The Caring City: Ethics of Urban Design 9781529201222

Citation preview

THE CARING CIT Y E THI C S OF U RBAN DE SI G N JU LIE T DAV I S

THE CARING CITY Ethics of Urban Design Juliet Davis

First published in Great Britain in 2022 by Bristol University Press University of Bristol 1-​9 Old Park Hill Bristol BS2 8BB UK t: +​44 (0)117 374 6645 e: bup-​[email protected] Details of international sales and distribution partners are available at bristoluniversitypress.co.uk © Bristol University Press 2022 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-​1-​5292-​0121-​5 hardcover ISBN 978-​1-​5292-​0123-​9 ePub ISBN 978-​1-​5292-​0122-​2 ePdf The right of Juliet Davis to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved: no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of Bristol University Press. Every reasonable effort has been made to obtain permission to reproduce copyrighted material. If, however, anyone knows of an oversight, please contact the publisher. The statements and opinions contained within this publication are solely those of the author and not of the University of Bristol or Bristol University Press. The University of Bristol and Bristol University Press disclaim responsibility for any injury to persons or property resulting from any material published in this publication. Bristol University Press works to counter discrimination on grounds of gender, race, disability, age and sexuality. Cover design: Liam Roberts Front cover image: Witherford Watson Mann Architects Bristol University Press uses environmentally responsible print partners. Printed in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

For Otto, my son

Contents List of Figures

vi

Introduction 1 Care as Practice and Ethic 2 Care in and through Urban Design 3 Placing Care 4 Accessibility in/​as Caring 5 Shaping Caring Urban Atmospheres 6 Openness and the Unfolding of Care 7 Continuity, Attachment and Care 8 Urban Design as Tending Futures Conclusion

1 11 22 36 63 88 112 139 165 189

Afterword and Acknowledgements Notes References Index

198 202 204 222

v

List of Figures 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5a

Startblok in Amsterdam  Almshouse site plan Almshouse garden room perspective view  Almshouse internal corridor perspective view  Sargfabrik (the FAB) ground-​floor plan, set within its urban context  3.5b Sargfabrik (the MISS) levels 1 and 2 (lower and upper ground) floor plans, set at the corner of its urban block 3.6 Sargfabrik (the MISS) part of the dining space which wraps around the library 3.7 Sargfabrik (the FAB) ground-​floor circulation and residential thresholds 4.1 Meidlinger Hauptstraße plan  4.2 Meidlinger Hauptstraße perspective view  4.3 Kampung Admiralty ground-​floor public space 4.4 Kampung Admiralty section 4.5 Kampung Admiralty hawker centre 5.1 Visualization of Thrive Zones proposals  5.2 Thrive Zones project conceptual sketch 5.3 Parque Central water channel 5.4 Parque Central Romantic Garden 6.1 Aranya lane 6.2 Aranya demonstration house 6.3 Plans and sections of five Aranya houses as built in 2019  6.4 Aranya house being painted prior to Diwali 6.5 Polgarstraβe 30a site plan 6.6 Polgarstraβe 30a axonometric drawing showing flat types 6.7 Polgarstrasβe 30a rear façade balconies in use 7.1 Leathermarket estates site plan 7.2a Marklake Court brick façade at ground level 7.2b Marklake Court brick details 7.3 Marklake Court in the context of the wider estate 7.4 Overview of Central Hill estate from the south vi

43 48 50 53 57 57 59 60 72 74 78 79 81 99 100 106 108 123 124 125 128 130 132 136 145 150 151 152 160

newgenprepdf

List of Figures

7.5 7.6 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5

Vizualization showing proposed roof extensions to low-​r ise maisonettes  Save Central Hill campaigners outside the estate  A cleaned and revived well, part of the Million Wells initiative  Parc Hadau plan and sketches A recharge well being formed by Mannu Vaddars Lake Jakkur’s constructed wetland Visualization of the central commons at Parc Hadau

vii

161 162 168 170 178 179 183

Introduction This book sets out to consider the potential of urban design in terms of care in cities. It is concerned with how urban design supports the diverse inhabitants of cities in meeting their needs and developing capabilities, enabling them to thrive and flourish into the future. It is also concerned with the role of urban design with respect to care practices and relations –​with its potential to condition the dependencies of people on others, to foster patterns of interdependence, and to enact care for future generations. For a long time, the potential of design with regard to care or caring was principally explored through particular spaces associated, for example, with the care of children, the elderly, refugees, homeless people, disabled people and the sick. The result is a rich and still rapidly growing corpus of studies of typologies of care-​centred architecture –​from the hospitals, hospices, historical asylums and day centres of healthcare, to the nurseries and schools of childcare, to the residential settings of care in families and communities (see, for example, Briller and Calkins, 2000; Nord and Högström, 2017; Worpole, 2009). Though important exceptions exist (such as Mitchell et al, 2003), the significance of urban design was not considered to the same degree. Hence, relatively little emphasis was placed on the relevance of the locations of particular spaces of care in cities relative to other land uses for care. Similarly, relatively little emphasis was placed on the role of various aspects of urban form and qualities of urban places and infrastructures with regard to how people are involved in and practise care for one another and in communities. This relatively narrow focus on the potential of design regarding care has been gradually broadening in recent times, however. Since around 2010, an increasingly wide array of urban places and infrastructures have cropped up in literature as important ‘spaces of care’, encompassing streets, cafés, museums, allotments and other urban green spaces (see, for example, Munro, 2013; Artmann et al, 2017; Mangione, 2017, 2018). There is rising interest in how morphological characteristics of neighbourhoods shape caring relations, including the accessibilities and porosities of 1

THE CARING CITY

infrastructures and amenities (Barnes, 2011; Kullmann, 2014; Bates et al, 2017). A widening lens on care beyond institutions and contexts of formal care has, in turn, led to greater focus on the physical and material qualities of spaces of informal care between neighbours, friends and even strangers (for example, Williams, 2005; Kehl and Volker, 2013; Pont et al, 2013). There is an emerging conceptualization of urban care in terms of the repair of places impacted by traumas of decline, conflict or redevelopment (see, for example, Till, 2012). Informed by environmental studies and the climate emergency, there has also been an increasing emphasis on how architecture and urbanism may embody care for the resources and fragile ecosystems of planet earth upon which all life depends (see, for example, Fitz et al, 2019). As part of these lines of exploration, there has also been growing discussion not just of how design may shape care practices but also how it may embody an ethic of care and actually be a care practice in itself (Fathers, 2017; Bates et al, 2017). To date, however, there has been no single monograph devoted to the caring potentials of urban design. This is the gap in theory which this book sets out to fill. Across its eight chapters, I will explore how urban design is relevant to care needs, relations and practices pertaining to diverse citizens in multiple ways. I will show how urban design can respond to care needs and help develop capabilities for wellbeing and flourishing. I will also show how an ethic of care can be reflected in urban design practice and become embodied in urban places to foster more humane, attuned and resilient cityscapes than many live in today.

Caring urban design? To accomplish these tasks, I begin in quite a dry place, with the complexities inherent to the notions of both urban design and care and by setting out some of the ways in which these will be utilized and studied throughout the book. Let’s begin with urban design. Urban design encompasses a range of activities and scales that relate to how, as a discipline, it lies between and partially overlaps with town planning, landscape design, architecture and, increasingly, also ecology.1 Stemming from its relationships to these other fields and the consequent hybridity of knowledge that it encompasses, it is, as Matthew Carmona writes, a ‘mongrel’ discipline (Carmona, 2014: 1). In the broadest terms however, urban design is a practice involving a variety of social actors and professional competencies leading to the shaping of aspects of urban form, characteristics of place and the patterns of movement in cities. Hence, it denotes the processes of design that produce urban places and, at the same time, the spatial and physical outcomes of urban design themselves. 2

Introduction

The process of urban design is shaped by many contexts, actors and agencies –​from policy and regulation to governance arrangements related to particular sites and projects, to financing and real estate, to land ownership patterns, to the professional roles and networks through which design is valued and produced (Carmona, 2016; Madanipour and Hull, 2016 [2001]). It is also often shaped by design philosophies, political orientations and methods that are distinctive to particular practitioners, reflected in aspects of design ranging from forms of site analysis, to participatory approaches to design, to scenario-​building. Design process may also reflect particular moral standpoints regarding the role of the designer and the nature of good design or best practice. The physical, material outcomes of urban design, in turn, have been defined in different ways. A key focus of urban design production is the ‘spaces between buildings’, which, as Ford shows (Ford, 2000), include a huge range of types of urban space: from commercial spaces such as markets, to thoroughfares such as alleyways and streets, public, recreational and ceremonial spaces such as parks and squares and even ordinary, semi-​public territories including driveways, parking lots and suburban gardens (also see Gehl and Koch, 1987). But urban design is also, in a larger sense, concerned with the various ‘elements’ of urban form (as in Dempsey et al, 2010) that make up the built environment encompassing buildings, the spaces between them and all their interrelationships leading to masterplans, design codes and urban frameworks as key activities in which urban designers in practice engage. Urban design may relate to radically different scales of intervention: from small elements of urban furniture, to the sorts of small urban spaces famously characterized by William Whyte (1980), to grand public plazas, parks, large urban extensions or even whole cities. And while urban design is often concerned with the morphology and spatial characteristics of new places, it may also involve the development of strategies that shape the transformation of cities over time. Such strategies may involve the establishment of particular relationships between old and new, or between continuity and discontinuity in the management of urban growth or decline (see, for example, Inam, 2013; Carmona, 2021). Increasingly, urban design is engaged in addressing the transformative context of Anthropogenic climate change, with theory and practice working towards the sustainment and resilience of communities and whole cities within fragile ecosystems and on a warming planet (see, for example, Pickett et al, 2013). How urban design has shaped the transformation of cities historically has of course often been the focus of critique within urban studies, from the work of Jane Jacobs (1992 [1961]) in the 1950s on the destructive impacts of design-​led urban renewal on life in American cities, to contemporary accounts of the relation between designs for urban regeneration, gentrification and the displacement of low-​income communities (for example, Lees and Ferreri, 2016). 3

THE CARING CITY

The variety of the potential output of urban design, as of concepts associated with the practice, has led leading scholars in the field such as Matthew Carmona and Kim Dovey to endeavour to set out a number of broad categories of urban design thinking to delimit the scope of this fluid field. Thus, for Carmona (2021), the primary dimensions of urban design, which cut across different types of urban forms, scales buildings and spaces, are: ‘morphological’, ‘perceptual’, ‘social’, ‘visual’, ‘functional’ and ‘temporal’. Dovey (2016) sets out a different range of themes, however, for his own guide to ‘urban design thinking’. While these do include typologies such as towers and shopping malls, they also include elements of urban form such as ‘access’, ‘mix’, ‘density’ and ‘interface’, and experiential qualities such as ‘atmosphere’ and ‘memory’. This book, similarly, is organized according to a set of themes within urban design, though I should stress that the selection of these came about through immersion as much in care scholarship as in urban design literature and that they are in no way intended to be read as a toolkit or formula for caring cities. A major advantage of a thematic approach is that it allows me to consider spatial, material and experiential aspects of urban design in relation to care in a broad sense before focussing in on design projects that deploy the aspects in question in response to particular care issues, practices and relations in cities. The approach also allows me to avoid defining either particular spaces in the city as zones of care (rather than others) or particular people as subjects of care (rather than others), reflecting instead a view that care is relevant to all. Throughout the book, urban design will be considered in terms of both processes of design and the physical outcomes of urban design practice. My methodology has been crafted to allow care to be revealed and understood in the context of urban design as complex, linking different social actors, spaces, materialities and times. Let’s now consider care. Like urban design, understandings of care are varied and continue to unfold. As Maria Puig de la Bellacasa puts it (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011), care has long been a ‘contested concept’ within interdisciplinary care scholarship. Three primary reasons for this may be identified. First is the fact that care stands for subtly different things when used as a noun (the care) or a verb (to care). The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) traces the etymological roots of care as a noun to the Old English word caru or caeru, which means mental suffering. Caru in turn derives from an Old High German word, chara, which means trouble or grief. From these words, the OED suggests, stem the ongoing use of ‘care’ in common parlance as in to ‘have a care’, signifying a burden, a concern or worry that weighs the person or people bearing it down. Care as a verb is said to arise from a related root in the Old High German word châron, which was linked to chara, denoting the actual process of grieving, lamenting, feeling concern and assuming a burden.2 4

Introduction

However, the meanings of care in both senses have evolved over time and quite different meanings are encompassed by each today. Part of this evolution has been the development of more positive ideas of care and concern, moving beyond notions of burden, worry and lament (see Michael Fine, 2006). While care as a noun may still be used to refer to woes or burdens, it may also give name to a practice involving attending to specific people or groups –​as in the care of children. When care is used as a verb, as in ‘to care for’ or ‘caring’, it can mean to have concern or take interest (Frankfurt, 1998), to like or enjoy something or to look after someone or something. Used in the context of ‘taking care’, however, it can also mean to refrain from doing harm to self or someone/​something else –​to perform acts of preservation motivated by a sense of the worth of the cared-​for (Held, 2006: 29–​30). Furthermore, when we describe someone as caring, using care now also as an adjective, we are typically not saying they are weighed down with burdens or grief but that they are empathetic and kindly, disposed to feel and act out of concern for others, noticing their situation and needs. Care is a contested concept, second, because the sorts of activities that it can be seen to encompass are highly diverse, leading to difficulty in defining the scope of care as a practice in general terms. Caring dispositions and practices might be formulated in response to the increasing incapacity of a person with declining health to take care of themselves, the destruction of rainforests worldwide or the exploitation of resources which future generations should be able to rely on. The combinations of actors and activities required to address these contexts of caring would clearly be very different. As Puig de la Bellacasa puts it, depending on context, care ‘implicates different relationalities, issues and practices’ (2017: 3), with these being key to any empirical understanding of its ethical and practical dimensions. For many scholars, the breadth of caring practices has produced a certain resistance to defining care, let alone good/​bad care, other than in context. However, the development of care ethics from the early 1980s has involved the production of more generalized understandings that, though debated, evidence –​as Michael Fine argues –​a certain ‘convergence of definitions of care around common themes’ (Fine, 2006: 26). This has been important as the range of practices regarded as care and for which care is viewed as relevant has only continued to expand, with care coming to prominence in a range of disciplinary and practice-​based contexts spanning fields as diverse as medicine, social care, agriculture, political theory, urban studies and architecture. These understandings centre not so much on the specificities of practices but on what care implies about personhood and relationships, what it broadly involves and how it can be regarded as a moral theory of practice. Perhaps the best-​known example of a generalized understanding 5

THE CARING CITY

of care is that formulated more than thirty years ago by Joan Tronto and Berenice Fisher (1990), which continues to make regular appearance in care-​related studies in many disciplines today: Care is a species activity that includes everything we do to maintain, continue and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-​ sustaining web. (Fisher and Tronto, 1990: 40; Tronto, 2001: 61) Care is a contested concept, third, because of the ways in which it is has been debated in the context of care ethics and, indeed, how it has been defined as an ethic. The definition of care as an ethic began with the groundbreaking theoretical work of Carol Gilligan in her book In a Different Voice (1982), and was rapidly taken up and developed by other feminist scholars (see, for example, Noddings, 1984; Baier, 1986; Fisher and Tronto, 1990; Held, 1993; Kittay, 1999). In a Different Voice details the outcomes of Gilligan’s research into the different ways in which men and women approached moral dilemmas in personal life. An ethics of care, she argued, emerged as a distinctive feature of women’s choices and decision-​making processes, arising from a primary concern with important relationships in their lives, with the interdependencies and emotional attachments they involved and the nature of responsibilities for and towards others. Over the years care ethics has moved far beyond this basis in the gender politics and feminist theory of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Some key elements of Gilligan’s analysis do, however, remain at the heart of contemporary care ethics, particularly her recognition of persons in an ontological sense as continually constituted by and through relations with others and her concern with the flourishing of those involved in care relations. But, as care ethics has grown into a distinct branch of moral philosophy, new concepts have been introduced and/​or developed. For example, scholars taking the theory forwards have debated understandings of the role of emotion in moral reasoning associated with care (Kittay, 1999; Held, 2006: 35), the roles of autonomy, dependency and interdependency in care (for example, Kittay and Feder, 2002), the relationship between care as value and as practice (Held, 2006), the role of such values as trust in care (Baier, 1986) and the problems of how power is exercised in care including how care is often devalued (Tronto, 1993, 1995, 2013). The possible common features of ‘good’ caring have also been the subject of considerable debate, both at a theoretical level and in relation to specific care practices (see, for example, Tronto, 1993; Mol, 2008, 2010). These will be discussed in further detail in Chapter 1, where their relevance for urban design thinking and the analysis of specific projects as care will also begin to be drawn out. 6

Introduction

Suffice to say here that care ethics is typically concerned with how the concrete and particular needs of human and/​or non-​human others are recognized and addressed. It works with, as Virginia Held (2006: 13) puts it, ‘a conception of persons as relational rather than as the self-​sufficient independent individuals of the dominant moral theories.’ Care ethics places emphasis on the quality of practices of care and how these may be evaluated as genuinely attuned to care needs (Fisher and Tronto, 1990; Tronto, 1993; Tronto, 2001; Sevenhuijsen, 2016). Related to this is a recognition of the role of emotions such as sympathy, empathy, concern and love in motivating caring action and shaping the quality of care. Finally, care ethics is future oriented, placing emphasis on action oriented towards the potential of all those involved in care relations and ‘circles of care’ (Abel and Nelson, 1990) for thriving and flourishing. To address my primary aims to explore the caring potentials of urban design and, in the process, develop new understandings of the ethics of urban design, this book brings into conversation debates on the scope and social/ ecological impacts of urban design and discussions on the nature of caring practice/​care ethics. Doing so has involved integrating hybrid literatures spanning not only the fields of moral philosophy and urban design but also sociology, geography and science and technology studies (STS), across which fields a vast corpus of research on care is distributed. Here, at the very start of addressing my aims, it would seem clear that a key opportunity arises from how closer and broader definitions of care have been framed. As I will argue in more depth in the upcoming Chapter 1, care ethics points to the need to focus on practices of attunement to situated care needs, relations and practices in contemporary cities –​to understand care as Imrie and Kullmann also endeavour to do (Imrie and Kullman, 2017) through specific projects in which such disposition and practice is apparent. And yet, care ethics also provides the conceptual means to develop a set of more general understandings of what ‘good care’ in the context of urban design might entail and what, indeed, a ‘good city’ in these terms might be. The city has of course long been constructed according to notions of goodness, classic examples including Plato’s republican polis –​shaped around an ideal of democracy –​St Augustine’s city of God –​shaped around Christian ideas of salvation –​and Thomas More’s utopia of social and political order. More recent attempts to define the features of a good city are provided by urbanists Kevin Lynch (1981), Alan Jacobs (2011) and Ash Amin (2006), each of whom offers a different set of criteria for imagining and assessing contemporary cities in this way. In this book, another set is offered again, drawing on ideas of care. This, however, shares broadly with Lynch an emphasis on goodness as defined by ‘performance’ and ‘fitness’ rather than through the prescription of idealized forms, with Jacobs an emphasis on theorizing through the detail of specific examples, and with Amin an emphasis on establishing an ethics 7

THE CARING CITY

of caring urban design with the ‘repair’ of damage and ‘relatedness’, as well as flourishment and fulfillment at its heart.

