Daryl Martin

Architecture and health care: a place for sociology

Sociologists of health and illness have tended to overlook the architecture and buildings used in health care. This contrasts with medical geographers who have yielded a body of work on the significance of places and spaces in the experience of health and illness. A review of sociological studies of the role of the built environment in the performance of medical practice uncovers an important vein of work, worthy of further study. Through the historically situated example of hospital architecture, this article seeks to tease out substantive and methodological issues that can inform a distinctive sociology of healthcare architecture. Contemporary healthcare buildings manifest design models developed for hotels, shopping malls and homes. These design features are congruent with neoliberal forms of subjectivity in which patients are constituted as consumers and responsibilised citizens. We conclude that an adequate sociology of healthcare architecture necessitates an appreciation of both the construction and experience of buildings, exploring the briefs and plans of their designers, and observing their everyday uses. Combining approaches and methods from the sociology of health and illness and science and technology studies offers potential for a novel research agenda that takes healthcare buildings as its substantive focus.

Affective sanctuaries: understanding Maggie’s as therapeutic landscapes

Abstract Since 1996, Maggie’s has led a new approach to cancer support that emphasises the empowering potential of the designed environment for its users. This paper draws on qualitative research from two separate projects undertaken with staff, visitors and volunteers at 10 Maggie’s Centres, exploring their experiences of Maggie’s environments, and their use of internal spaces and garden areas. Maggie’s has been most often noted for the buildings it commissions, but we argue that the gardens prompt a re-evaluation of the integrated healing environment. Locating our research in health geography debates, Maggie’s buildings and gardens are situated as contemporary examples of therapeutic landscapes. The Centres open up debates about the capacity of the designed environment to enhance the experience of well-being. This is achieved through the provision of communal areas within which visitors can find private places for emotional retreat, encouraging the experience of affective sanctuary.

Imagined Bodies: architects and their constructions of later life

ABSTRACT This article comprises a sociological analysis of how architects imagine the ageing body when designing residential care homes for later life and the extent to which they engage empathetically with users. Drawing on interviews with architectural professionals based in the United Kingdom, we offer insight into the ways in which architects envisage the bodies of those who they anticipate will populate their buildings. Deploying the notions of ‘body work’ and ‘the body multiple’, our analysis reveals how architects imagined a variety of bodies in nuanced ways. These imagined bodies emerge as they talked through the practicalities of the design process. Moreover, their conceptions of bodies were also permeated by prevailing ideologies of caring: although we found that they sought to resist dominant discourses of ageing, they nevertheless reproduced these discourses. Architects’ constructions of bodies are complicated by the collaborative nature of the design process, where we find an incessant juggling between the competing demands of multiple stakeholders, each of whom anticipate other imagined bodies and seek to shape the design of buildings to meet their requirements. Our findings extend a nascent sociological literature on architecture and social care by revealing how architects participate in the shaping of care for later life as ‘body workers’, but also how their empathic aspirations can be muted by other imperatives driving the marketisation of care.

Eyjafjallajökull 4′33″: A Stillness in Three Parts

Abstract This paper uses the work and musical theory of the composer John Cage as a point of departure for considering the disruption caused by the ash cloud originating at the Eyjafjallajökull volcano. Mobility has been defined as a constellation of movement, representation and practice; this definition is used to structure an analysis of what Eyjafjallajökull meant for the pace of air travel, how it unsettles common‐place cultural understandings of air travel, and what it could mean for the practice of aeromobility in the future. The literature on stillness is engaged to inform a discussion of air travel, with the airport as its exemplar space, and its potential to act as a focal point for debate on the nature of contemporary citizenship.

The Anticipated Futures of Space Tourism

Abstract This paper examines the development of the ‘space tourism’ industry, a concept which primarily denotes the development of space technology for recreational or leisure purposes. It will first theoretically locate space tourism with relevant streams of the mobilities literature, primarily research on aeromobilities and tourism mobilities. It will then summarise existing literature on space tourism, focusing especially on the different models of space tourism that have been proposed and the subtle but important differences between them. The analysis then explores the perceptions of feasibility of space tourism from those within the space sector, the anticipated changes to living these forms of space tourism would bring with them, and the comparisons with existing forms of mobility that are drawn by many in the space sector when attempting to ‘sell’ the value and potential of space tourism. In the final part of the paper, we explore many of the implicit assumptions held by this nascent industry, the uncertain position of the passenger within these conceptions of future space tourism, and identify avenues for future research into this emerging form of mobility.

