Cities

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.

Notes on Contributors

Preface

1. Designing with care and caring with design
Rob Imrie and Kim Kullman

2. Age–inclusive design: a challenge for kitchen living
Sheila Peace

3. Curating space, choreographing care: the efficacy of the everyday
Daryl Martin

4. I don t care about places : the whereabouts of design in mental health care
Ola Söderström

5. The sensory city: autism, design and care
Joyce Davidson and Victoria L. Henderson

6. Configuring the caring city: ownership, healing, openness
Charlotte Bates, Rob Imrie, and Kim Kullman

7. Looking after things : caring for sites of trauma in post–earthquake Christchurch, New Zealand
Jacky Bowring

8. Empathy, design and care – intention, knowledge and intuition: the example of Alvar Aalto
Juhani Pallasmaa

9. Architecture, place and the care–full design of everyday life
Jos Boys

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

11. Caring through design: En torno a la silla and the joint problem–making of technical aids
Tomás Sánchez Criado and Israel Rodriguez–Giralt

12. Design and the art of care: engaging the more than human and less than inhuman
Michael Schillmeier

13. Afterword: caring urban futures
Charlotte Bates and Kim Kullman

Index

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.