The bones of an argument The book will argue that urban design may be thought of as caring and as embodying an ethic of care in a range of ways. Design can support people in their everyday lives, enabling them to meet needs and develop capabilities key to wellbeing and flourishing. It can pattern the giving and receiving of care between people, fostering awareness of others’ needs across lines of cultural and generational difference. It can help maintain bonds between people and places, acting as a repository for memories that people hold dear. It can facilitate adaptations necessary to respond to how the care needs of individuals and groups shift over time. It also has the potential to contribute to the maintenance of resources vital to life on earth. Its doing so effectively, however, requires careful attunement on the part of designers to place-​based situations and contexts. These lines of argument are developed over the chapters that follow, concluding with a summary of elements of an urban ethic of care. In Chapter 1, I set out a series of ways of understanding care as a practice and an ethic, and consider what this suggests for the theorization and analysis of cities and urban design as caring. Building on the ideas I establish here, in Chapter 2, I consider how to identify and evaluate care in the context of urban design. The key challenge, as I will argue, lies in the complexity of urban design’s shaping role, as discussed earlier, which is distributed across the physical and material outcomes of design practice and the often multifaceted, drawn-​out processes of design themselves. Thus, I discuss how ‘materialities of care’ (Buse et al, 2018) may be identified in urban forms, infrastructures and urban transformation processes as designed, but also how care may be detected in the ideas, intentions and methods of design adopted in practice. In this chapter, I also crystallize the themes which form the focus of the six chapters that follow, and outline some of the features of the research underpinning them. Chapters 3 through 8 explore various ways in which urban design may be thought of as shaping care relations and practices and how, in so doing, it may embody an ethic of care. Each involves the identification of a key theme within urban design and discussion of the potential framing of that theme in terms of care. Building on the contention of feminist care ethicists that care is always situated and specific, each chapter also involves the exploration of the theme in question through two specific case study urban design projects. In each chapter, these offer examples of design processes and physical designs that develop the theme in question in view of particular care needs, relations and practices. Each chapter concludes with reflections on what the research suggests for an understanding of cities and urban design as caring. 8

Introduction

Chapter 3 focusses on the role of urban design with regard to the ‘place of care’ (Sevenhuijsen, 2003) in cities. It explores how ways of valuing and recognizing care, as of constructing responsibilities for care in society, are reflected in cities and shaped by planning and design practices. It also considers how practices of care in neighbourhoods are articulated through the deployment of intimate spaces of the home, interpersonal spaces of sociability and communal spaces (Madanipour, 2003: 95–​144). The two case studies for this chapter, though very different, both offer ways of thinking about how urban design may help to stage encounters and create possibilities for supportive networks to grow. Chapter 4 focusses on accessibility, a concept that has more often been framed in terms of ideals of autonomy and self-sufficiency than of care. Here, I show how accessibilities of urban infrastructures can improve the reach of care services and resources, condition patterns of interdependence within care relations and help carers and those cared for alike. Chapter 5 focusses on how ‘urban atmospheres’ of care in cities may be identified (Griffero, 2013; Gandy, 2017; Böhme, 2018). I begin this chapter by showing how both ‘affective atmospheres’ (Böhme, 2013, 2017; Anderson, 2009) and atmosphere in the sense of gases and air quality (Adey, 2013a, 2013b) have each been associated with issues relevant to care and/​ or to specific care practices. Through the chapter’s two case studies, I go on to consider how forms of atmospheric urban design may complement practices of preventative healthcare and seek to foster experiences of wellbeing, embodying an ethic of care in the process. In Chapter 6, discussion turns to what Carmona (2021) refers to as the ‘temporal dimension’ of urban design. Chapter 6 itself considers how notions of ‘openness’ in urban design (Kendall, 2000; Sennett, 2007) can correspond to the capacity of places to respond to people’s changing involvements in care over time. Its two case studies reveal different strategies of openness encompassing incomplete form, adaptability and flexibility, all of which are revealed as significant for how care needs and practices unfold over the lifecourse. Chapter 7, by contrast, considers urban design that enables continuity of place as a form of care. It begins by discussing how place can be ‘wounded’ (Till, 2012) by such approaches as comprehensive redevelopment that sever place-​based attachments between people and their environments. Through its two case studies, this chapter shows how design can, alternatively, seek to maintain, repair and cultivate place-​attachments through strategies that become attuned to the values of continuity in the urban environment from the perspectives of those who know and live them. Finally, Chapter 8 considers how care for future generations may be practised through urban design. It takes as examples strategies that, in different ways, support the preservation of fragile resources such as air and water upon which life itself depends, hence establishing caring relations between today’s world and future generations. While all the chapters in 9

THE CARING CITY

the book are concerned with the production of material and spatial aspects of urban places that stand to condition care between people, this chapter is unique in considering design care in the broader sense that Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) conceives care, that is, as a practice that attends not just to other people directly but also to the environmental contexts of life, to our ‘more-​than-​human’ worlds. The conclusion of the book brings together the various ideas arising from each substantive chapter about the potential of urban design to facilitate, foster and actually give care. I also develop the proposition that the good city of the twenty-​first century and beyond may be framed as a ‘caring city’, embodying care as an ethic of urban design. As the book draws on debates that cross many different disciplines, it has the potential to appeal to a broad academic readership. However, I have endeavoured to write the book in a way that will not seem too dry or scholarly to appeal to non-​academic audiences. Doing this reflects my contention that care is a topic that connects everyone, as all need it, and which, however much theorized, is always ordinary and everyday. Through the book, I hope to stimulate discussion on the importance of care in design, on the failings as well as strengths of existing city forms and places, and on how urban design could shape webs of care and dependency in your city, positively impacting the lives today and in the future of its diverse citizens, including those you directly care for and about.

10

1

Care as Practice and Ethic Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, Nothing is going to get better. It’s not. Dr Seuss, The Lorax

Introduction As outlined in the introductory chapter, care is a word that has evolved substantially over time, gathering different meanings and associations. These subtly vary depending on whether care is used as noun, a verb or an adjective. Adding complexity, care can denote a disposition, as in ‘caring about’ something, someone or an issue. But care also denotes a wider set of activities, as in ‘caring for’ a person, collective or thing in a practical sense (Noddings, 1984; Fine, 2006). Both meanings of care can of course be, and often are, interlinked within single uses of the word.   In the early days of writing this chapter, I was reading to my young son The Lorax by Dr. Seuss (1971). It is a story of a tree species being exploited almost to extinction, with those involved in deriving economic benefit from it failing to comprehend its crucial importance for the health of a biodiverse ecosystem. Finally, at the end, once that ecosystem has been all but destroyed and the economy is on its knees too, a little boy who learns the story from former industrialist the Once-​Ler and is given the last remaining seeds of the tree is motivated to plant them and take care of the emerging seedlings. The recovery of the landscape will depend, the Once-​Ler tells him, melancholy with hindsight, on people like him caring ‘a whole awful lot,’ with the word care denoting both a disposition of deep concern about the damaged state of the world and the vast labour of care that would be required to make it a better place again. In an age when children across the world, inspired by Greta Thunberg, are taking on these sorts of labours of care for the environment for the sake of their own and their children’s futures, the story is no longer 11

THE CARING CITY

prophetic as it would have been in the early 1970s but rather reads as a commentary on the state of contemporary action against climate change. As disposition and set of related labours, of course, care may pertain to a breadth of issues, contexts, situations and activities that, at least on the surface, may seem to bear little relation to one another –​from the everyday care of children to real-​world contexts of environmental degradation. And yet, as I briefly set out in the introductory chapter, even as the importance of care has been revealed within increasingly diverse social and environmental contexts, understandings of what it means to be caring and what good care might entail in a broad sense have developed and become established. In this chapter, then, I endeavour to lay out these understandings, focussing on four key characteristics of care as practice and as an ethic of that practice, and outlining in the process some of the key lines of debate within care ethics that relate to them. I will also begin to explore what these understandings suggest about the possible nature of care in the context of urban design.

Care’s focus on needs The first key characteristic of care is its responsiveness to circumstances of need that become its concern and the focus of caring activities. As Joan Tronto writes, ‘[c]are is the perspective of taking others’ needs as the starting point for what must be done’ (Tronto, 1993: 105). Needs, hence, form the basis of the disposition of concern that instigates caring practice as a response (also see Bubeck, 1995: 129–​33; Held, 2006: 32–​4). Different authors adopt wider and closer definitions of what needs encompass (Engster, 2015: 19). Joan Tronto adopts a broad view. Within her analysis, needs are never specifically defined; she implies that they may encompass a very wide ranging set of situations and aspects of the human condition leading people to require the support and assistance of others to thrive. A closer analysis is provided by Daniel Engster, however (Engster, 2015: 19–​21). While he broadly concurs that human needs form the basis for caring and are, hence, a key concern of care ethics, he stresses the value of recognizing and teasing out different sorts of needs. These, as he argues, encompass essential requirements related to basic human survival, such as needs for ‘food, water [and] shelter’. However, needs of care, as any study of interpersonal care relations would show, also encompass such qualities of human life as emotional connection, respect and the capacity to fulfil self-​ defined goals, these varying depending on the care relations in question. The spectrum of needs which may, in different circumstances, be relevant foci for care can thus be seen to encompass goods (as in basic needs) but also qualities, functionings and supportive actions that may be required for the development of ‘physical, mental and emotional capabilities’ connected to human wellbeing and flourishing (Engster, 2015: 19). 12

Care as Practice and Ethic

In emphasizing the importance of a capabilities perspective for care ethics, Engster draws on the work of Martha Nussbaum, particularly her framework of ten human functioning capabilities which she lists as: 1) life or being able to live to the end of a human life of normal length; 2) bodily health; 3) bodily integrity; 4) being able to use senses, imagination and thought; 5) emotions or being able to develop attachments and experience/​express emotion; 6) practical reason; 7) affiliation or being able to live with and toward others and having the social bases of self-​respect and non-​humiliation; 8) being able to live with other species; 9) play, and; 10) having control over one’s environment (Nussbaum, 2000: 78–​80). Nussbaum’s capabilities clearly overlap with understandings of the nature and outcomes of interpersonal care practices in significant ways, such as through references to affiliations and attachments (Engster, 2015: 50–​1). And yet Engster, along with scholars such as Tronto and Virginia Held, cautions against absorbing this framework within care ethics. Virginia Held, indeed, sees it as entirely opposed to care ethics, representing an attempt to universalize human functioning and development (Held, 2006: 94–​5) rather than stress the importance of eliciting needs and capabilities in the context of relationships and develop skills in recognizing and responding to their specificity. While recognizing the value of the concept of capabilities for explicating the focus and goal of care, Engster also argues that the framework risks not only limiting understandings of the true variety of what people can ‘do and be’ but suggesting that those unable to develop certain capabilities have categorically less worthwhile lives than others (Engster, 2015: 50–​1). Hence, though differing framings of need exist, care ethics generally adopts the position that to care well, the needs that become the focus of concern should be elicited bottom-​up through the caring process and not assumed or prescribed. It resists notions of personhood defined in idealized or universalized terms. Instead, as Margaret Urban Walker puts it, it adopts a ‘moral viewpoint [that] centres on persons pretty much as we know them’ and ‘as sensing and perceiving individuals and/​or communities’ enmeshed in complex relations, value systems and path-​dependent circumstances (Walker, 2003: 15). For her, this suggests downplaying needs in the definition of care’s focus altogether, placing emphasis instead on how care is attuned to the concrete situation of the cared-​for, within which needs combine complexly with feelings, values, interests, capabilities and vulnerabilities/​precarities. For other thinkers, such as Engster, need remains a useful framing for how care meets ‘individuals on their own terms to help them to live as well as possible given their abilities’ (Engster, 2015: 50–​1). As Held explains (2006: 12), the ‘particularistic’ focus of the ethics of care raises certain issues of its own. For a start, though interpersonal, face-​ to-​face interaction may characterize forms of responsiveness to needs as distinct as parenting and medical care, how interactions are conducted, experienced, felt and evaluated will be radically different depending on 13

THE CARING CITY

the context. Further, there is a recognized danger within care ethics of prioritizing interpersonal relations at the expense broader social relations, relations established across spatial distance, human/​non-​human relationships and materialities that are entangled with human relations (Sevenhuijsen, 2003; Held, 2006: 32–​4; Mol et al, 2010: 7–​27; Puig de La Bellacasa, 2015). Selma Sevenhuijsen (1999, 2003), for example, has stressed the relevance of an ethic of care for the relations established between governments and citizens through social care and welfare policies. Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2015, 2017) has demonstrated the relevance of an ethic of care for practices related to complex ‘objects’ such as soil, the nurture of which is at once a form of care for people today and in the future given the basic human need for food and its entanglement with soil health. The same could be said of of objects such as heritage and home, both of which are ‘cared for’ in light of human needs which may complexly intertwine with feelings,values and interests. In turn, Barbara Adam and Chris Groves (2007) have argued for the value of care ethics as a moral orientation towards the future, shaping action that stands to impact on the needs of future generations. What does this discussion point to in terms of urban design and its analysis? To begin with, it suggests exploring how urban design responds to needs related to the wellbeing of people now and in the future, whether through spatial design or design process. Though urban design often involves taking a broad view of human needs –​and this has often led to the production of generic forms that exclude many different sorts of people –​it suggests the need to develop practices that are attuned to specific place-​based needs. Related to this, it suggests considering how urban design can attend to human needs and wellbeing through the care of resources vital to life such as air and water. Given the long duration of the built environment, it suggests, finally, consideration of urban design’s responsiveness to the contingencies of human need, and the potential for individual and collective needs to either change or else persist in time, unfolding into the future. These suggestions, of course, are not straightforward. We may ask how it is possible to attune to specific needs and broader contexts at the same time. A key is suggested once again by Tronto (2019: 29) through her idea that particular caring practices are nested into other types of care. The point of care at the ‘more general level’, as she puts it, ‘is to make certain that [specific] pieces come together into a complex, life-​sustaining web’.

Care as relational A second key characteristic of care according to care ethics is its relational nature, always involving caring people and others cared for, giving and receiving care. The dynamics of care relations can of course be hugely varied and complex. Where caring is performed in response to people highly dependent on others for basic needs to be met, it might for example involve considerable 14

Care as Practice and Ethic

imbalances of responsibility and power. But it can also involve forms of mutual reliance or interdependence, with people caring for one another in reciprocal ways, including through objects, materialities and environments. Self-​care, as Carol Gilligan argues (Gilligan, 1982), may be part of these dynamics, given that this may well assist in effective responsiveness to others and thus in performing care work well. Care ethics is concerned with this relationality and, hence, with the ethicality of these dynamics. It endorses a conception of personhood as inherently relational and interdependent, ‘morally and epistemologically’, as Held (2006: 13) writes. As such, the care ethics is generally opposed to the concept of autonomy and the ways in which it is upheld as a right and mark of maturity within the context of dominant moral theories’ (Held, 2006: 9-​15) such as Kantian ethics and utilitarianism with their different notions of justice and respective emphases on individualistic, independent personhood. Stemming from Carol Gilligan’s groundbreaking work in the early 1980s, these theories have been seen not only to neglect realities of interdependency and interconnection between people in everyday life but to have been instrumental in the relegation of care to the private realm, the deeply unjust subordination of women to men and the devaluation of care work within the context of patriarchal Western society. Gilligan argues for the need to recognize the deepening of affiliative ties through care and capacities to assume responsibility for others as hallmarks of maturity in human development alongside the development of capacities for autonomy. Since the 1980s, some feminist scholars have argued that autonomy is altogether a myth and a product of liberal individualism. Others have, in essence, if freed from gender stereotypes, developed Gilligan’s argument, recognizing a place for autonomy within care ethics’ relational ontology (see, for example, Young, 2002; Sevenhuijsen, 2003; Held, 2006). Iris Marion Young (2003: 45–​6) suggests that the key to integrating the concepts is to define autonomy, which can mean subtly different things, in a way that complements the focus and goal of care. She distinguishes between autonomy as ‘self-​determination’ and autonomy as ‘self-​sufficiency’. The problem with the concept of self-​sufficiency, she argues, is that it implies the loss or breakage of affiliative relationships in order for someone to pursue self-​interests, personal ambitions or survival strategies that are inherently exclusive of others. In contrast, self-​determination signifies the capacity for someone to fulfil potentials and make choices in life. Autonomy defined in these latter terms may sometimes be produced as an outcome of caring, such as when children grow up or environments are facilitative of greater independence for vulnerable people. It is autonomy that arises, as Held puts it, ‘through our interactions with others [and] our personal, familiar, social, political and economic relations’ (Held, 2006: 48). As such, it can arise from relations that are free from oppression or denote flourishing as a result of 15

THE CARING CITY

care. The extent to which it is possible, indeed, may well depend on the quality and strength of those interactions and relations. Though the term is debated, these, broadly, are arguments in favour of the concept of ‘relational autonomy’ (Friedman, 1997, 2003). Besides autonomy, care ethics has also engaged critically with societal notions of dependency. Ellen Feder and Eva Feder Kittay (2002: 1–​13), for example, trace the varied and evolving meanings of dependency and some of its problematic features as constructed within Western society in the twentieth century. For example, they highlight the stigma associated with ‘welfare dependency’, the lack of choice associated with the dependence of women on male breadwinners and the lack of emphasis on possibilities for autonomy for disabled people. In these and other contexts, they argue, dependency has often been constructed as a specific trait or expectation of some people rather than others (also see Held, 2006).Through the development of these lines of critique, contemporary care ethics has generally come to assume that, as Engster puts it, ‘all human beings “depend” on the care of other human beings [for] survival, development and basic wellbeing’ (Engster, 2015: 21), echoing in this Hannah Arendt’s much earlier (1998 [1958]) assertion regarding the human condition that ‘no human life, not even the life of the hermit in nature’s wilderness, is possible without a world that directly or indirectly testifies to the presence of other human beings’. At the same time, they stress that the dynamics of caring relationships involve not simply some people depending on others but, rather, carers and cared-​ for being mutually constituted and interdependent (see Held, 2006: 52–​3). Recognizing the dependence of all on care at different stages of life has important implications for social responsibility and the politics of care. Engster argues that if we see vulnerability and care needs as inescapable aspects of the human condition, manifest in all persons, then so too, logically, must we see responsibility for the social care of those recognized as vulnerable or in possession of particular care needs. This feeds into arguments about the need to recognize care as a ‘public issue’ (see, for example, Fine, 2006), with the costs of decent care for all borne by society at large. To consider urban design in terms of care, then, is to consider how the physicalities and processes of urban form and place-​shaping condition patterns of human reliance on others and, critically, the dynamics of power that characterize those patterns. This could include how built forms and spaces of the neighbourhood shape particular caring relations, be it between family members, friends or people engaged in formal care practices. Zooming out to the city scale, it could include how built forms condition the dependencies of whole geographic areas, such as cities and regions, on other places that may produce resources and/​or manage waste. Thinking in terms of the impact of design through time, in contrast, it could also include how design and development condition the continuity of human life 16

Care as Practice and Ethic

on earth given that, as Bonnie Mann argues (2002: 348–​69), this depends on the earth’s fragile life-​support system, including the quality of its air, its temperature-​regulating system and its diverse, interconnected habitats (also see Fitz et al, 2019). In any of these contexts, caring urban design would be that which attends to and supports relationships and interdependencies rather than claims of autonomy as self-​sufficiency.