Introduction: Towards a Political Understanding of New Ruins

This debate section gathers together contributions from cultural historians, political geographers, urban sociologists and architectural writers on new forms of ruination in contemporary landscapes. Their case studies span examples of ruins in China, North America, Ireland and Ukraine, as well as reviewing cultural representations of ruined, remote and peripheral spaces in England and Greece. Many wider cultural representations of ruined landscapes are primarily visual; whilst these have great value in alerting wider publics to the debris of global capitalism, neoliberalism and state-sanctioned processes of cultural imperialism, what is needed within academic contributions to the ruinology literature is a deeper understanding and articulation of the wider contexts within which ruination occurs. Therefore, several contributions supplement visual representations of ruination with ethnographic and first-person accounts of places on the ground, whereas other contributions offer readings of ruined landscapes that are rich in political histories and policy details. Connections are made to wider contemporary debates around ‘forensic architecture’ and critical archaeologies of the present and recent past. What connects these contributions is a commitment to situating ruins within their historical, policy and social contexts, and working through ruination to open out political readings of landscape.

Mobilities‐Based Urban Planning in the North of England

Abstract This article explores the suggestion by architect Will Alsop that the future prosperity and influence of Northern English cities will be best achieved through merging into one discrete urban entity facilitated by the M62 motorway corridor. The article will locate Alsop’s plan within the concerns of literature drawn from the mobilities strand of social science research, as well as architectural theories of urbanism and contemporaneous governmental policy. The article concludes by looking at the Northern English region and Alsop’s plan within a national, European and global context.

‘Essentially it's just a lot of bedrooms’: architectural design, prescribed personalisation and the construction of care homes for later life

Abstract This article draws on ethnographic data from a UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded study called ‘Buildings in the Making’. The project aims to open up the black box of architectural work to explore what happens between the commissioning of architectural projects through to the construction of buildings, and seeks to understand how ideas about care for later life are operationalised into designs. Drawing on recent scholarship on ‘materialities of care’ and ‘practising architectures’, which emphasise the salience of material objects for understanding the politics and practices of care, we focus here on ‘beds’. References to ‘beds’ were ubiquitous throughout our data, and we analyse their varied uses and imaginaries as a ‘way in’ to understanding the embedded nature of architectural work. Four themes emerged: ‘commissioning architectures and the commodification of beds’; ‘adjusting architectures and socio‐spatial inequalities of beds’; ‘prescribing architectures and person‐centred care beds’; and ‘phenomenological architectures and inhabiting beds’. We offer the concept prescribed personalisation to capture how practising architectures come to reconcile the multiple tensions of commodification and the codification of person centred care, in ways that might mitigate phenomenological and serendipitous qualities of life and living in care settings during later life.

Dirty linen, liminal spaces and later life: Meanings of laundry in care home design and practice

This article explores the design and practice of laundries and laundry work in care home settings. This is an often-overlooked aspect of the care environment, yet one that shapes lived experiences and meanings of care. It draws on ethnographic and qualitative data from two UK-based Economic and Social Research Council–funded studies: Buildings in the Making, a study of architects designing care homes for later life, and Dementia and Dress, a project exploring the role of clothing in dementia care. Drawing together these studies, the article explores the temporality and spatiality of laundry work, contrasting designers’ conceptions of laundry in terms of flows, movement, and efficiency with the lived bodily reality of laundry work, governed by the messiness of care and ‘body time’. The article examines how laundry is embedded within the meanings and imaginaries of the care home as a ‘home’ or ‘hotel’, and exposes the limitations of these imaginaries. We explore the significance of laundry work for supporting identity, as part of wider assemblages of care. The article concludes by drawing out implications for architectural design and sociological conceptions of care.

From Problems in the North to the Problematic North: Northern Devolution Through the Lens of History

Current debates about Northern English cities and their role in national economic strategies cannot be read simply through the lens of contemporary politics. We therefore take the Northern Powerhouse as our starting point to trace a long history of policy and planning discourses about the North of England. We use Russell’s chronology of key historical moments in which Northern English cities hold a particular charge in cultural narratives of the nation to guide our analysis of contemporaneous tensions in debates about planning and governance. A focus on representations about the North of England over the last two centuries reveals four interlocking themes: the role of London in directing debates about the North; a tension between political and spatial approaches to planning; the characterisation of cities in the North as intrinsically problematic; and the continued issue of poverty in these cities.