Care as process A third characteristic of care is its temporal, processual nature. As outlined in the introductory chapter and above, care can denote a mental disposition –​ as in ‘caring about’ –​or a practice –​as in ‘caring for’ (Fine, 2006: 32). However, care ethics generally takes both to be key to effective caring. As Tronto puts it (Tronto, 1993: 16), to be meaningful and genuine, caring must be embedded within an ‘actual practice that we engage with as a result of these concerns’, through which a ‘burden’ of caring labour is assumed, and that allows a response to be produced within the cared-​for.1 In their seminal 1990 paper, Fisher and Tronto outline four key stages of care which have been central to their theory ever since: 1) caring-​about; 2) taking care of; 3) caregiving, and; 4) care-​receiving (Fisher and Tronto, 1990; Tronto, 1993; Tronto, 2010). Each of these phases is seen to involve a corresponding ethic. Caring-​about centres on ‘the recognition in the first place that care is necessary’ (Tronto, 1993: 106). This entails ‘attentiveness’ as a moral disposition and capacity to notice and attune to another’s situation. For Selma Sevenhuijsen (Sevenhuijsen, 2016), who has developed the concept of attention in the context of care in more recent times, distinct qualities of action are involved, from a basic ‘recognition of plurality’ to practices of attunement through ‘seeing and hearing’, time-​giving and patience. These enable the particularistic, contextual practices endorsed by care ethics, as discussed in the first section above, to unfold. The second phase, ‘taking care of ’, involves recognition that ‘one can act to address these unmet needs’ and the development of a sense of responsibility for responding to the situation of an other. Responsibility can take very different forms of course, and can be taken to different degrees and assumed in different relational contexts involving people and/​or things. It may also be relevant to quite different time frames and contingent contexts, as in taking responsibility for the wellbeing of future generations (Adam and Groves, 2011; Petterson, 2012; Groves, 2014). The third phase, care-​giving, involves the actual meeting of needs, whether this entails administering medication, repairing something broken or helping someone accomplish a task important to them. The key value in this phase for Tronto and Fisher is ‘competence’. Caring competently involves the deployment of skills, tools and behaviours specific and appropriate to the context of care. Across contexts however, it clearly depends on a mix of 17

THE CARING CITY

qualities and abilities intrinsic to carers (Held, 2006), on the experience and knowledge they have accrued through the lifecourse to date but also, often, on an array of external factors that may be entirely out of their control, such as the availability of financial and material resources for care. The fourth phase, care-​receiving, entails the response of the object of care to the actions of caring and the quality of the relationships forged through the process. It is established in order to recognize that, as care is formed in the context of relationships, so both (or all) parties play a crucial role in defining what and how effective it is. Through it, Tronto and Fisher suggest that the evaluation of care should never rely on the perspectives of carers alone. It should also encompass the cared-​for as equal participants in the process. A response to care might include outcomes such as getting better or improvements in wellbeing. But it might also include experiences of trust and confidence, a sense of a strengthened bond or attachment and/​or a feeling of having been seen and heard. While many scholars adopt a looser framework for defining and evaluating care practices than Tronto, care ethics generally endorses their view of care as co-​produced. This is not merely a matter of carers doing and the cared-​ for feeding back but of all parties shaping all the phases of the process, from the definition of needs to the experience of outcomes. Tronto and Fisher’s framework has nonetheless been criticized by some for failing to include a way of evaluating the wider social, political and economic contexts through which gender roles, values and forms of inequality associated with caring are produced. As Diemut Bubeck (1995) compellingly argues, without some sort of mechanism to take account of structural issues shaping the lives of carers and cared-​for, an ethic of care could equally ‘function as an oppressive ideology that serves to perpetuate women’s part in the sexual division of labour by making them continue to care even when such care is exploitative in nature’. In response to such critique, in 2010, Tronto added to her framework, establishing a fifth phase of the process/​ethic which she terms ‘care-​with’ (Tronto, 2010). In her words, this concept embraces a feminist position that ‘caring needs and the ways in which they are met need to be consistent with democratic commitments to justice, equality and freedom for all’. Thus, it takes account of the gendered, class-​based and racialized distribution of care labour and responsibility, issues of poor pay and lack of recognition of the intersection of skills including emotional sensitivities that lead to caring well in different areas of care practice (also see Robinson, 2010; Kittay, 2019). It recognizes the issue of maternalism or paternalism in care, whereby care practice comes to be disproportionately defined by the perspectives of carers in unequal power relations. It also addresses the risk of ‘parochialism’ in care, whereby emphasis on the needs of some can serve to exclude others. In all these ways, care-​with is associated with a new integration of the ethics of 18

Care as Practice and Ethic

justice, long seen as incompatible with care (see for example Baier, 1995 [1987]), within the framework of care ethics. Good care, for Tronto, is care in which all the qualities associated with all five phases can be identified, though she acknowledges that good care will mean very different things in different contexts. The process should not be regarded in a linear way –​‘caring about’ doesn’t stop, for example, when caring begins, as Nel Noddings notes (Noddings, 1984). Rather, dispositions and actions on the part of carers and cared-​for are imbricated throughout, mutually shaping and (re)configuring one another. As Mol et al argue (Mol et al, 2010), the inclusion of the perspective of care-​receiving allows all the other phases of care to be refined and enhanced through time. Care can thus be understood as iterative, involving the continual renewal of concern (caring about), return to the context of needs and the maintenance of some form of ongoing connection between those intertwined within caring relations. In considering how urban design may enact and embody caring processes, certain limits to Tronto’s framework become apparent. Her primary focus is on interpersonal relations of care. Urban design as a practice does of course always involve interpersonal relations, and these may reflect an ethics of care, as will be discussed shortly in Chapter 2. However, ultimately, design involves the performance of work for others through the imagination and spatial shaping of urban places. In other words, in the context of design processes, care practices need to be considered as mediated though materiality and as involving complex webs of care relations involving both human and non-​human actors. In taking forward these ideas in Chapter 2 and beyond, therefore, I will continually return to Tronto’s theories. But I will combine them with new sociological literatures which have paid attention to the role of objects and artefacts, spaces and tools in healthcare practices of different sorts, arguing for the need to evaluate the quality of care through the role that materialities as well as interpersonal relations play (Buse et al, 2018). In a similar vein, I will draw on the work of science and technology studies (STS) scholars, such as Puig de la Bellacasa (2010, 2015, 2017), who have drawn attention to the potential for an ethic of care to inform the construction and maintenance of technologies of different sorts in order to address particular needs and/​or avert possible negative impacts on future worlds. Of course, I will also build on the existing and emerging scholarship on caring architecture and design (such as Bates, et al, 2017; Trogal, 2016; Trogal, 2018; Fitz et al, 2019).

Care as future oriented A fourth characteristic of care is its orientation towards the future. While it may begin with the immediacy of a situation, it is a purposive practice and ethics, driven constantly by goals and desired ends. This is apparent in 19

THE CARING CITY

the earliest writings on care ethics by Carol Gilligan (Gilligan, 1982). As already indicated, Gilligan distinguishes between the goals that characterize individualism and those of care. The former, she argues, promote the idea that people should pursue goals ‘in any way, constrained only by working legal apparatus that enforces contracts’. Such a perspective is, Gilligan argues, deeply rooted in Western culture, as illustrated by the classical tale of the valiant Aeneas in Virgil’s Aeneid, about the founding of the city of Rome. This, according to Gilligan’s account, entailed Aeneas’s prioritizing his capacity to progress his journey to Rome over bonds of attachment, which were sacrificed along the way. In contrast, care promotes a view of the future as the very progress of such bonds. Accordingly, caring persons, communities and societies are those that work for the purpose of preserving and/​or improving relationships as well as shaping and improving the circumstances of those involved in them. This is not to say, of course, that the goal of care is to sustain patterns of dependency that keep people in positions of uneven power, unable to spread their wings or assert themselves. A more recent perspective on the purposive nature of care is offered by Barbara Adam and Christopher Groves (2007). Nurture, they suggest, may be concerned with the situation of another in a concrete way, but it is always, at least in part, a concern with what she/​he/​they might become in the future –​with what might be possible for them given, for example, adequate food, education or the maintenance and repair of their environments. When people care for others or anything which is of ‘constitutive value to us’, what they do, Adam and Groves contend, is ‘acknowledge that their future, their welfare and ethical significance is bound inextricably with our own’ (2007: 151). The purpose of care may encompass a huge range of possible outcomes depending on the context, from everyday accomplishments such as growing up in the context of care in the family, to recovery from illness. It may encompass acts of the kind that Margaret Walker (2006) discusses as ‘moral repair’ following wrongdoing such as the ‘wounding’ of place (Till, 2012). It may relate to endings as well as to beginnings in life –​to setting off on a journey well-prepared or dying peacefully and without pain, for example. It might also encompass goals that are nearer and further away in temporal terms, extending into the life spans of those as yet unborn (Adam and Groves, 2007). The formulation of purpose and intent is of course an activity which is intrinsic to urban design. Urban design is, after all, an inherently future-​ oriented discipline, constantly involved in the projection of imagined and/​or desired outcomes, situations and scenarios. The purposiveness of care may be elicited in the context of urban design by considering the intended outcomes of design, such as inclusion, healing, reconciliation, place-​attachment and security, which connect to wellbeing, as well as the means of reaching them. 20

Care as Practice and Ethic

Thus, for example, we might consider how accessible design approaches are devised to support the development of capabilities, transforming patterns of dependency in care relations. Similarly, we might consider how the atmosphere of urban spaces such as gardens is composed to foster healing and a sense of respite amid the frenzy of urban existence (Bates et al, 2017). Building on Adam and Groves’s notions of care for futures, we might also consider how design engages such issues as climate change and environmental degradation as ‘matters of care’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011) to promote the preservation of the earth’s resources for future generations.

Thinking and studying care Thus we reach the end of this chapter, having set out a number of ways of thinking about and studying care and by beginning to consider what these suggest for understanding and theorizing care in the context of urban design. Care, I have argued here, is a disposition and a practice: we can care about things and carry out caring actions, sometimes simultaneously. Caring action is motivated by and carried out in response to needs which, I have suggested, should always be defined in context. Care is a relational practice involving interdependent carers and cared-​for people, collectives and/​or assembled things. It is at once a practice and an ethic, with good care representing a symbiosis of values and stages of caring. Finally, it is future oriented, driven to accomplish outcomes connected to wellbeing, thriving and flourishing. These understandings suggest that evaluating care in the context of urban design and cities will involve exploring, first, how design, in whatever context, is concerned with, seeks to shape and actually effects the meeting of place-​specific needs connected to wellbeing and the potential for flourishing. Second, it will involve exploring how design is attuned to the particularities of relations of care, supporting carers and cared-​for alike in their interdependencies. Third, it will involve considering how design shapes the dynamic ways in which phases of care unfold over time and reflect an ethics of care in process. Finally, it will involve considering how the ‘ends of care’ (Engster, 2005) are formulated and translated into urban place, space and materiality.

21

2

Care in and through Urban Design Not only did [Bacon] and the people he directed not know how to make an interesting or humane street, but they didn’t even notice such things and didn’t care. Robert Kanigel, Eyes on the Street, 2016

Introduction Urban design has often been depicted by urban scholars as the antithesis of care as characterized in Chapter 1. Though urban forms and places are hugely varied, they have often been depicted as poorly attuned to the needs and capabilities of inhabitants. Such criticism can be detected, for example, in literature linking urban form to health outcomes, such as the extensive research exploring the relationship between urban sprawl and socio-medical conditions such as obesity, diabetes and heart disease (see, for example, Frumkin, 2002). It can be found in studies of the atmospheric qualities of urban form such as noise from streets, poor air quality and light pollution that have been connected to issues of physical health but also identified as stressors affecting mental health and wellbeing (see, for example, Tuan, 1974; Park and Evans, 2016). It can be found in the growing literature connecting urban design with the availability of such vital resources as water, including research on the impacts of public space design on the depletion or replenishment of the groundwater aquifers that healthy and resilient ecosystems depend on (for example, Lerner, 1990; Pickett et al, 2013). It can also be seen in critical assessments of the generic nature of much urban form and building leading to a sense of placelessness and social exclusions of diverse kinds. Generic design has often been seen to reflect universalizing conceptions and/​or imaginary norms of human behaviour, anatomy and ability, and as ‘disabling’ (Hall and Imrie, 1999) to those who fail to adhere to them, who may include

22

Care in and through Urban Design

people with specific health conditions, mobility issues, learning difficulties or sensory impairments (see, for example, Burton and Mitchell, 2006). Along with neglecting needs, urban designs have often been shown to play a divisive role with regard to human relationships, including relations of care. Through such strategies as zoning and the segregation of land uses and different residential areas, for example, they have been seen to reinforce difference between different ethnic, age-​based and cultural groups rather than foster an ethic of care (see, for example, Frug, 1999; Amin, 2010). Through accessibilities of urban form and place, they have been associated with the promotion of dependency rather than support for interdependence, failing to assist more vulnerable people in their everyday lives as well as, indeed, their carers. In turn, processes of design connected to urban change that are inattentive to place-​based relations and which involve uprooting people and/​or the destruction of places of personal history and meaning have often been seen to carry profound consequence for attachment and wellbeing (see, for example, Gustafson, 2001; Fullilove, 2004). Urban designs have also been depicted critically in terms of the futures they promote and the impacts they create. As Jenny Donovan (2017) has argued, such issues as lack of access and a sense of broken connections through traumatic urban change can create innumerable barriers to personal development. These issues may also exacerbate vulnerabilities at individual and collective levels. Thus, for example, a lack of opportunity to walk with ease, peacefully and in and safety might compound health problems, contribute to experiences of social isolation and affect confidence among elderly people, failing to generate conditions of wellbeing and flourishing. Similarly, a lack of opportunity for children to access play spaces or to experience nature may impact their development into adulthood, with potential consequences for environmental care in the future too (Kyttä et al, 2018). While they are very different, all these issues can be seen as problems of design as form and physical place but also as a process –​as problems of design thinking and practice. Spatial and material qualities of city forms and urban places shape the ways in which citizens meet needs, develop capabilities, cultivate relationships and achieve things. But as Jane Jacobs suggests in this chapter’s opening quote, issues of built form originate, at least to an extent, in the minds and sensibilities of planners and designers. The critical words in this quote were spoken following a visit to sites of urban renewal in Philadelphia in 1956 with Edmund Bacon, the executive director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission (1949–​70). These sites, she suggested, lacked humanity, but ultimately, they revealed that Bacon’s planning and design teams were so deeply committed to their ideologies of modernist form and the bulldozers that would bring it about that they didn’t care to discover the ingredients of more socially sensitive and ‘interesting’ urban design. 23

THE CARING CITY

Building on the ideas of care developed in Chapter 1, the aim of the remainder of this chapter is to explore how care as a practice and ethic may be detected and evaluated in projects and processes in and through urban design. In this discussion, therefore, I will consider how spatial, material and experiential aspects of physical design shape care needs, practices and the formation of caring relations. But I will also consider how care may be studied through the intentions, dispositions and actions of designers, through ways of seeing and making urban places. I conclude the chapter by discussing how these insights will inform the analysis of case studies and the building of theory in the chapters that follow.

Caring urban design projects While, as I discussed in Chapter 1, care has often been considered in terms of interpersonal relations, the ‘materiality of care’ has been a growing area of interest and research in the fields of STS and sociology in recent times (Mol et al, 2010; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011; Buse et al, 2018). For Buse et al (2018), who study contexts of healthcare, materialities of care encompass a wide range of non-​human artefacts, tools, properties of materials and configurations of spatial settings that are involved in the relations and practices of physical and/​or psychological healing. They divide these ‘features of the physical landscape of practice’, as they put it, into two main categories –​first, materialities used and employed in carrying out practices of care, such as tools and instruments, and second, the settings within which practices take place and the relations between spatial configuration uses, material and experiential qualities that characterize those settings. Buse et al go on to set out various dimensions of the materiality of care across wide ranging healthcare settings, establishing in the process an important new way of thinking about and analyzing care architecture and design beyond the identification of specific types of building, space or infrastructure, though one that overlaps with the aspects of urban design that I discussed in terms of Matthew Carmona and Kim Dovey’s work in the introductory chapter. In what follows, I build on this to propose a number of different ways of thinking about the ‘materiality of care’ in the context of urban design which will go on to establish the set of themes which are the focus for the rest of the book. An initial way of thinking about the materiality of care in cities is in terms of spatial positioning or how care relations and practices are placed within configurations of buildings and cities. Care is placed, as Buse et al argue, through strategies that locate care settings relative to other urban spaces and land uses but which also configure different spaces and their designated uses within care architectures (such as hospitals, hospices and housing) (Buse et al, 2018: 3–​4). How care is placed within such settings can be revealing of how care has been or is organized in society in a broad sense, as of how particular 24

Care in and through Urban Design

care practices were seen by designers and intended to be enacted. Hence, both the overall location and complex spatial arrangement of a hospital, for example, can be understood as telling of how healthcare is constructed as a set of professional practices, as a privatized or public service and as a wide-​ ranging set of activities, facilities and events (see, for example, Jones, 2018). Building on this, the placing of care through urban design may be explored by considering how practices of care related to particular people or care needs are positioned spatially in cities –​whether, for example, in institutional or ‘extitutional’ (Milligan, 2001; 2016 [2009]) settings, in inner city or suburban locations, in residential environments or more industrial ones, in deprived or affluent localities and so forth. The placing of care in these terms may be revealing, among other things, of societal conventions of care for more vulnerable people, which might involve family, community and/​or institutions of the state. It may be telling of the extent to which care needs and acts of care are in effect ‘owned’ by being made visible in urban centres or otherwise marginalized and concealed, and it may also reflect class-​based, gendered and/​or racialized aspects of the social organization of care labour (see Petrescu and Trogal, 2017; Trogal, 2018). The placing of care may also be considered at a finer scale of resolution by focussing on the establishment of relationships between the intimate spaces of homes, interpersonal spaces of sociability and communal spaces in particular urban design projects (Madanipour, 2003: 95–​144). For example, as Power (2019) argues, the design of housing places care practices such as parenting or the care of elderly people, but its spatial characteristics shape the everyday routines of these practices, including the extent to which they are largely contained within the interpersonal environment of the household unit or shared across a wider community of friends and neighbours. In turn, within housing projects, as Brownlie and Spandler (2018) show, spatial characteristics of such mundane infrastructures as stairwells can be key to fostering considerate and caring relations between neighbours (Brownlie and Spandler, 2018). And, as Kullmann (2014) argues, places that could seem impersonal or merely routine and functional, such as the ordinary pavements of urban thoroughfares, can actually serve to foster caring practices of diverse sorts, encompassing the petting of animals and the development of caring dispositions and informal caring relations between people of different ages and backgrounds. A second way of thinking about the materiality of care in the context of urban design is in terms of accessibility. As with other notions introduced thus far in the book, different ideas of the constitutive characteristics of accessibility abound, encompassing the spatial proximities of land uses in mixed-​use urban form, legibility, permeability, mobility and transport options (see Evans, 2009; Pafka and Dovey, 2017). Accessibility is associated with numerous outcomes such as enhancements in the physical and mental health 25

THE CARING CITY

of individuals and communities and the expansion of horizons for disabled people (Donovan, 2017). The accessibility of urban design may be considered relevant to care when and as it shapes people’s capacities to reach things they need (including opportunities to develop capabilities for wellbeing and flourishing). Care ethics, of course, concentrates attention on people conceived in particular rather than universal terms, encompassing their culturally specific and place-​ based understandings of access and needs. Care, hence, offers conceptual means to address what Imrie (2012: 878) sees as a significant issue of universalizing notions of access: that, while they place emphasis on laudable goals, they often portray insufficient ‘sensitivity towards socio-​cultural variations, or to the specific, localised, understandings about what appropriate design is or ought to be in responding to the access needs of disabled people’. The accessibility of urban design is also relevant to care when and as it shapes care relations and practices. As Steinfeld and Maisel (2012: 17) argue, accessibilities of urban form and place often shape patterns and relations of dependency, with poor accessibility making people more reliant on others to help them meet their needs and better access helping them become more able to ‘take care of themselves and participate in society’. As a result, accessibility can be seen to condition the lives of all involved in caring relations –​those requiring particular sorts of care, but also those with caring responsibilities. The accessibility of a street, for example, may make it easier for someone in a wheelchair to navigate it for themselves but might also help someone caring for a baby to push their pram. In turn, the accessibility of spaces such as childcare facilities in a neighbourhood may also be key to enabling parents to pursue opportunities for fulfilment beyond their caring commitments, opportunities that may at times be critical to caring for themselves. A third way of thinking about the materiality of care in the context of urban design is in terms of the notion of atmosphere. Research on atmospheres of care or ‘caring atmospheres’ has typically focused on the qualities of place in healthcare settings that seem to shape specific practices and goals of care such as by promoting experiences and perceptions supportive of healing, for instance ease, calm and contentment (see, for example, Edvardsson et al, 2005; Mangione, 2018; Martin et al, 2019; Sumartojo et al, 2020). These ‘affective atmospheres’ (Böhme, 2013, 2017, 2018; Edensor and Sumartojo, 2015) are recognized as ‘multidimensional phenomena’ (Stefansen, 2017). They may be a product of tangible aspects of place –​including particular objects, colours and textures –​and intangible ones –​such as the play of light and shade, the sounds produced in spaces and flows of air. But they also fuse qualities of design with the qualities of interpersonal communication and exchange that take place within healthcare settings. Edvardsson et al (2005), for example, demonstrate the importance of being in an environment that contains ‘traces of familiar objects’ for sensing ease in a hospital ward. 26

Care in and through Urban Design

Mangione (2018), in contrast, shows how the calm atmosphere of a garden aimed at promoting wellbeing and healing through ‘therapeutic horticulture’ is composed. Evocatively, she describes how elements such as ‘thick sheets of water rushing playfully from a water wall tucked in the shaded corner … and (depending on the season and year) hollyhocks for hummingbirds and bushes to attract butterflies’ were deployed within the garden to stimulate positive sensory experiences while users tended to soil and plants. However, there are indications that urban atmospheres, combining both air quality in cities and affective atmospheres (Gandy, 2017), also shape care practices and relations and, hence, that these atmospheres may be considered as part of the materiality of care. A fourth way of thinking about the materiality of care is in terms of the capacities of urban fabrics and places to remain supportive or conducive to care through time, such as through qualities of adaptability or durability. In healthcare settings, Buse et al (2018) argue, ‘practices of care are not only emplaced’ but are continually unfolding and changing as needs and circumstances evolve. This is true in the context of particular life events such as an illness or of stages of life such as old-​age, during which care needs can evolve substantially. As they do, spatial arrangements or technologies of built forms and urban places that were perfectly navigable can suddenly constitute barriers, transforming a supportive, homely space into a hostile environment. Needs for care and the practices of care that people are involved in usually transform radically across the lifecourse as they progress from childhood through various stages of adulthood (Bowlby et al, 2010; Bowlby, 2012). As these transformations unfold, routines and patterns of inhabitation in neighbourhoods and cities often also change. Thus, for example, public spaces between home and the local school that form essential parts of the daily lives of young families may fall into the background of everyday life once the children have flown the nest. However, it is not necessarily always the case that changing care needs require change in the built environment. As individual lives unfold in place, accumulating experiences and memories, feelings of belonging and emotional attachments to place can deepen. As Sugihara and Evans (2000) suggest, place-​attachment can not only be key to wellbeing but can profoundly shape experiences of care. Hence continuities of fabric and place that connect to these sorts of feelings may be considered a fifth way of thinking about the materiality of care in the context of urban design. A sixth way of thinking about the materiality of care lies in the latent impacts of built form at different scales on the wellbeing of future generations. Such impacts might relate to resources vital to life such as food and water, to sources of enjoyment and quality of life or to cultural heritage. In each of these respects, designed places may be considered in terms of the roles they play in shaping practices of care but also the qualities of relations and practice that enable care to be experienced as effective or good. 27

THE CARING CITY

This brings us to questions of how qualities of care may be evaluated in relation to these different dimensions, and how the goodness of urban design in view of care may be ascertained. As suggested in Chapter 1, a primary way to evaluate goodness would be to consider how effectively designed places support the meeting of particular place-​based needs. Defined in these terms, the concept of goodness clearly stands opposed to generic, ‘one-​size-​fits-​all’ solutions as to conceptions of persons in universalized terms such as that provided the Modernist architect and urbanist Le Corbusier’s ‘modular man’. Instead, an idea of good design as effective support for particular place-​based needs aligns with Lynch’s (1981) conceptualization of the goodness of city form in terms of a number of ‘dimensions of performance’ –​these being vitality, sense, fit, access and control. Lynch’s approach, groundbreaking when it emerged in an era still characterized by Modernism’s obsession with physical determinism, offers the means to identify good design in very different, culturally and geographically specific urban forms. This is because goodness is seen by Lynch as a matter of fit and affordance rather than in terms of rigid categories of shape, layout, density or composition. Care, hence, may be evaluated by considering the fit and affordances of design in light of the needs and socio-​environmental conditions of place. Goodness may also be evaluated drawing on Joan Tronto’s framework of phases of caring and corresponding ethic of care, specifically by ascertaining how effectively and positively urban designs support people’s capacities for caregiving and receiving. We may ask what role they play in shaping people’s attentiveness to human and other needs and vulnerabilities and in fostering a sense of responsibility for the wellbeing of others, whether intimates or strangers. How, further, do they help people care with competence, whether that care is given to people, to non-​human forms of life or to resources necessary for life? How do they facilitate responsiveness, enabling care-​receivers to shape the material conditions of their care, whether through design process or through inhabitation over time? How long might responsiveness potentially endure, and what does this suggest about the temporality of care through design? In turn, Tronto’s fifth phase of care, care-with, prompts us to ask what role urban materialities play regarding broad, societal ways of supporting, valuing and allocating responsibilities for care. Can certain forms be shown to reflect, for example, how women have been disproportionately burdened with responsibilities of care for the family and how this has led historically to them being relegated to the home? Do they reflect the difficulties faced by urban poor, migrant and coloured communities across cities of the Global North in accessing safe, good-​quality and affordable housing, despite these groups being disproportionally represented in care work? How can urban design otherwise succeed in somehow critically tackling gendered, racialized and/​or class-​based patterns of care provision? 28

Care in and through Urban Design

While many of these questions may be addressed by exploring the relation of design projects to care relations and practices, it is important to recognize that urban forms and places always somehow reflect how fragile situations and vulnerabilities are approached in the context of design practice itself and the complex intersections of politics, economics, materiality and creativity that this entails. Thus, we come to the second way of detecting and evaluating care in the context of urban design –​the process of design.

Design as caring process The notion of care will be no stranger to designers when they think about the nature of their professional role; care figures in many definitions of professionalism that relate to design practice –​in the form of a ‘duty of care’. In general, the duty of care is a legal obligation carried by an individual which requires adherence to a standard of reasonable care while performing any acts that could foreseeably harm others. A duty of care would characterize many professional relationships, such as doctor-​patient and surveyor-​mortgagee and related contracts. In architecture, a duty of care is an obligation (under common law in the UK) which trained and qualified designers are expected to adhere to in carrying out all aspects their work on behalf of clients and future users of their projects (Caicco, 2007). In the UK context, the Royal Institute of British Architects defines that care in the following terms in their Code of Professional Conduct, 2019: 1. Members shall act competently, conscientiously and responsibly and are expected to apply reasonable standards of skill, knowledge and care in the performance of all their work. 2. Members should take reasonable care to ensure that the terms of the contract are legally accurate, are compatible with other provisions, will not lead to excessive liabilities and do not create conflicts of interest. 3. Members shall exercise reasonable skill and care when issuing or recommending the issue of any certificate. 4. Members shall exercise reasonable skill and care to use supply chains which are free from Modern Slavery. ‘Reasonable care’ in relation to each of these points is defined, further, as ‘the degree of caution and concern an ordinarily prudent and rational person would use in similar circumstances’. Drawing on the definitions of care established thus far through this book, it is clear that care in these terms means taking care in the execution of work to meet standards that would be expected in the formulation and fulfilment of briefs and in the formation and maintenance of professional relations across a design team. 29

THE CARING CITY

It also stands for taking care in the sense of avoiding risk –​as in taking care not to do something that could incur a liability and/​or cause harm to future users. In essence, it relates to the responsibilities and competencies of designers. This is a narrower definition of care than that which forms the focus of this study. ‘Care-​taking’, as the assumption of responsibility and deployment of skill, is of course a key component of any care process. But it is not by any means all that care involves. Similarly, care as defined in the context of care ethics involves far more than the adherence to standards and the terms of contracts; indeed, many sorts of care-​taking, along with the values and emotions that attend them, would be impossible to define in legal or contractual terms. Thinking of design in terms of care ethics hence opens up a broader set of perspectives on how designers may be caring, encompassing all the complexities and characteristics of care which have been discussed thus far. Care may be considered as a disposition of designers who care about the quality of their work and the specificities of sites, issues and people that it involves. It may also be considered as a labour of caring for people and things through design (encompassing Tronto’s phases of care-​taking, caregiving and care-​receiving). Before going further with this discussion, however, it is important to note that professional designers are rarely ‘free’ in the ways in which they act through practice (Doucet and Janssens, 2011). Urban design is shaped by the locations of practice, whether within planning departments and urban authorities or in private companies. It is shaped by its clients who may be public sector organizations, corporations or communities –​by their requirements, tastes, values, budgets and the like –​and by related financing and governance arrangements. Design is often also influenced and substantially shaped by the broader cultural contexts of its production. To offer an example, through his study of the evolution of a hospital in Liverpool, Paul Jones (2018) demonstrates how design produced under the aegis of ‘centralised healthcare’ in the 1970s differs from that realized in the context of ‘consumerist approaches to care’ in the late twentieth century to the early twenty-​first century. As a final point, urban design often integrates many disciplinary perspectives such as landscape design, civil engineering, ecological science, conservation and architecture. As Petrescu argues, it is fundamentally a relational practice, involving the intersections of multiple human and also non-​human agencies rather than the genius of a lone designer as author of particular pieces of the built environment (Petrescu, 2012; Petrescu and Trogal, 2017). The caring of design, in other words, is complex and should be considered in terms of this extended relationality. Despite the complexity of design processes, at many times throughout architectural and urban design history, particular designers and design collectives have been able to place themselves the forefront of debates 30

Care in and through Urban Design

regarding matters of social concern demonstrating how they care about them through visions aimed at capturing the public imagination and transforming society. ‘Caring about’ can be identified, for example, in the ways in which designers (architects and town planners) mobilized concerns in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century regarding the relationship between unsatisfactory housing conditions and high levels of mortality stemming from infectious diseases, seeking to create visions of (housing-​led social betterment (as described, for example, by Cherry, 1988; Lasner, 2018). These designers were also often influential in campaigns to develop building controls and other forms of planning regulation that would help promote human health and wellbeing in cities. Countless other historical and more recent examples of ‘caring about’ in the context of design practice can be identified. These include the widespread efforts of designers worldwide to secure investment in design quality and the long hours and laborious work they themselves invest in this. They include the endeavours of many designers to go beyond the requirements of regulations and codified forms of best practice to formulate new, potentially more effective and sometimes radical approaches to environmental and ecological design. Illustrating such an endeavour, Finnish firm Jolma Architects has worked to develop a vision of ‘degrowth’ through urban design, reflecting a critical stance towards capitalism’s obsession with ongoing growth in production and consumption, and care about the realities of resource depletion, unsustainable global warming, looming mass extinctions and environmental degradation.1 Examples of ‘caring about’ also include expressions of concern regarding social exclusion in cities, whether this is related to the place of non-​human animal species in cities, vulnerable groups, women in design practice or manifestations of racism, exploitation and colonialism in the public realm (such as the statues that were finally pulled off their pedestals in Bristol during the Black Lives Matter uprising of early 2020). Specific cases would encompass projects as diverse as Part W’s campaign, initiated in 2018, to tackle issues of gender equity in the UK construction industry,2 and Architects for Social Housing’s efforts to support the residents of housing estates in London experiencing marginalization in the process of their regeneration.3 Finally, ‘caring about’ might be identified in practices seeking to ensure that decision-​making power with regard to development and change resides with communities rather than just design and development experts, for example by creating participatory, democratic co-​productive or community-​led models of design (Trogal, 2016). This brings us to how design may be considered as ‘caring for’ rather than just ‘caring about’. James Fathers (2017) argues that one of the major impediments to conceiving of design as caring is the historical assumption that the role of design is to order place, a process which has often entailed the paternalistic imposition of a vision of life and idea of ‘goodness’ on the 31

THE CARING CITY

people who come to inhabit its creations. Still-​prevalent approaches to design research as the ‘diagnosis’ or ‘reading’ of urban problems by experts without significant input by those who experience them reflect this conception of the role of design. In turn, many examples can be identified throughout architectural history of occasions when urban design has been shaped by paternalistic attitudes. To turn to a nineteenth-​century example, factory settlements in the UK such as Cadbury and Bournville or Saltaire and Port Sunlight may have embodied certain ideas of care for industry workers . However, through the top-​down delivery of these projects, they also came to concretize assumptions regarding working-​class people’s needs and culture, tastes and temptations, encoding inequalities within the built environment connected to the organization of labour and production. To return to the Jane Jacobs quote at the start of the chapter, the urban renewal of American inner cities also embodied ideas of improvement and progress and yet, at least according to her analysis, failed to respond adequately to the needs of citizens and social dynamics of neighbourhoods. As Treadaway and Fennel (2017) argue care implies a greater understanding of needs and lived experiences than has often been denoted by urban design strategies. The development of alternatives, however, is no simple matter of a shift from top-​down, deterministic design to open-​ended co-​design with future users. For a start, much urban design is carried out without knowing precisely who the future users will be; but automatically designating this as ‘uncaring’ and inattentive to needs would exclude the vast majority of urban design from the possibility of being considered as caring. Further, participatory urban design itself can fail to embody an ethic of care, such as when participants lack the experience or will to see and hear one another, when the process ends up being dominated by louder voices and powerful lobbies and/​or when conflict is mismanaged (see, for example, Calderon, 2020). Care ethics, I argue and will show in the upcoming chapters, is relevant to the micro-​politics of participatory practice involving future users but also to many other ways in which practices and actors are assembled relationally to realize and appropriate design projects. Tronto’s conceptualization of an ethic of care in practice, again, offers a helpful set of notions for considering and evaluating what, broadly speaking, caring for in the context of design process should involve beyond any specific design methods. The notion of attentiveness, first, points to the many ways in which designers deploy, as Cross (2001) aptly puts it, ‘careful strategies’ to develop ‘a deep understanding of all aspects of the context’ of a design project. Developing such understanding would involve avoiding making generic or stereotypic assumptions regarding need and relying instead on practices of seeing and listening as the basis for formulating specific understandings of need and possibility. Such practices are key to the production of places that, as Imrie and Kullman puts it (Imrie and Kullman, 2017), ‘are not reduced to types, or normate body parts’ but rather, are customized or personalized. 32

Care in and through Urban Design

Similarly, these practices may be key to the production of places that can remain attuned to the changing demands and relations of care, such as in the context of nurturing a child to adulthood, of assisting a person to die with dignity, of ageing over years or decades, or of community-​building and the formation of place-​based attachments. Taking care and caregiving, then, must somehow or other involve the enrolment of design competencies and the commitment to translate needs into material forms. Design, as Bromley (2012) argues, is an ‘interpretative act’ involving the synthesis of different sorts of information and evidence (which may include claims and testimonies as well as physical site data) over several iterative stages and translating these into spatial ideas, technical strategies and material details. This translation is never direct; it always involves what Cross (1997) has termed a ‘creative leap’ between design problems and spatial/​ material approaches involving imagination, aesthetics and experience. Given that good care is never only given but is also shaped by those cared for (Mol et al, 2010), caring through design must also entail some recognition of the responsiveness of clients, future users and other stakeholders. Practices that reflect this might include incorporations of stakeholder’s reasoned and/​ or emotional responses to design proposals in the context of participatory events. But, as buildings are often inhabited and appropriated by different users over time (most of whom will not have been part of the design process), responsiveness might perhaps also be thought of as something to ‘build into’ the fabric of places and cityscapes. It may potentially be facilitated through such features of design as incompleteness, flexibility and adaptability, which allow the ‘creative user’, as Jonathan Hill puts it (Hill, 2003), to shape, reconfigure, personalize and maintain spaces according to their unfolding needs (also see Sennett, 2007) but facilitating responsiveness should be viewed with caution as analogous to the concept of ‘empowerment’ as often utlilized in the context of participatory design discourse. Empowerment is the gift of a capacity to decide and/​or act, whereas responsiveness denotes the allowed expression of an experience of care and a process of feeding back in ways that meaningfully shape how care continues. Empowerment, hence, is akin to concepts of autonomy and independence while responsiveness is bound up with care’s relationality. Evaluating responsiveness in the context of design, hence, may involve considering ways in which either users unknown by designers or those who may be involved in design processes directly are enabled to respond to the ways in which needs have been understood and/​or met through the spatial and material qualities of design. It might, however, also include evaluating what an urban design process involving future users has yielded by way of tailored and context-​specific places. Finally, caring entails attending to matters of justice that may pertain to particular care practices and connected relations. Given that care is 33

THE CARING CITY

often undervalued or treated as ‘invisible work’(Star and Strauss, 1999) demonstrating ‘care-​with’, by design, might entail ways of ensuring that the human vulnerabilities and needs of carers –​from the people who sweep streets, wash buildings and maintain parks to the parents and other carers who must navigate the city daily in the performance of care responsibilities –​are taken into account. As Kim Trogal puts it (Trogal, 2018: 192), ‘From an urban [design] and architectural perspective, [caring] means considering all who make our cities and regions liveable: teachers, cleaners, youth workers, community workers, those who grow food, and so on’. But it also means considering how design quality is distributed in ways relevant to care, and how this might be more widely accessible.

Analyzing care and building theory The upcoming chapters build on the approach developed in this chapter and in Chapter 1. In sequence, they cover each of the ways of thinking about aspects of the materiality of care through urban design outlined in the first section of this chapter: the placing of care, accessibility, atmosphere, continuity, open-​endedness and impact. This set of themes is in no way regarded as definitive or final, but is presented rather as a collection that might be altered or expanded in the future as new aspects of urban design come to be seen as significant for care practices of different kinds. As stated in the overall introduction to this book, my approach offers the means to think in broad terms about the role of urban design with respect to care. Thus, whereas a study focussed on particular types of urban environment or infrastructure would attend to aspects of design relevant to each of those, I build from the opposite direction, from broad topics that may find resonance and meaning in many different sorts of projects and situations of caring design practice. The structures of each of the upcoming chapters vary. However, consistent across each is a detailed exploration of one of the six ways of thinking of the materiality of care. In each, this encompasses discussion of how design may embody the various characteristics of care discussed in Chapter 1, supporting people, their care practices and relationships, and their capabilities for wellbeing and flourishing. Each also includes two case studies which offer concrete and specific examples of the aspect in question being developed through design to address specific care issues. In researching each of the case studies, I considered how design sought to shape specific care needs and practices in a concrete, material sense, the nature of design processes and how these could be seen to relate to concepts of caring practice in care ethics. Thus, employing methods including the analysis of design drawings and reports, visits to the site of each case study –​ often accompanied by designers and/​or residents –​and observations of 34

Care in and through Urban Design

everyday life where possible, I explored the spatial and material strategies employed by designers related to the particular aspects of the materiality of care which are the focus of each chapter. Interviews with designers, including project clients, professional architects and urban designers, residents and other users also formed a central part of the methodology. My aim in conducting these interviews was to discover how designers understand their work in terms of care, the moral standpoints shaping their views of care relations, how they had sought to become attentive to place-​based needs and capabilities, and how they endeavoured to create space for users to shape place for themselves. Throughout, my questions to them were guided by the framework established in Chapter 1, by the desire to understand care in the context of urban design as a human response to need, as a relational practice, as a process and as a future. Providing two case studies in each chapter also allowed me to identify contrasting positions and approaches, while also using the case study approach to reflect the particularistic nature of care. Through the research and analysis, I hence endeavoured to flesh out the complexities of care in the context of urban design as well as some of its exciting and varied possibilities for thinking and making cities.

35

3

Placing Care ‘I think –​my personal view is –​it’s probably one of the most significant projects we will do because it’s one of the projects which has allowed us to bring together our thinking about the city –​how we might live together better in the city, through what we’ve learned from designing public spaces –​with what we’ve learned from designing public buildings –​how to make an institution, but one we’re hoping [sic] through various architectural means and material, will not feel institutional.’ Stephen Witherford, Witherford Watson Mann Interview, London, 2019

Introduction The project in question here, as described by its designer, the architect Stephen Witherford, is conceptualized as an “almshouse for the twenty-​ first century”. Located on a high street in the inner-city neighbourhood of Bermondsey, South London, it provides housing for around ninety elderly people. Designed to be open and, to an extent, continuous with the public spaces and social interactions of the high street rather than merely as an object building contained and defended within the boundaries of its site, it has been conceived by the practice Witherford Watson Mann as a node in a complex network of caring practices, relationships and spaces that extend out into the surrounding neighbourhood and beyond. As such, it exemplifies a trend in the design of eldercare in the UK, as in many other nations globally, involving the development of what are termed deinstitutional models of care in place of traditional models within bounded institutional settings. These new models encompass varied combinations of formal care services and informal types of care made available to people living outside of traditional institutions such as nursing homes. They pertain 36

Placing Care

to a wide array of spaces too, from the long-​term family home where someone may wish to age-​in-​place, to day care centres where people may go for a few hours to receive particular forms of support beyond the home, to residential accommodation such as the almshouse where people may live relatively independently but with help, services and resources close at hand. Design has an important role to play in facilitating these deinstitionalized models of care, just as it has embodied ideas of care and practices of care in institutions of various kinds, reflecting through place and materiality how, as Christine Milligan (2016 [2009]: 134) puts it, ‘care is being constructed and reconstructed’ continually in society. This chapter’s aim is to consider the caring potentials of urban design in placing care practices and relations. As discussed in Chapter 2, placing can be considered at different scales –​from the broad city scale of relations between centre and periphery or between different urban land uses, to the scale of a localized piece of city such as a street or building block. The placing of care at the city scale may involve deciding to position spaces of care in the middle or at the edge of cities or in relation to particular urban activities. At the more localized scale, it may entail the composition of connections between spaces of intimate, interpersonal and collective life and the careful planning of access for formal care services, visiting families and the like. I am broadly interested in exploring what the placing of care, whether in bounded institutions or within communities, in the suburbs or the inner city, can tell us about the social construction (and reconstruction) of care. I am interested in how designers such as Stephen Witherford view their work as part of that care and the values they associate with it. But, drawing on the understandings of care that I set out in Chapter 1, I am also interested in how practices of placing may be evaluated as caring. I begin my discussion with the relationship between various ways of providing care for specific groups within society and the spatial/​material place of care in cities, drawing on Selma Sevenhuijsen’s (2003) notion of the ‘place of care’ in Western society. In the second section, I draw on care ethics to consider the ethical significance of placing care in particular locations, settings and spaces through urban design. Through the chapter’s two case studies, I then proceed to explore care placed in the context of particular projects. I show in detail how the almshouse project places care for elderly people on its South London high street, and then how a housing project in Vienna called Sargfabrik places care practices of different sorts within and across a socially diverse neighbourhood and set of public and private spaces. In the process, I also ask of each project: What is good care when considered in terms of how design has sought to position care needs, relations and practices? While care has often been relegated to the margins of social and political life, ‘to the nursery and the kitchen, to purdah and to poverty’, as Onora O’Neill (1992) puts it, I will argue that both projects offer a more complex 37

THE CARING CITY

picture of the place of care, with implications not only for the range of settings that can be regarded as spaces and/​or ‘infrastructures of care’ (Power and Mee, 2020) but also for questions of who is and should be a carer in the city for the design of caring cities.

Placing care Selma Sevenhuijsen (2003) argues that the ‘place of care’ for and by different social groups has been profoundly influenced over recent decades by social and political change. For Sevenhuijsen, place is a broad concept, encompassing locations within society, politics and space. Focussing on the case of the Netherlands, she identifies three major shifts in the place of care for particular groups unfolding in recent decades, each conceived as a ‘relocation of care’ from one domain of social life to another. First is a shift connected to gender roles and the gendered division of labour within constructs of the family and wider society. Since the 1970s, she argues, women have been increasingly active in the arena of paid labour, with implications for the time they spend and labour they are able to carry out in the care of the family and in the home. Second is a shift strongly connected to the first which she characterizes as a ‘relocation from inside to outside’. As women have become more active in the workplace and men have largely remained active there too, demand for professionalized care services associated with children, disabled family members and older people has increased, such as pre-​school-​years care, after-​school care, holiday care and day care. Similar points have been made by other care ethics scholars including Annette Baier and Berenice Fisher (see, for example, Fisher, 1990; Baier, 1995 [1987]). The types of carers associated with these groups have also proliferated, including nannies, au pairs, private nurses and so forth, some of whom work within the context of the home in a private capacity, while others operate from institutional settings (both private and public). Third is a shift related to changing patterns of health and wellbeing across society and, hence, to changing needs for medical services and healthcare at different stages of life. For example, as people live longer and are able to maintain independence and quality of life into old age, traditional assumptions about dependency and needs for specialist medical care in old age have changed, as therefore have notions of how eldercare might be provided. Sevenhuijsen argues that the lines between dependence and independence have become more fluid and also stretched out over longer time frames. Associated with this are changing conceptions of responsibility as people are able to take care of themselves for longer and formal care or the informal care of family members is able to assume a lighter touch. Fourth is a shift connected to political ideology and, particularly, the rise of neoliberalism since the 1970s, conceptualized by Sevenhuijsen as 38

Placing Care

a ‘relocation of politics’. This is a shift in terms of how responsibilities for the care of particular social groups across the state, markets and civil society are constructed and distributed through political agendas and social policies. Her discussion, though centred on the Netherlands, is relevant far more widely given that debate in many nations has centred on questions of what the proper scope of action by the state in relation to individuals and their families should be as social phenomena such as ageing societies place pressure on welfare budgets and come to be viewed as new opportunities for competitive private markets in healthcare and housing (see, for example, Engster, 2015; Milligan, 2016 [2009]). One of the areas in which this shift is most clearly apparent is in the fall of state-​run institutional models of care. In Britain, a shift away from institutional care began in the 1970s, connected to budgetary constraints that had their origin in the aftermath of the Second World War, a financial crisis and growing criticism of the quality of that care. The potential closure of institutions for psychiatric care was a key topic of debate at this time, as was the potential nature of support to enable older people to remain in their communities and homes rather than dislocate them as they became more vulnerable. In the 1980s, these processes accelerated rapidly, reflecting Margaret Thatcher’s neoliberal political agenda with its emphasis on economic reform and the dismantling of the welfare state. The decade saw a concurrent rise in notions of ‘care in the community’ and ‘informal care’. As Heaton (1999) argues, the ideological promise of ‘care in the community’ is a return to traditional, idealized, place-​based interactions in which the members of local communities look out for one another and formal care services are provided outside of residential institutions. Hence, it typically encompasses a mix of formal and informal care (Milligan 2016 [2009]). The former might encompass the support given by local primary care practitioners and/or a range of itinerant care services (meals on wheels, district nursing and so forth). The latter may involve stronger and weaker social ties, from care given in the context of kinship relations to the care of neighbours and friends. Informal neighbourly care might include offers of help to people struggling to take care of themselves with practical tasks such as shopping, laundry and dog walking, or might involve dropping by for a cup of tea and offering company, keeping an eye out in the background, and a range of associated dispositions of concern, compassion and empathy (Arber and Ginn, 2008) involving ‘intimates and strangers’ (Morgan, 2009). In Britain, patterns of care in the community came to reflect rising disparities in society in the context of neoliberalism. The 1980s saw the rapid expansion of private sector residential institutions and this trend has continued apace, serving those in a position to pay, even as state-​run residential care has reduced in capacity. Community care, hence, became a feature of disadvantaged neighbourhoods where people lack the capacity to pay for 39

THE CARING CITY

formal care and are reliant on their families and neighbours. The pattern is noted by Danny Dorling (2011: loc 2617), who argues that ‘those areas where people are most in need of care, usually containing the most ill and least healthy adults (and children), have traditionally been least well served by care services’. Conversely, his research reveals a strong correlation between the locations ‘of the population with health need and those providing many hours of unpaid care’, with many of the carers supportive of others ‘for reasons other than family ties’ (Dorling, 2011: loc 2631–​45). While the concept of ‘care in the community’ continued to thrive in 1990s and early 2000s Britain, it strongly resurged in the context of austerity politics under the conservative governments successively leading the country since 2010. In a 2015 speech devoted to the realities of an ageing society, for example, the UK health secretary Jeremy Hunt stated: “If we are to rise to the challenges we face, taking care of older relatives and friends will need to become part of everyone’s life.” A similar rhetoric can be identified elsewhere around the world, such as across Europe, in America, Australia and New Zealand and Asian contexts such as Singapore. Each of the social and political changes identified by Sevenhuijsen has transformed the ‘landscape of care’ (Milligan 2016 [2009]) in spatial terms, encompassing the locations of care for particular people –​whether within, on the perimeter of or on the outside of cities –​the types of places involved –​whether institutions or otherwise –​and the spatial configuration of those places. Changing gender roles, for example, have transformed neat correspondences between women, the care of children and the home. Historically, assumptions about the place of care and of women in the home have strongly shaped planning practice. Looking at the post-​War suburbanization of American cities, for example, Lewis Mumford (1961) argues that the design and layout of suburban development encapsulated a vision of nuclear family life. As Ellen Feder (2007) has more recently argued, this was a white, male, middle-​class vision, produced not only by separating the place of home from places of work but also by dividing society along lines of class, gender and race. Its development and rapid proliferation in turn shaped notions of the ‘wife’ and of virtuous ‘motherhood’ in mid-​century America, concurrently placing them and the responsibility ascribed to them within the home. With its emphasis on the single-​family home and the mass production of housing, suburban development also served to relegate care to the private realm, to intimate interior spaces rather than, say, to communal spaces of the street or community garden of the traditional inner-​ city neighbourhood where friends and neighbours might have cultivated their support networks. For Dolores Hayden (1980), the American suburb and the suburban home hence epitomized sexism at the level of the city and its built form. Gradually, however, the changing gender roles described by Sevenhuijsen have become widely associated with relocations of care for children and 40

Placing Care

elderly family members from the ‘inside’ of the private home to an array of non-​residential facilities –​school clubs, nurseries and day care centres, for example. In turn, shifts away from ideologies of segregation in planning and urban design in the US and elsewhere have supported a re-​establishment of proximities between home and work that can assist parents, both male and female, in maintaining a work-​life balance. In turn, changing patterns of health in old age have transformed the locations of care for older people. These encompass a range of options designed to support the ageing process. Some, such as retirement villages, require people to sell up and leave their former homes to move into bespoke accommodation, while others facilitate ‘ageing-​in-​place’. While there continue to be care home options for those in need of formal care, new residential typologies aimed at facilitating informal care have been on the rise. One example is intergenerational housing, which, by collocating families and older people, typically aims to foster informal caring relations between people at different stages of life so that older people can remain independent within a socially and physically supportive environment. In a related way, changing political ideologies of care also have consequences for the landscape of care in spatial and physical terms. Al Condeluci (1991) argues that the development of the welfare state was associated with a widespread tendency to remove those in need of care from neighbourhood settings and cities –​to the elderly care home, the psychiatric hospital, nursing homes, assisted-​living facilities, hospices and so on. Architecturally, these institutions often encapsulated an idea of treatment as carried out by those with authority and in power on behalf of others, bounding communities of formal carers and cared-​for people. In the UK, for example, public assistance institutions established after the birth of the NHS in 1948 were established in former workhouses, buildings imbued with the stigma of poverty from the Victorian era and which, while often in urban settings, served to cut people off within a disciplinary institution. Residential homes also included new local-​authority-​funded buildings which were often remote from urban centres. The rise of care in the community, in contrast, is associated with the re-​placement of care in the midst of urban neighbourhoods and city life. The changing place of care is clearly of interest to urban design as a practice engaged in placing, both in the sense of planning the locations of land uses relative to one another and in composing relationships between intimate, interpersonal and communal spaces within design projects (Madanipour, 2003: 2–​4). As deinstitutionalization proceeds, this is increasingly the case, as whole neighbourhoods or streets become part of a network of care. Andrea Kenkmann et al (2017) note in their study of a care home that design can articulate and reinforce how care is structured and performed, such as by clearly demarcating places of work for professional carers from spaces of home for residents. Urban design can similarly respond to relocations of 41

THE CARING CITY

childcare from the private home to non-​residential facilities such as nurseries by positioning these relative to residential areas, transport infrastructures and places of work. In Vienna, for example, planners of the large Aspern Lake City masterplan framework attended closely to the routines of families in positioning educational infrastructures, devising principles of a ‘city of short distances’ to ‘make the combination of paid employment and unpaid domestic work easier’ (Irschik and Kail, 2013: 216–​7). Urban design can respond to the changing place of old age as a result of improved health prospects. This is demonstrated in the location and design of the Humanitas project, a housing complex for elderly people in Deventer (a small city in the Netherlands). Through design, its managers have sought to avoid creating a ghetto, stressing instead the linkages between the development and its surroundings. A key aim of this was to enable those with mobility issues to reach local shops and other amenities with ease by themselves. This was achieved through accessible design, the focus of our next chapter, but also through the minimization of boundaries at the periphery of the site and the opening up of the entrance foyer and gardens to the rest of the neighbourhood. Urban design can also play a role in articulating and supporting configurations and practices of formal and informal care. In so doing, of course, it may reflect the ‘relocations of politics’ that Sevenhuijsen outlines, as well as changing (complexly intersecting) perspectives on the efficacy of care in institutions. This is certainly true of the Humanitas project, which integrates student accommodation amid its housing for elderly people. This was done not only to inspire young people to support the elderly but also to encourage older people to act as mentors for the young. Although those with advanced dementia are highly protected, and the design carefully orchestrated to facilitate this protection, social spaces open to the neighbourhood, the lobby area and the community garden allow friendship to flourish across the boundaries of the institution and thus, for care to be, to an extent, unbounded. Associated with this, however, is a carefully constructed system of rent relief in exchange for caring activities on the part of the young. Startblok in Amsterdam is another scheme designed explicitly with an aim of fostering informal care. It seeks to do so through co-​location of housing for students and refugees from Syria in a series of blocks built from shipping containers. Open spaces between buildings (shown in Figure 3.1), and enlarged corridors and social spaces within each one, are positioned to create the potential for people to meet, for relationships to form and for caring practices to take root among people from different backgrounds and with different levels of affiliation in the city, recognizing that a primary need of newly arrived migrants is not just access to services and shelter but also the means to learn the habits and routines of a new place and to develop social connections. Once again, however, designs are associated with a financing 42

Placing Care

Figure 3.1: Startblok in Amsterdam

Source: Juliet Davis

model creating incentives for (unpaid) informal care, community-​building work and housing management.

The place of care and care ethics As well as shaping where care takes place, the placing of care through urban design is also relevant to the evaluation of care against its characterization in care ethics. In meaningful ways, location and spatial configuration shape the meeting of care needs. To take one example from the discussion above, in Doleres Haden’s ‘sexist’ suburb, the meeting of needs of children and their mothers was clearly strongly affected by the separation of residence from other land uses as well as by the emphasis of suburban development on care as an interior, private activity rather than one messily distributed over the neighbourhood. Accompanying this, as she suggests, was a paternalistic disdain for care: both for its recipients and its givers. Relationalities of care, as Joan Tronto (1999) suggests through her case study of age-​segregated housing, can also be affected by how care is placed in cities. This type of housing, whether in the form of vast retirement villages on the Sunshine Coast of America or exurban care homes with little connection with wider communities, compartmentalizes groups deemed to be more needy of care (or about to become so) as opposed to those that are ‘care free’. According to her analysis, segregation, therefore, not only serves to bound care needs and relations but also contributes to 43

THE CARING CITY

the distribution of moral responsibility for others across society. Thus, as a result of segregation, some are enabled to adopt a position of ‘privileged irresponsibility’. Those who are privileged, she argues, are able to remain ignorant of ‘certain forms of hardship that they do not face’ (Tronto, 1993: 121) and, at the same time, are not assisted in the potential cultivation of their empathy and attentiveness to others. Segregation, indeed, clearly limits the capacities of people within different age groups to see and hear one another, developing the sense of concern which is prerequisite for caring about and caring. Privileged irresponsibility is also, in her analysis, often associated with lack of awareness of the conditions of care work: of the lives of cleaners, cooks, nurses and so forth. This is not just a problem of age-​segregated housing of course, but also of planning and urban design strategies leading to the isolation of those with disabilities, of refugees, and low-​income citizens in general, helping to fan flames of stigma and prejudice as opposed to caring relations between different people. This is not to say that spatial lay-​outs and physical boundaries determine outcomes –​we know that much more is required than physical infrastructure alone –​but simply that, as Madanipour puts it, space has ‘social and psychological significance,’ shaping and being shaped by social relations (Madanipour, 2003: 2). While he does not explicitly promote an ethics of care, Zigmunt Baumann’s (1993) emphasis on the importance of what he terms a ‘we-​ experience’ within a ‘postmodern ethics’ resonates with Tronto’s case against segregated living. The we-​experience expresses the emergence of a sense of ‘responsibility for [an]other’s weal and woe’ as a result of entering ‘into interaction with the other’. The capacity to take responsibility, he suggests, relies fundamentally on the capacity for people to interact, which, while risking conflict, also creates possibilities for relationships, understanding, a breakdown of fear and even empathy to build. These capacities, he argues, ‘must be salvaged’ in an age characterized by difference and individualism. Questions that naturally follow are: how might urban design, through the placing of care, endeavour to promote the emergence of a ‘we-​experience’? How might it, assuming it can, promote a sense of responsibility that spans society far more broadly than would appear to be the case in the model of segregation that Tronto discusses? Is this just a matter of promoting social interaction? How might urban design endeavour to provide support to carers and cared-​for within particular care relations? What sorts of forms, spaces, materialities and design processes might be involved? With these questions in mind, I now turn to explore my two case studies, both projects that have sought to place care practices and relations in the midst of existing urban environments. Though this is not the main focus of discussion, both reflect the emergence of new models of governance and financing associated with supportive residential environments, hence reflecting the political shifts that Sevenhuijsen identified in the Dutch context. Both 44

Placing Care

are small projects in themselves rather than big transformative frameworks, though both involve approaches to form, such as to porosity, the formation of street edges and massing, that could be developed in the context of much larger projects. Both seek to create ‘infrastructures of care’, in Power and Mee’s (2020) terms, through housing, patterning and thereby fostering the organization of care at both household and neighbourhood scales. The first, briefly presented in this chapter’s introduction, is an example of sheltered housing for elderly people in Southwark, London, conceived as a project that inverts a notion of the place of care as an exurban ‘retreat’ and focus for bounded care services, tackling perceived stigmas associated with old age and dying in the process. The second is a cohousing project in Vienna offering opportunities for intergenerational living. It reflects a vision of urban living as being integrative of as much difference as possible and includes housing for various groups that have often been the focus of segregated and/​or institutional living arrangements including refugees, orphaned children and elderly people. In the discussions that follow, I consider how the projects reflect or react to change in the place of care in wider society and cities, the processes of design employed in order to understand care practices associated with particular people and relationships, and the ways in which spatial design ideas and arrangements seem to align with the major themes in care ethics and embody in themselves an ethic of care. Through these explorations, I will show how the placing of care can itself be caring, addressing the concerns that Tronto raises in relation to age-​segregated housing.

Urban living in old age: Southwark Almshouse The almshouse was instigated by the United St Saviours Charity (USSC), an organization established in the London Borough of Southwark in 1541, in the reign of King Henry VIII. Since then, it has held true to its goal of supporting people in the traditionally low-​income working-​class communities across the River Thames from the City of London, though it secularized over time. The charity manages two other sets of almshouses –​ the first an inner urban development formed in the eighteenth century, and the second a more recent suburban project located in Purleigh, Essex. The location of the latter reflects the difficulties in constructing a project of this sort in inner London today given elevated land and property values, and hence how the place of residential care for elderly people has been shaped by land markets as well as the shifts identified by Sevenhuijsen. The project was funded on land owned by Southwark Borough Council through what is known as a Section 106 agreement between a local developer and the local authority. USSC, however, rather than the developer, was designated as the client for the project and manager of the almshouse in perpetuity, commissioning the London-​based architects Witherford Watson 45

THE CARING CITY

Mann (WWM) in 2014 to design it. This arrangement has not only enabled high-​value land to be secured for a ‘low-​value’ land use but also high design quality for development designated as social housing and the protection of that housing against forces promoting the displacement of poorer groups in this part of London in the context of regeneration (see case studies in Chapter 7 for examples of other projects addressing this). According to the architect Stephen Witherford: “It felt like an incredibly virtuous triangle where private development funding payments were not just put into a pot for as-​yet undefined social projects. [Rather] it’s for something to be run by someone in a place for somebody” (Interview, Witherford, 2019). The almshouse responds to changes in terms of the healthcare needs of older people, reflecting the broad shift in the place of care connected to health in old age as identified by Sevenhuijsen. In the words of one USSC manager, the almshouse was developed to suit the needs of the “modern day older person”, which he characterized as someone who may be elderly for substantially longer than in the past, who may be well and therefore only intermittently in need of healthcare services for a long while, but who progressively requires support with mobility, or to tackle emerging health conditions and age-​related diseases. These were understood as needs for accommodation where older people’s capabilities for independent living were developed, and from which they would be able to access healthcare services, housing managers, social infrastructures, transport and convenience stores for themselves safely and with ease (Worpole, 2020). Given this emphasis on independence, one manager confessed that the organization had been employing the word ‘care’ with some caution, keen to avoid connotations of ‘dependency’ and/​or of a top-​down, institutional service. Through the design of the project, it was, as the manager put it, trying to “rehabilitate” the notion of care, largely by emphasizing ideas and values associated with informal care and looking out for one another and also by stressing the agency of older people in meeting their needs and determining the level of support from others they required. Aside from commissioning the building, the charity intended to provide building management and maintenance services. It would subsidize the cost of living to ensure that the amount residents paid towards living at the almshouse would be well within housing benefit limits. It also aimed to work with residents to develop individualized support plans and to access care services in the home as needed. Despite building for independent living, the USSC was keen that the building was not merely a stepping stone to a conventional institution but a lifetime home. The almshouse responds to the diminishing provision of suitable, accessible housing for elderly people by the local authority, reflecting the shifts denoted by Sevenhuijen’s notion of a ‘relocation of politics’. As USSC managers explained, there were many elderly people living in Southwark, as elsewhere, 46

Placing Care

in unsuitable housing as a result of this reduced provision, combined with the difficulties many people face in funding their care. USSC’s management team recognized that, while those able to pay for residential care have a choice to remain in the city or “retreat” to the suburbs, seaside or country, poorer groups, including people who may have spent their lives in council housing, have significantly fewer choices and are often deprived of the option to age-​in-​place within urban surroundings. Hence, the almshouse was developed for Southwark residents, enabling them to remain within the borough in high-​quality accommodation rather than having to move to an entirely new environment to find that quality. The almshouse also responds to the impacts of urban and broad societal change on Southwark’s population and older people in particular. Up until the 1960s, working-​class communities in Southwark would have been characterized by intergenerational living, with different generations of families living in close proximity and exchanging forms of mutual care, much as Young and Wilmott (1957) described in post-​War Bethnal Green. However, changes encompassing slum clearance and redevelopment, the migration of working-​class people from inner London to the suburbs and beyond in the post-​War era and the soaring property values that have characterized regeneration since the 1980s, this pattern of living gradually disappeared. As a result, USSC managers explained, there was a need for housing that, without romanticizing the past, acknowledged the ongoing presence of older people in Southwark. Thus, in conceptualizing the project, the managers sought to carefully consider the roles that individuals, families, professional carers and communities might play in the provision of support, giving place to them physically within the building and its wider urban setting. This involved, for example, recognizing the importance of providing accommodation for visiting friends and relatives while, at the same time, providing the digital communications technology to enable people to stay in touch from afar. In other words, while the potential for older people to live independent lives was a key concept for USSC, this is independence conceived as an outcome of relational care involving many different people rather than the independence of autonomous, self-​interested individuals. The siting of the project formed a key part of USSC’s strategy. The almshouse is located on Southwark Park Road in Bermondsey, which dates back to medieval times when it was a lane leading towards London Bridge through hamlets and market gardens. Here it has a place of prominence, presenting a five-​storey façade to the high street, though it steps back in section to align with the two-​storey terraced houses along the side streets to the rear of the site. Older people, in other words, are located at the heart rather than the perimeter of a neighbourhood (a strategy which we will also see in the second case study in Chapter 4), their homes part of the mixed-​ use borders of a lively, historical high street. 47

THE CARING CITY

In turn, the placing of the project here became key to the development of Witherford Watson Mann’s urban design strategy. Rather than using buildings to bound the site, thereby communicating protection and privacy, the architects sought to “flip” the idea of retreat and enclosure, creating porosity between the urban life of the high street and the social spaces of the interior. Rather than focussing solely on the traditional typology of the almshouse as a precedent for this, WWM saw the historic coaching inn –​ examples of which are found nearby at London Bridge –​as a model. This is a residential form type based around a narrow open courtyard designed for people coming and going, passing through and yet also congregating in a shared room (Figure 3.2). As Witherford explained, while this idea might not suit everyone’s vision of life and situation in old age, the point is to offer a new and alternative place for elderly people to live where they might enjoy the conveniences of the high street and contribute to its public life. The approach reflected USSC’s identification of a gap in provision for elderly people by both the local state and the market. However, consultation events involving residents at their almshouses in Hopton Street were also key in shaping it. These were not residents who would move into the new almshouse but rather people living in a similar setting, able to comment on the advantages of living centrally in London, to describe what they looked for in housing management and the almshouse environment and give a flavour of their own life stories and needs in ageing. The almshouse, in other words, Figure 3.2: Almshouse site plan

Source: Witherford Watson Mann

48

Placing Care

is an example of a project which did not entail participatory design with future residents but that nonetheless involved careful attention to the needs of specific people and the particularities of their circumstances and place-​ making practices. The research was carried out by WWM collaboratively with the historian Ken Worpole and photographer Philip Eberling, the latter of whom visually documented residents in their accommodation. For Witherford, a key finding arising from this research, which became a driving idea and ethos for the project, was that “you can start again at 60”. Thus, the ageing environment can be facilitative not just of help in view of vulnerability but of “helping someone become the thing that they’ve never been able to be before”, helping them to cultivate capabilities and new opportunities. Another key finding was that many of the people in the Hopton Street almshouses continued to lead active lives, whether in music production, mending bicycles, youth training or even working as volunteers in the House of Commons. The combination of support given by accessible design and through the arrangement with USSC and capability promoted by ongoing immersion in work networks, meaningful projects and relationships also emerged as key to the conceptual architecture of the project. “Flipping” the idea of retreat and enclosure is reflected in a number of different aspects of the project’s composition. As though pressed with a thumb, the main high-​street elevation is not straight but rather cranked, seeming to subtly weave together the façade with the widened pavement in front of the building’s entrance and convey the sense of a blurred boundary rather than a hard edge. Continuity between inside and out on the ground floor is expressed through transparency –​the ground floor is visually connected with the high street, like a shop front. A large bay window further pushes part of the interior into the public realm, allowing occupants who may wish to do so to sit almost in the street and watch the comings and goings of people at the bus stop –​children, workers, shoppers –​and also ensuring that older people are not hidden away from the street’s other users as though in shame. The crank in the façade is echoed in the interior of the building block where it is expressed as a slight protrusion into a court at the heart –​a move designed again to blur the edge between a ground floor ‘garden room’ (shown in Figure 3.3) and the garden proper which acts as the social focus for the residential community and its wider networks. On the ground floor, the plan is conceived as a series of “deep thresholds”, articulating a gradual passage from “public to personal”, as he put it, which simultaneously relate to and foster different kinds of communal and interpersonal interactions. Usually, the boundary between the public realm and the institutional interior occurs within the depth of a front door. Here, it is the depth of a room. The aim of the garden room is to fuse the idea of day room with an entrance lobby and a broader community centre. 49

THE CARING CITY

Thus, Witherford explained, he aimed to avoid creating the sort of day room which he has found to be characterized as a “God’s waiting room” –​a place ostensibly set up for sociability but in which elderly people’s capabilities are underdeveloped while their growing limitations are emphasized. It is not a place to wait for death but, quite otherwise, a nodal space in a vibrant network of new opportunities. Various local organizations that the USSC gives grants to or otherwise partners with can be involved in or set up shop in it, including a gardening group, a theatre group and a cookery school, engaging residents and the wider community in their activities as members, volunteers or audiences. As Witherford put it: “It’s not a room in which you would go to do [this particular thing or] that. It’s not a church in that sense; it’s got a looser sense of itself than that but, over time, you would expect friendships for people who are living there with those who don’t to evolve [and for] people in the area to begin to use it as part of a network of other places where they come together with different age groups.” Its goal, in other words, is to foster interactions, awareness of others’ situations, a sense of common ground and affiliation, recalling Bauman’s notion of a we-​experience. As one USSC manager explained, neighbourliness is easy to idealize and much harder to actually seed. It is not just about helping people when they are in specific need but about “pulling together” in relation to a shared endeavour. The potential to enable people to develop new skills and Figure 3.3: Almshouse garden room perspective view

Source: Witherford Watson Mann

50

Placing Care

work together was a driving idea behind the development of the cookery school, blending ideas of education with the idea of the hearth as a key space of exchange within the intimate environment of the home. Here that hearth is more communal and is characterized by weaker social ties than those of family, but is still seen to have the potential for association and, through the care given to food preparation and the exchange of food, even love. Moving into the heart of the building, the form unfolds to support the potential connections and social life of the community of residents of the fifty-​seven flats. In part, this is a move into more secure space, though the goal of the design team was to minimize connotations of danger, mistrust and removal from everyday urban life that security can all too easily embody. As Witherford put it, “You’ve got to have CCTV, you’ve got to have –​there’s security, there’s fire detection, there’s automatic running vents, telecare system, there’ll be signage, there’ll be lighting levels … it’s incredibly technical”. This is the technology of care, but his point was that it does not necessarily contribute positively to wellbeing. So, the goal was to ensure that “something else [is] more present, which is life –​the rhythms of people, the garden and sunlight, joyful things you feel each day”, which might include the ways in which people personalize their spaces as well as the daily routines of coming and going through the building, seasonal changes in the garden and so forth. The residential accommodation is configured in a horseshoe-​shaped form, echoing the traditional form of almshouses, wrapping around the communal garden court (Figure 3.2). The circulation areas providing access to the flats take the form of enclosed, glazed walkways along the edge of the courtyard, becoming another thick threshold as well as a winter garden that tempers the environment between outside and the interior (Figure 3.4). These walkways are generous and sunlit. Each flat has a seat outside it, creating the sense of a balcony overlooking a beautiful garden rather than just a corridor –​a warm, habitable space of interpersonal, face-​to-​face exchange. Along with a social space available to residents on the first floor and a roof garden at the rear of the building, these circulation areas create opportunities for occupants and their visitors/carers to see one another coming and going, to meet and to hopefully eventually develop negotiated relations of familiarity, trust and interdependence. Thus, they articulate in spatial terms the idea put forward by USSC of care as a quality and outcome of social interaction and togetherness rather than of care in a formal, medical sense. Echoing care ethics’ concern with the concept of autonomy (for example Gilligan, 1982; Held, 2006; Tronto, 2010), Witherford expressed the view that there is a real danger of equating a lack of need for formal care with a lack of need for care altogether. Loneliness, he explained, has become “one of our biggest killers” suggesting that care in this broader, relational sense is sorely lacking and vitally needed among older people who may ostensibly be able to lead independent lives. 51

THE CARING CITY

His research in the Hopton Street almshouses had suggested that there is a need to communicate to people that they remain, as they age, “a critical part of the fabric of family, society and cities”, and that the placing and design of a home can play a key role in doing so. Locating the almshouse on a high street, he suggested, offered an ideal way to do so, as these local infrastructures provide a focus for everyday routines through which people can develop neighbourly ties (which may be stronger or weaker) across generations, social backgrounds and occupations (a point also made by Kullmann, 2014). This is not to say that medical care and other formal care services would not form part of the life of the almshouse. In the main, these were envisaged as external services that residents would access and receive in their homes if and when needed, in accordance with their care plans. However, the potential is built in for some residents to have personal live-​in carers should they need them, through the development of an equal number of one-​and two-​bed flats. Whether a carer is a child of the resident (who might themselves be a pensioner) or a formal care worker is not prescribed. In addition to the fifty-​seven resident apartments, there are a further two dedicated to student care workers who would be studying locally. Recognizing the dispersal of family geographically in contemporary life, these apartments can be reserved and used by family members who don’t live locally during the holidays. At the time of my research, all the resident apartments were being designed around the possibility that family members, even grandchildren, might come to stay, resulting in efforts to create the necessary spatial generosity to accommodate guests while working around the constraints created by the UK’s ‘bedroom tax’ rules. All these measures serve to emphasize the sense in which the building is conceived as a node in a complex network of care relations. In multiple ways, then, the design of the almshouses demonstrates the potential for integrating vulnerable groups in urban settings, helping to create a physical and social connection to surrounding urban fabrics and to foster individual and collective relationships. This approach of embedment in a place also can also be seen to foster an ethic of care related to different sorts of social ties in some of the ways we discussed in Chapter 2. The project seeks to aid and prompt attentiveness across a multiplicity of people and relationships. Unlike the age-​segregated housing evaluated by Tronto, it creates possibilities for people to see and observe others different from themselves, potentially cultivating tolerance and empathy. It helps neighbours to become alert to one another’s needs and to get to know one another sufficiently well to ask for support and develop bonds. By making it easy for family members to visit, they are helped to stay in touch, remain aware and continue to play an important role in residents’ lives. Visibility and porosity created through transparency, generous routes for movement 52

Placing Care

Figure 3.4: Almshouse internal corridor perspective view

Source: Witherford Watson Mann

and the organization of form around shared, well-​lit internal and external rooms are key strategies. Though there is of course no guarantee that visibility will actually cultivate feelings of empathy within the wider Bermondsey community, the design of the project shows how an idea of care needs as a shared condition and as a collective responsibility may be articulated spatially. But the subtle thoughtfulness of WWM as to how protection can be given through the technologies of building security, while avoiding having that protection dominate the experience of space, and to choices offered by the mix of private and communal spaces, also allows for responsiveness, for people to choose not only how much they can give but how much they need and wish to reveal themselves to others at different moments, including as they reach that ultimate personal threshold of the end of life.

Collocated needs: Sargfabrik We come on now to the second case study in this chapter, the Sargfabrik, which is a housing project in Vienna designed by the Austrian architectural practice BKK-​3. Somewhat unpromisingly for a scheme focussed on ideas of care and community, Sargfabrik means ‘coffin factory’, as this is what was previously on the site, located in the Penzing area (District 14) of the city. The project began as an experiment in collective living and social togetherness in Vienna in the mid-​1980s, and was developed between 1986 and 1996 by the cohousing group Verein für Integrative Lebensgestaltung 53

THE CARING CITY

(Association for Integrative Living, or AIL). Penzing is a neighbourhood that was urbanized from the last decade of the nineteenth century and is characterized by eight-​to-​ten-​storey high apartment buildings, often ornate and colourful, set within larger urban blocks. Today, the two buildings that the AIL manages are set within these blocks, both responding to and in places breaking the urban design principles of edge and core and public versus private that they embody (such as by drawing public spaces into the heart of the block). The drawn-​out process of development reflects difficulties in the planning process and in financing the project. However, once developed, it was not long before the same group had acquired another site and realized their second project just around the corner on a street called Missindorfstraße. As this was a ‘daughter project’ of the first and was located on a street with ‘Miss’ in its name, it became known as the Miss Sargfabrik (while the original building began to be affectionately referred to as the FAB). The MISS was completed in the year 2000. The initiation of the project was inspired by the ideas underpinning the cohousing movement that began in Denmark in the 1960s. This emerged as a reaction to the concept of the single-​family home (Williams, 2005; Schmid, 2018; Larsen, 2019) and the ways in which it became associated with the rise of the nuclear family. It was a reaction, hence, to how care within the family had been relegated to the limited sphere of the automous suburban home. Over the decades, cohousing groups worldwide have typically sought to promote visions of shared living, social interaction and community-​based or mutual support (see, for example, Williams, 2005; Jolanki and Vilkko, 2015), spatializing through their design and development projects ideas that resonate with care ethics’ view of human life and flourishing as contingent on webs of social relations and complex interdependencies. From the outset, the association’s commitment to the notion of integration through housing design and development also reflected a reaction to recognized patterns of social segregation across the city. Rather than concentrate on one example of this, the AIL sought to create a radical response to the larger issue, forming at a tiny scale a place for people from as many different backgrounds, generations, lifestyles, housing needs and types of vulnerabilities as possible to live together, sharing a range of social infrastructures aimed at facilitating interaction and supporting the development of mutual care practices. It sought, indeed, to blow apart any idea of care needs and vulnerability as protected or specific characteristics of some rather than others, that required specific housing isolated from that of ‘free’ and ‘independent’ persons. In such terms, AIL’s approach resonates with the school of thought in care scholarship emphasizing a view of care needs in the context of human releationships as highly varied and shared by all in different ways rather than merely pertaining to designated forms of vulnerability such as disability and impairment (see, for 54

Placing Care

example, Thomas, 2007: 87–​89). Through the strategies of ecological design that both the FAB and MISS parts of the project embody, Sargfabrik also reflects an idea, akin to that articulated by Bonnie Mann (2002), of all people as ultimately dependent in place upon the actions of humanity collectively in relation to the earth’s finite resources. The remodelling of the original Sargfabrik and addition of a series of extensions within the heart of its urban block created space for 112 apartments. The idea was that these should accommodate all the members of the AIL, including directors of the design firm BKK-​3, along with a diverse range of others. To achieve this, a different approach was taken to the conventional market-​oriented strategy of creating standardized products including smaller and larger flats, accessible units and so on. Instead, diversity arose through a process of attracting people to take part in the project, which was billed as affordable for and inclusive of all, during the design phase. This was important, lead designer Franz Sumnitsch explained, because it allowed a bottom-​up process to shape the community rather than this being defined by top-​down normative ideas of who and which groups should be included and in what proportions. Participatory design, then, attended with care to all the different needs and desires associated with the people that came forward –​encompassing people of different sexual orientations, students, older people, single mothers, refugees, disabled people and even the city of Vienna, which wanted an eight-​room apartment for orphaned children and their carers. This, as Sumnitsch explained, led to a fascinating design-​ based exploration of the nature of ‘home’ and the qualities of homeliness for different people and their care relations –​from the home of children with live-​in care workers, to that of a single mother desperately in need of space in which to find moments of time for herself, to that of a student in temporary accommodation or a newly arrived migrant dislocated from the home and connections that they had left recently behind. Though different from the research carried out by WWM, this was seen by BKK-​3 as a key aspect of the ethos of the design of the Sargfabrik –​a close attention to diversity and its direct translation into spatial complexity through the design process. Sumnitsch’s hope was that the inclusion of different people would lead to the formation of a complex web of social ties across the project as new a micro-​ neighbourhood –​crossing lines between different generations, kin and non kin, national and non-​national and so forth. But his idea of integration also extended beyond the boundaries of the project. As he explained, the FAB was conceived as an “open village”. Like the almshouse, the urban design strategy inverts conventions of forming a hard limit to public space at the façade of residential buildings or blocks. Instead, it weaves a publicly accessible yet fine-​grained lane all the way through the building, linking together a series of amenities (as shown in Figure 3.5a). This openness, too, is a key aspect of the moral underpinning of the project as inclusive of anyone and all. 55

THE CARING CITY

Articulating the principle of openness, there are no gates to this lane or anywhere else within the project’s open spaces. Even more so than the almshouse, where technology may be masked but is in place to create needed protection within certain zones of the project, thresholds between public, communal and interpersonal space in the FAB are porous right up to the front doors of the flats. Thus, the sense of passage from the street into the project is articulated merely by a ceiling and the transition from full sunlight to shade momentarily beneath an orange soffit. While the thresholds suggest subtle transitions between different levels of ownership and privacy, they don’t determine where people should and shouldn’t go or who should and shouldn’t mix, allowing the culture of the place to form of its own accord rather than be closely orchestrated by design. The MISS, which is located on a more compact plot, leading to a more vertical arrangement of spaces, is not quite as open, however, with glass doors separating the street from a lobby and garden space beyond (see Figure 3.5b). The openess of FAB means that a stranger, such as I was when I visited, can pass right through the project, discovering and deploying capacities to judge for themselves where not to look and whether/​where it might be appropriate or not to linger. As such, it suggests a preparedness on behalf of the resident community to trust rather than an instinct to guard and defend against ‘the other’, helping people overcome fears and form ‘habits of living with diversity’ that, for Ash Amin, are key to cultivating an urban ethic of care (Amin, 2006, 2010). The publicly accessible social infrastructures or ‘third spaces’ (Oldenburg, 1989) strung along the main lane of the FAB include a café, a cultural space for music events, a nursery, a seminar room, a small swimming pool and a garden with a reflective pond. These are resources for and managed by the membership of the AIL, but they are also made accessible to people from beyond the project –​who may enrol their children in the nursery, attend organized events and utilize the café. As such, they suggest a potential transformation of the figure of the stranger altogether, as those who pass through often, and who perhaps eventually connect over a cup of coffee, may become familiar and even develop new friends. The process of fostering neighbourly relations within the project began within the design process itself. This involved not only designing the diverse housing units but also deciding what kinds of shared resources to invest in and how to reconcile the often very different perspectives of a heterogenous community encompassing different tastes, needs, values, affiliations, worries and fears, among other things. This in turn entailed a recognition that, as the success of the project relied on the pooling of resources, labour and commitment, no one person in the group could possess all skills or act or make decisions with autonomy. As Sumnitsch explained, it involved trying to recognize rather than erase people’s different perspectives; to see others’ points of view in ways reflective of Carol Gilligan’s (1982) observations of 56

Placing Care

Figure 3.5a: Sargfabrik (the FAB) ground-​floor plan, set within its urban context

LDS

C

TRA

SSE

MATZNERGASSE

GO

GS HLA

Source: BKK-​3

Figure 3.5b: Sargfabrik (the MISS) levels 1 and 2 (lower and upper ground) floor plans, set at the corner of its urban block

EBENE 1

EBENE 2

Source: BKK-​3

57

THE CARING CITY

how people adopt an ethic of care –​by actively choosing to recognize their interdependence over their potential capacities to act alone. Neighbourly relations are also fostered in an ongoing sense through the emergent spatial design strategies. A key aspect, for which the project is well known, is the inclusion throughout the FAB and MISS of shared spaces, including several gardens, a library, a kitchen/​dining area, a laundry, a workshop, a film/​party room, a dressing-​up room, and a hobbies room (for “doing whatever you like”, as Sumnitsch put it). The idea, Sumnitsch explained, came from the history of social housing from the era of Red Vienna under the Social Democratic regime of 1918–​34.This was when landmark housing projects such as the KarlMarx-Hof were built, often integrating an array of social infrastructures (Blau, 2000). Shared spaces were seen by the AIL to create opportunities for people to exchange skills, do things together and collaborate and act in supportive ways, building capabilities and resiliencies across the community as a whole. The kitchen/​dining room in MISS, for example, provides opportunities for people to meet and share in the rituals of preparing ingredients and eating, linking the care of the body with sociability. As a shared space, it clearly creates scope for, among other things, people to learn about other cuisines, to swap recipes, to sample different styles of cooking, for older people to teach younger ones, for the younger ones to introduce new ideas of food and so on. Similarly, the library and seminar room (glimpsed below in Figure 3.6) offer places for sharing knowledge, ideas and good reads. BKK-​3 was clearly aware that none of these behaviours or uses could be prescribed –​they are not “functions” in dry and deterministic a modernist sense, Sumnitsch explained, but rather “invitations”. The playfulness of the architecture in both projects is key to expressing this, encouraging experimentation in ways of being and doing. In the library in MISS, for example, sloping floors and angled windows, an amorphous shape and triple height volume help anyone spending time there to throw any received rules about how to read a book up in the air. Residents must practice using it, like defining the rules of a game. The same is true of the kitchen/​dining room which wraps around this space on the fourth floor (visible in Figure 3.6). The possibility of a lecture or slideshow is suggested by a sloping floor but, as Sumnitsch said, again this is not prescribed. Zigmunt Bauman (1993: 143–4​ ) writes that one of the most important aspects of play is that, unlike labour, ‘it is free and gratuitous’ and thus it allows people to choose whether to take part and to come together to frame the rules. As with the elements of form articulating the notion of the ‘open village’, playful shared spaces invite neighbourly caring and sharing as creative responses to design. The design of circulation spaces was also key, creating locations in which, over the course of everyday life, people can meet, cross paths and have a chance to recognize one another and become aware of one another’s 58

Placing Care

Figure 3.6: Sargfabrik (the MISS) part of the dining space which wraps around the library

Source: Juliet Davis

routines. The width of ground floor routes and upper level deck accessways was carefully judged, creating enough space not just for two people to pass but to allow householders to occupy the space directly outside their flat (see Figure 3.7). In MISS, deck accessways zigzag to create undulating forms and the potential to use wider and narrower sections differently. These are not “defensible spaces”, Sumnitsch argued, but thresholds allowing a resident such as himself to “show to the public who you are”. Drawing on personal experience, he explained how a neighbour there might see another trying to fix a punctured bike tyre or manoeuvre a buggy out of a lift or carry washing to the laundry. People might share tips about plants, recipes or new software and other technologies. A child may, of course, on occasion knock someone else’s belongings over. But the design sought to express an idea of living together in a caring, tolerant way as a negotiated process, one that unfolds and takes shape/​place over time. As in the almshouse project, shared resources and circulation spaces can be seen to foster an ethic of care in some of the ways we outlined in Chapter 2. They make people visible to one another, cultivating possibilities for attentiveness. The children in care, for example, come into contact with other children and their families in the ground floor courtyard garden of the MISS, connecting over play things and through games, normalizing different experiences of childhood. Children and adults using the dressing-​up room are able to create and reveal other selves, fostering tolerance of people’s hybrid identities and imaginative 59

THE CARING CITY

Figure 3.7: Sargfabrik (the FAB) ground-​floor circulation and residential thresholds

Source: Juliet Davis

capabilities. The party room creates a chance for people to let their hair down, reveal selves temporarily freed of mundane responsibilities and connect over drinks, music and conversation. In all these ways, shared spaces allow ‘a recognition of plurality’ that Sevenhuijsen regards as key to an ethic of attention. There was some indication that the design helped people to take care of others, to perform their responsibilities effectively. As Beatrix Eichinger, a long-​ term resident I interviewed in 2019 alongside Franz Sumnitsch, explained, the inclusion of the nursery gives working parents an accessible option for professional childcare outside the home, thus helping them to be parents while also holding down employment. The design of the shared gardens around which many of the family units cluster allows adults to share in the task of casual surveillance needed to keep children safe. For carers of the children in the home, the presence of other children and other adults helps create the possibility for respite and the sharing of the responsibility of care. The ways in which apartments overlook shared spaces and spill over thresholds into shared circulation spaces help to cultivate the watchfulness needed to see if carers are coping or if more vulnerable members of the community are alright. Based on the experience of forming the AIL and discussing the meaning of community in the context of participatory design, BKK-​3 sought to show sensitivity through design to how neighbourly relations might become stretched if people do not have choice in how and when to engage, resonating with Virginia Held’s (2006: 42) contention that care ‘is work as well as an emotion or motive or intention’ and that this work becomes an issue if it 60

Placing Care

wears people out. Hence, equally as important to the design as bringing people into contact is allowing them to retreat, to have respite, to be able to avoid the drawbacks of ‘overcommitment’ to others, in Held’s terms. In both the FAB and MISS parts of the Sargfabrik project, residents can choose how much or how far to conceal themselves as each flat has a large window with curtains or blinds that can be drawn open or closed. They are given individual balconies as well as the shared spaces described above –​places to regain energy in quiet and solitude, with no expectation of having to interact or be responsible for the wellbeing of others. Before concluding, it is important to clarify that neither the social integration nor the quality of design (encompassing the extended process as well as the imaginative outcomes) would be possible without the financial arrangements put in place at the project’s inception and the ongoing financial management of the development. Financing both FAB and MISS involved state grants as well as pooled funding from AIL members and the future residents, which BKK-​3 played an active role in orchestrating. These ensured that the project achieved, like the almshouse, a rare combination of high quality and affordability. Sargfabrik would also be a very different place without the participatory management that keeps the buildings and open spaces going, as well as manages the finances. A bewildering array of voluntary groups today take care of every aspect of design from the roof garden to the urban setting, the social infrastructures public spaces and bicycle storage. This complex and somewhat eccentric governance has become key to the ethos of the place. In all these ways, then, the project offers a compelling fulfilment of Tronto’s vision of ‘communities that are integrated by age, race, economic level, and types of family structure’ (Tronto, 1999: loc 5328), thereby avoiding the moral problems she identifies in age-​segregated housing. Indeed, through it’s radically integrative approach to housing, it arguably does this more fully than the Southwark almshouse.

Placing as caring I began this chapter with the aim of exploring the role of urban design in in responding to and shaping the changing place of care in cities and how this process might be considering caring. Both case studies involved the development of urban design strategies related to ideas of care as deinstitutionalized –​ ‘relocated’, to use Sevenhuijsen’s term, into the unbounded corridors and gardens, streets and cafés of communal life. In the process, the designers of both sought to respond to the changing role of families, professional carers and neighbours/​friends in the care of specific people in contemporary society. Both also, hence, worked with ideas of care as involving a wide range of ties and forms of support, from those associated with formal care relations to those that might characterize the 61

THE CARING CITY

informal care of friends and neighbours. In both cases, design involved placing considerable emphasis on the relationship between intimate, interpersonal and communal space within the projects, as on the interfaces and edges between the projects and the wider public domain. Though both are very small projects, they have much to offer urban design at a larger scale. Indeed, lessons from cohousing projects like Sargfabrik in Vienna have already influenced the design of big, new urban extensions in cities, such as Aspern Seestadt. In turn, the almhouse offers a valuable precedent for urban neighbourhood designs or street regeneration projects seeking to integrate affordable housing for older people. Despite the different ways in which they were developed and the different forms and spatial relationships that resulted, both came to embody an ethic of care through design. In both cases, design involved careful research and consultation. The almshouse shows that design does not need to involve future users directly to be attentive and empathetic to their situation and to create opportunities for responsiveness within the design process. In contrast, Sargfabrik shows how participatory design involving those very users can be used to yield real diversity in housing types, corresponding to diverse needs, household configurations and tastes. Though design can never make people be more caring, both projects involved the development of particular spatial strategies which can be read as efforts to try to avoid the ‘privileged irresponsibility’ that Tronto identified in the context of age-​segregated housing. The notion of porous thresholds as developed in both projects is a good example of this, creating opportunities for visibility, encounter and a sense of relatedness. Another is the inclusion of spaces devoted to shared activities and the potential these offer for fostering shared interests and the development of mutual support networks. Both projects suggest that, by creating spaces in which different sorts of interactions may take place, the burden of responsibility for care for specific people, such as children, may be spread. Again, the porosity of borders which both design strategies generate is important here –​between private, communal and public space and between interior and exterior. In turn, they suggest a role for design in the cultivation of ‘caring habits’ (Hamington, 2004), whether this is just a matter of saying hello to neighbours in the corridor, getting together to debate wider political and social concerns in a shared seminar room or taking care of buildings and gardens for both oneself and others to enjoy. Ultimately, they both suggest that placing care in a caring city is a matter not of bounding or hiding away care, but of identifying locations that seem advantageous for the cultivation of a wide range of supportive practices and relations, and of setting about to stage those weaker and stronger, closer and more distanced social ties.

62

4

Accessibility in/​as Caring Introduction I began to allude to the importance of accessibility in facilitating new patterns of care in the previous chapter, and the goal of this chapter is to consider in depth how urban design can mobilize notions of access to influence care needs, relations and practices. However, I begin the discussion with a quandary since two of the major goals of accessibility as constructed in the context of urban design theory have an uneasy relationship with the ideas of care and from the ethics of care which I have presented thus far. The first of these goals is personal autonomy. The accessibility of built form is often seen to shape the autonomy that people such as those with a mobility or sensory impairment have in looking after themselves and choosing how and where to live. The second goal is universality. The goal of accessible urban design, such as within the context of ‘universal design’ discourses, is seen to be the creation of city forms and places that are navigable by all, satisfying principles of inclusivity and equity (see, for example, Steinfeld and Maisel, 2012). As we saw in Chapter 1, care ethics adopts a critical position regarding the concept of autonomy and particularly the ways in which it is seen to have been idealized in society. An emphasis on autonomy, as Gilligan argued, not only implies that the goal of human development should be the ability to fend for oneself, to become a free agent able to act independently of others, but also serves to mask and devalue the ties and relations of care that may in fact be vital to the resilience, wellbeing and choices available to individuals and communities. Stemming from this critique, as we have seen, care ethics has centred on a conception of humans as interdependent –​a condition that does not negate autonomy altogether but that reconceives it as relational, as given by nurture and support rather than by the extraordinary capabilities of self-​directed, self-​sufficient individuals (see, for example,Verkerk, 2001). Care ethics also contains a critique of universality that, as discussed in Chapter 1, is key to the ways in which it is distinguished from the ethics of 63

THE CARING CITY

justice and the Western Enlightenment philosophies from which these arise. The key issue, as Joan Tronto (1993: 146–​50) argues, is that an emphasis on universal rights or privileges in moral theory, while laudable, can be associated with processes that mask the particularities of people’s needs. If the problem of autonomy, then, is a problem of excessive emphasis on the individual in terms of their capacities for freedom, the danger of universality is a lack of emphasis on the individual as a living, feeling subject within specific circumstances and with specific needs and capabilities for wellbeing and flourishing. My interest in this chapter, as the title suggests, is to consider accessibility in and also as caring. Before I begin, however, it is important to clarify that, beyond its social and political connotations, accessibility pertains to a range of different aspects of urban design. As Kim Dovey (2016; Pafka and Dovey, 2017) suggests, at its core, accessibility is always ‘a measure of what we get access to’. What accessibility consists of within the built environment and in the context of urban design, therefore, depends fundamentally on what is to be accessed. Thus, if accessibility is considered in the broad terms of access to people, goods, services and information in cities in general, as it is by Philipp Rode et al (2017), then transport infrastructures and their interfaces with urban form are key considerations. In contrast, if accessibility is considered in terms of the reach of local amenities within neighbourhoods or the general accessibility of neighbourhood public spaces, as it is by Graeme Evans (2009), then it may encompass such features of urban public realm design as lighting, signage, public art, railings, level or stepped surfacesand gradients. As these two examples suggests, accessibility is influenced by the urban scale at which it is considered –​with accessibility at the broad urban scale concentrating attention on quite different features of built form and place to those which are most significant at a more localized scale or in the context of specific public spaces. To add complexity, what accessibility pertains to also fundamentally depends on whose access is in question. While certain features of urban form and mobility at any scale may be relevant to the accessibility for many different people of urban resources and amenities, some will have a special significance to particular people. Thus, for example, visual ways of finding information may be particularly important for those with memory impairments, whereas auditory information may be crucial for blind people. To give a different example, the separation of work from home in the context of modernist planning, as discussed in Chapter 3, may not have created a barrier to men pursuing employment opportunities, but it was associated with the relegation and confinement of women to the home (see, for example, Hayden, 1980; Hamraie, 2013). Slopes and gradients may be barely perceptible to some but may be experienced as significant barriers or even hazards by others, limiting the accessibility of resources vital to wellbeing (Steinfeld and Meisl, 2012: 8). In turn, different people may perceive the 64

Accessibility in/as Caring

accessibility of the public realm in different ways, as safe, reachable and/​or navigable. These perceptions may be personal, sensory, rooted in memory and experience and/or culturally conditioned. Accessibility, hence, is not just an objective, generalizable measure but one that often depends on how barriers and porosities in places and cities are both subjectively experienced and culturally constructed. What is the role of access in caring? In this chapter, I begin my discussion not with a theoretical discussion of the theme, as in the previous chapter, but with my two case studies, as these offer the means to discuss different set of ideas of accessibility in relation to care in context. The first is a public-​realm project in the city of Vienna, which forms part of its broader ‘gender mainstreaming strategy’. The second is an urban block in the city of Singapore which encompasses housing for elderly people and a neighbourhood centre. In both, notions of universal design, which are very widespread within contemporary planning and urban design practice, do play a key role in framing the moral values of the projects. However, I will argue that they also clearly show how distinctive accessible design strategies can emerge from practices involving close attention, as in Tronto’s first stage of caring, to specific needs and abilities as to specific (and very different) cultural contexts and climates. They also both yield interpretations of access that relate directly to care relations, offering the means to rethink the notion of accessibility beyond its common association with personal autonomy. In the second section, therefore, I will consider the implications of the analysis of the case studies for conceptualizing accessibility in urban design not only as a measure of justice as encoded in and embodied by city fabrics but as part of its capacity for care, as caring.

Access and care in the street: Vienna’s Meidlinger Hauptstraße “For example, if you say you want to have women go to work and care work is made easier for them, what you need is … good, accessible childcare infrastructure. What you also need is good care for elderly people: you have to make sure that there is a good network and services are easily accessible.” So said Ursula Bauer of the City of Vienna’s Executive Office at our meeting together in the summer of 2020. Inaccessible infrastructures and services, she argued, affect care relations in numerous ways. They affect the extent to which some people can reach formal care services they may need by themselves, but they also affect the lives of informal carers in numerous ways. Her particular interest, as head of the department for gender mainstreaming, is in how accessibility affects women as they have historically borne the 65

THE CARING CITY

lion’s share of responsibilities for care in the context of the family and also predominate in the care professions. In Vienna, as elsewhere, this was not something that was recognized as an issue for planning in general terms, let alone for accessible design, until the early 1990s. Change began in Vienna with an exhibition in 1991 entitled Who Owns Public Space? Women’s Daily Life in the City, curated by two women planners, Eva Kail and Jutta Kleedorfer, who worked, respectively, for the Executive Office for Construction and Technology (in the unit for urban renewal) and in the Department for Strategic Planning and Urban Development (Irschik et al, 2013). The exhibition depicted the daily routines of a range of women of different ages –​from a small girl to a very old lady –​as they went about their daily lives. Each girl/​woman was shown to trace a different path through the city, and yet all made clear that safety and ease of movement between spaces that were part of their routines were issues they confronted daily. This led to the establishment in 1992 of a Women’s Office, led by Eva Kail, within the planning department tasked with identifying gender-​specific planning issues, In 1998, a specialist planning unit was established within the Executive Office for Construction and Technology with a mouthful of a title, the Co-​ordination Office for Planning and Construction Geared to the Daily life and Specific Needs of Women, where planning issues from women’s perspectives were the focus. The launch of this unit was key to development and roll-​out of the gender mainstreaming strategy given that, as Bauer explained, it was situated “right at the top of the planning hierarchy”, giving it considerable influence. The result was the instigation of an approach which has been a hallmark of the gender mainstreaming strategy in Vienna ever since: the identification of pilot projects as a focus for the development of new methods and to show the effects of a socially sensitive planning culture, thereby influencing mainstream planning practice. Beginning in 1995, these projects have included local parks, several housing schemes (such as the internationally renowned Frauen-​Werk Stadt scheme) and streetscape designs. Later still, in 2005, a gender mainstreaming team in the Chief Executive Office of the city was created and, shortly after that, a gender budgeting unit was formed by the director of finance. These developments, combined, not only enabled the implications of research and design conducted in the context of pilot projects to be scaled up to the level of policy but also allowed for gender issues to be addressed across departments including planning, health and education, for gender to be ‘mainstreamed’ across the city’s diverse administrative functions. As one illustration of this, a Gender Mainstreaming in Urban Planning and Urban Development policy formed part of the City of Vienna’s Step2025 Urban Development Plan of 2014, with ramifications for many different aspects of the city’s growth over the coming decades. A manual called Gender Mainstreaming in Urban Design and 66

Accessibility in/as Caring

Development was produced in parallel to this main document, providing more detailed guidance on gender-​sensitive design practice. The focus of the Co-​ordination Office’s work, led by Kail, has consistently been on women and girls of all ages and from all walks of life. Care emerged as a key theme, she stressed, not because of any prior assumptions held by her and her team about the roles of women but, on the contrary, because their research showed that “women do have to care for younger kids; they have to care about the elderly. If they have no kids, they [often still] have to take care of the household. Some of them are also taking care of their partner, to let him work more”. This was a finding that could not be ignored, though one they clearly found troubling from the perspective of gender equality. Though some critics of gender mainstreaming have suggested that supporting care in these terms can all too easily lead to actions that simply endorse gender stereotypes, what it suggested to those leading the unit was by no means just a set of strategies to make life easier for women in the performance of caring roles. As Bauer put it, the finding suggested the need to “adjust the services offered by the city” to better support practices of care in families –​which could of course involve men and women –​and, fundamentally, to create more choice for women in navigating their lives. These aims resonate with Daniel Engster’s vision of a care-​infused welfare state, the central goal of which, as he puts it, ‘is to provide public support for caring activities’ and for which care theory could offer ‘a new theory of justice’ (Engster, 2007: loc 238). Attending to issues of access, as we will see through the upcoming analysis, is one way in which these aims of supporting care translate into the planning context and materialize within urban form. Reflecting the focus on overlooked realities that characterized the Women’s Office’s earliest work, a key feature of all the pilot projects carried out over the past twenty-​five years has been an emphasis on developing and refining research techniques to understand the nature of barriers within urban form and the public realm. This has typically involved not just surveys and mapping, which can be done remotely, but also immersion in the sites themselves to carry out observations and interviews and, hence, build up an impression of places as experienced and lived by girls and women of different ages. The Meidlinger Hauptstraße pilot project, which was developed between 2010 and 2012, is no exception. This is a streetscape project in the city’s twelfth district, Meidling, which was urbanized from the late nineteenth century. The district has a traditionally working-​class population though it has been a focus of migration from the Balkan states and the Middle East since the 1990s. Meidlinger Hauptstraße is one of its main streets, an important ribbon of access between two major underground stations (one of which is also a railway station) which is lined for almost a kilometre with a vibrant array of shops. Surrounding it are the sorts of five-​to-​six-​storey 67

THE CARING CITY

residential and mixed-​use developments that characterize early twentieth-​ century Viennese neighbourhood urbanism. At the time that the street became a focus for Kail’s team, it had not received much investment by the city for some while. Discussion began with its need for maintenance and repair and the potential to improve the setting and accessibility of an important regional shopping street. The project emerged as a collaboration between the Co-​ordination Office and the city’s design department. The former was responsible for commissioning a ‘social-​space analysis’ by a team comprising the sociologist Christoph Stoick and the feminist landscape planner and socio-​anthropologist Heide Studer. Studer was already well known to the Co-​ordination Office by this time. Her firm, Tilia, was lead consultant in one of the planning unit’s very earliest pilot projects, initiated in 1999 (completed in 2001). This was the Einsiedlerpark, a small existing neighbourhood green space which was the focus of designs focussed on increasing accessibility for teenage girls and young women, shown to be marginalized by comparison to boys and young men in public spaces. The design department was in turn responsible for the organization of an international design competition and for putting together a competition jury. Kail, however, was involved in all aspects of the formulation of the call for competition entries and was a member, as a gender expert, of the jury. Local specificities, pedestrian movement and care practices are all typically blind spots in mainstream transport planning and highways engineering (Kail and Irschik, 2013). The result, not just in Vienna but worldwide, tends to be a one-​size-​fits-​all approach to street infrastructure that is often based on generic notions of access and accessibility that reflect a lack of understanding of place-​based and people-​centred particularities. Stoick and Studer’s social-​ space analysis revealed new knowledge regarding users, the life of the street and issues of access. It revealed the street as by no means generic but as a unique place embedded in the life of a multicultural community and shaped by many different factors including the area’s history, housing and demographics, recalling the remarkable while ‘ordinary’ life-​world that Suzi Hall (2012) also uncovered through her ethnographic study of the Walworth Road in London. It was a street “characterized by heterogeneity”, as the researchers put it. As such, it suggested a novel and non-standard way of approaching accessibility. One of the major findings, which came as a revelation to the city planners, was that Meidlinger Hauptstraße was not just a thoroughfare affording access to the various shops and amenities distributed along it but a destination in itself, a species of “district living room”, as Kail explained in our interview. As such, it was not just a means of access to other places but a place to which local people sought access in order to socializes, gather local news and cultivate support networks. The researchers observed that older people often seemed to have dressed up in ‘nice clothes’ to spend time in the street, a detail indicative of its 68

Accessibility in/as Caring

importance as a destination –​as somewhere not just to go but also to be seen to be. It had a local catchment, though its population combined numerous diasporic communities, creating a multicultural vibe. Owing to the surrounding density of development as well as the diversity of shops, however, this catchment was sufficient to ensure liveliness. Owing to the mixed-​use nature of the neighbourhood’s urban form, it formed part of myriad routes between homes, different kinds of amenities and social infrastructures, work, transport and local parks. The street’s heterogeneity encompassed care practices and relations of different sorts. Throughout the day, parents with prams and pushchairs plied the route –​whether shopping, on the way to one of the stations or just strolling. Fountains and seats created places to stop, feed and/​or play, and as a result were also places where caregivers socialized. The street was animated by the movements of children of different ages with their caregivers in the early weekday mornings and mid-​afternoons on their way to and from their kindergartens or schools. Teachers were also observed ferrying children down the street in the middle of the day toward activities in the nearby parks or library. The street’s heterogeneity similarly encompassed different levels of dependency on others in navigating and using it. From the late afternoon, the street was observed to be a popular place for older children to meet and socialize, ‘sometimes with a scooter, bike or skateboard’, and often unaccompanied by adults. The children’s capacities for independence were influenced by the fact that the street was a constant pedestrian thoroughfare. This created the condition of ‘eyes on the street’ that Jane Jacobs (1961) observed in 1960s downtown New York to be vital to both the collective care of children and their safety in the public realm. The street was also popular with older people, who could be seen throughout the day ‘shopping, strolling or resting –​some with shopping carts, some with walking aids’. Some were accompanied by partners, children or formal carers while others were seen navigating it on their own. The street encompassed people with different capabilities in terms of mobility –​from those in wheelchairs assisted by carers, to those requiring mobility vehicles, to those able to travel on foot with walking aids, to those able to move freely –​and different requirements of the street as a place of rest –​whether as somewhere to catch one’s breath on the uphill run, to watch the world go by or to connect with others. It also encompassed people with quite different capacities to acquire resources on the street with which to satisfy needs. While it was a focus for shoppers and those with purchasing power, it was also observed to be a focus for those with few resources, existing in precarious circumstances and seeking charitable social support through begging for money for food. Drawing on interviews as well as their detailed observations, the researchers drew together a set of issues of street design and accessibility that related to both particular social groups and users in general. In other words, the notion 69

THE CARING CITY

of access was framed in relation to their direct, place-​specific encounters rather than preconceived notions of the nature of barrier-​free streets. They were able to show that while the street was a magnet, a resource and a focus for caring activities of diverse kinds, subtle aspects of the street’s given design constituted barriers that could affect caring dynamics including the relative dependence/​independence of people in care relations. Thus, for example, features such as the steep gradient of the street, the presence of steps in places, fractured and uneven paving and a lack of clarity around the designation of places for sitting/​being and walking/​travelling created barriers for those with mobility issues, affecting their reliance on others. These features were also drawbacks for carers such as those pushing prams or buggies. In turn, a lack of consistent lighting at night, poorly articulated transitions from pedestrian to roadway sections of the street and a confusing interface between cycling and pedestrian routes were key barriers for older children seeking a level of independence in public space as well as for the quality of care for groups such as young children on the way to school. The ‘relational autonomies’ of different groups, were, in other words, seen to be reliant on the alignment and complementarity of social and material fabrics to create the necessary support structures. The researchers were also able to show that numerous aspects of street design constituted barriers for more than one group, such as slopes, steps, darkness at night and legibility, and drew up a set of priorities for its remodelling. For Kail’s team, it was clear that these were also key to gender-​sensitive design given that women tend to bear the brunt of caring responsibilities in families and homes, as girls and women often feel (and are) less safe in the public realm than men and that women predominate among older age-​g roups. The commission was awarded to the Hamburg-​based practice WES, known for its emphasis on the uniqueness of places and opposition to generic forms and details that characterize not just highways engineering but so much globalized urban design and architectural practice. As Kail explained, it was an easy choice as out of the thirty firms that submitted proposals, “twenty-​nine of them just offered hip furniture and completely ignored the outcomes of the social-​space analysis”. Just one, the anomaly, offered “much more sensitivity and awareness toward the needs of the people”, using the complex environment that Stoik and Studer revealed to think creatively and imaginatively rather than assuming that the goal of the street regeneration process was to denigrate its cheap shops, remove its beggars and draw hipsters into the scene, marginalizing images of vulnerability and care. For WES, the diversity of users, the interweaving of routines and the uses of the street as a place of care and intercultural exchange were drivers of their vision for the street’s transformation. For Wolfgang Betz, the director responsible for the project, this began with reconceptualizing the street from 70

Accessibility in/as Caring

a piece of generic, highways infrastructure to a “lifeline” to which access was needed by different users in the course of their everyday lives as carers and cared-​for. However, setting out to recognize the specificity of users and issues of access, Betz explained, creates a considerable challenge for public space design. The public realm is not only criss-​crossed by people with different needs, interests and levels of vulnerability all the time –​and must therefore accommodate constantly shifting diversity –​but the paths they take are never fixed or constant. To use design as the means to define or designate the paths and territories of different groups would be simply to segregate users, to limit possibilities and close down opportunities for exchange and crossover, for surprising encounters and for the street to function in the manner that Kullman (2014) suggests, as a place which incubates and helps cultivate dispositions and practices of caring. Thus, Betz suggested, there is a need to establish public space as a common ground, a place that all can universally reach, while at the same time creating different spatial qualities and experiences that attune to the diversity of users and activities as well as to the specific experiences of parts of the street that the social-​space analysis had revealed. The first of these goals was addressed by attending to barriers, adhering to a principle of barrier-​free design for all users of the street. Echoing Steinfeld and Maisel’s (2012) complex understanding of barriers in the built environment, the range of barriers WES set out to address was varied, drawing on the research captured in the social-​space analysis. For example, WES addressed barriers related to steps and the street’s incline. The street’s steep rise by twenty-​nine metres along its length posed a notable challenge. WES sought to soften the steepest gradients by remodelling sections of the street, reinstating a single surface of stone, removing steps and kerbs to ensure navigability for those on foot, in wheelchairs or pushing buggies, and installing seating at regular intervals to allow staggered passage with respite stops for frailer people. The darkness of the site at night, a problem for various groups, was addressed though the introduction of subtle, sulphur-​coloured column lamps for night illumination. The colour was selected to allude to the thermal springs for which Meidling was known prior to its nineteenth-​century urbanization. Street corners and the edges of alleyways frequented by teenagers were picked out and, at the same time, obstacles to viewing around corners were removed. Roadway sections of the street were narrowed to a minimum while pavements were maximized to accommodate not only users moving at different speeds but the exuberant spilling of goods and furniture from shops and cafés –​tables, chairs, signs, suitcases, dresses, pyjamas, hats, footballs, flowers and so forth –​their garish colours set against WES’s calm grey-​and-​buff stone. 71

newgenrtpdf

Figure 4.1: Meidlinger Hauptstraße plan

THE CARING CITY

72 Source: WES Landscape Architecture

Accessibility in/as Caring

The complex overlap of different modes of mobility in some sections of the street was addressed by better articulating the transitions from pedestrian areas to roadway sections that cars, bikes and delivery vans could navigate through new paving and signage. The edges of roadways were defined through a change of material from stone paving to concrete. A kerb was set between them, but at only three centimetres high it was designed to tell of risk and invite responsible behaviour rather than dictate to users. On one side of the road, however, a line of on-​street parking formed in stone setts creates something of a protective buffer zone which some might favour. In turn, one of the main ways in which the goal of creating different spatial qualities and experiences that attune to the diversity of activities on the street was realized was by developing the idea of the street as a living room. This involved not treating it just as a linear route but rather identifying a series of zones with distinct atmospheres (Figure 4.1). Through them, the street would acquire a “narrative structure”, Betz explained, such that “it’s a kind of storytelling you are going through”. This recalls Richard Sennett’s (2007) definition of streets not as mere liminal zones between a point A and point B but as ‘passage territories’ –​places in which to live, feel and think on the move. The idea also resonates with how, in his book The Old Ways, the writer Robert McFarlane (2012) infuses meaning into the word ‘ways’, as in pathways, by linking it to ‘ways’ as in ways of life. Pathways, he suggests, can be explored as inscriptions of life, of routines and stories that emerge at the intersections of culture and landscape. In Meidling too, the path was framed not just as the means to ends, as an efficient, fast route between different places, but as the focus of the unfolding of quotidian life in all its curiosity and diversity. Spaces were defined –​rather as is done in interior design –​by furnishing them with a ‘carpet’ of stone here, the umbrella of a stand of trees or the canopy of an awning there and with different sorts of seating, including big pillow-​shaped stones, long stone-​backed benches and moveable wooden chairs (Figure 4.2). No assumptions were made about which groups would use different seating areas, and yet the knowledge of different groups and meeting spots, routines and care practices remained alive within the design process, shaping the subtle characterization of places with different qualities of light and shade, with different configurations of seating, with rougher and smoother surfaces, levels of street lighting and so forth. This subtle spatial differentiation cannot determine use, Betz argued, but rather invites a diverse inhabitation and interpretation of the street by users. Reflecting more nuance than would be apparent in much street design the world over, WES also endeavoured to acknowledge the role of sensory experience in accessibility (paralleling the emergence of a wider interest in this within accessibility studies). Factors shaping sensory accessibility, Betz explained, include not just the ability to see ahead and to anticipate either potential hazards or opportunities for respite but also capacities to 73

THE CARING CITY

Figure 4.2: Meidlinger Hauptstraße perspective view

Source: Felix Holzapfel-​Herziger

navigate space by touch and a person’s predispositions to sensory overload or sensitivity to noise levels, strong smells and the like. This emphasis on sensory experience, as on the uniqueness of topography and place, reflects a long-​standing influence of phenomenology on WES’s design thinking including Merleau-​Ponty’s (1992 [1961]) philosophy of human consciousness and perception. But it also of course resonates with the preoccupation of care ethics with the responsiveness of users, its insistence that care is always co-​produced through the relations and interactions of carers and those cared for, and that it is ultimately to be assessed on the basis of human experience. Recognizing accessibility as being a matter of corporeal encounter and perception as much as of the dry ‘facts’ of physical design led WES not only to consider such sensory impacts of design as noise, light, temperature and movement in terms of generalized understandings of human experience (of place as loud, bright, cold or fast, for example) but of how they might be experienced in subtly distinct ways by different users. Hence, this recognition led Betz and his team to endeavour to create possibilities for different kinds of sensory experience throughout the street or, to use Kathleen Stewart’s term, ‘atmospheric attunements’ (Stewart, 2011) in the midst of everyday life. Often the ‘doing’ of design is measured by the scale of gestures made within a place. Habitually, too, the scale of gesturing bears all too little relation to the depth of contextual analysis underpinning it. Depth of analysis, however, is clearly at the heart of this project. The resulting street design is profoundly influenced by this and yet it has resisted trying to solidify ‘ways of life’ in the streetway through overly deterministic or highly individualized design. 74

Accessibility in/as Caring

Instead, detailed knowledge has been utilized to further the potential for heterogenous users to find a place in the street for themselves, to meet their everyday needs and cultivate their care relations. This is something quite different to design that merely generalizes or universalizes capabilities or experience. “At the end”, in Wolfgang Betz’s view, it is an approach that shows sensitivity to complexity and depth of thought, and that creates possibilities by “trying to do as little as possible”.

Access and care in vertical urbanism: Kampung Admiralty, Singapore Thousands of miles away, around the other side of world in Equatorial Asia, is a project that reflects an alternative conceptualization of accessibility while also endeavoring to shape care practices and relations. Since its opening in 2017, Kampung Admiralty in the city state of Singapore has been hailed as visionary in its response to Singapore’s ageing society through housing design. Unlike Meidlinger Hauptstraße, this is an urban block and neighbourhood centre: a large-​scale, new project rather than a careful tinkering with an existing form, a mixed-​use project rather than a public space. Before exploring its design, however, we should attend briefly to the name of the development, as this is telling in itself of how care relations were imagined and idealized in the context of the project. In Malay, the word ‘kampung’ denotes a unit of settlement that may occur in a rural or urban context. Typically, it denotes a cluster of buildings encompassing houses and community buildings. In the rural context, these would often be surrounded by rice paddy fields or orchards. But kampung also connotes ideas of affiliation and belonging. Used within the verb ‘berkampung’ (to form a kampung), it means to gather or to come together as a village society, whether in the context of a transient event or the formation of a settlement. Historically, across Malaysia and also in Borneo and Indonesia, these processes were informed by the values of gotong royong which means ‘joint bearing of burdens’ or ‘mutual assistance’ (Bowen, 2011). The kampung is a concept as well as a structure of community that has been significantly eroded in Singapore in the context of the rapid urbanization and modernization that has accompanied the transformation of the economy in the post-​colonial period of its history since the mid-​1960s (Chia, 2013). Describing a twenty-​first century piece of urban design as a kampung –​ which incidentally could not be morphologically more distinct from the kampungs of old Singapore with their timber and tin houses and frequent lack of basic infrastructure –​is therefore clearly significant, suggesting the aim to recapture something lost within the contemporary city and its culture. Obvious questions that follow are: to what extent is this an attempt to re-​ manufacture the social relations and values associated with the kampung and 75

THE CARING CITY

what does this have to do with care for the elderly in contemporary Singapore? To what extent does the deployment of the word kampung indeed reflect a certain nostalgia for what may have been lost in the course of clearances and redevelopments? Further, given that the Kampung Admiralty is the product of Singapore’s Housing and Development Board (HDB), whereas the kampung was traditionally a gathering of community from the bottom up, to what extent is this an attempt by the state to socially engineer relations of care from the top down? The project was developed by the HDB in response to changing demographics and housing needs. The HDB has developed and also governs a whopping 80 per cent of the housing that Singapore’s population lives in, though much of this is privately financed through government-​backed and tightly regulated home ownership schemes. As of 2014, when the project started, 11 per cent of public housing residents were aged sixty-​five and over, and this number was rising (Yuen, 2019a). By 2035, the HDB estimates that 32 per cent of Singaporeans will fall into this age category. Factors contributing to this are, on the one hand, rising life expectancy and, on the other, low birth rates. Indeed, Singapore currently has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world. It also has one of the most rapidly ageing populations in the world (Centre for Liveable Cities and the Seoul Institute, 2019). This demographic shift places pressure on Singaporean society as the workforce shrinks in proportion to the older population. In other words, as the population ages, the fiscal costs of care rise more rapidly than GDP. The obvious challenge this creates is to create a satisfactory balance between providing the care that is needed, managing the potential for costs to spiral and ensuring the health of the economy (Hong et al, 2019). The role of the built environment in the production of care needs and its potential contribution to care costs has been recognized in recent years, leading to the ambition to develop an ‘age-​friendly city’ (Centre for Liveable Cities and the Seoul Institute, 2019). Much has been written about the relationship between housing for the elderly in Singapore and assumptions about care relations and responsibilities. As Mehta (2006) suggests, for example, housing development in Singpore has long been informed by an assumption that older people are typically cared for in the family. The family, she writes, has been constructed at government level ‘as the first line of defence for older Singaporeans’, reflecting ‘Asian cultural norms of filial care for one’s parents’. As is true in other Asian contexts, and of course also in the West, the burden of this has fallen particularly on daughters. One of the observed results is a smaller proportion of older people requiring a high level of care living in nursing homes as compared to many other countries. As of 2016, Singapore had 26.1 nursing home beds per 1,000 people aged sixty-​five and above, compared to the OECD average of 45.2 beds. However, while there has been little focus on formal home-​based 76

Accessibility in/as Caring

care there has also been relatively little emphasis on the phenomenon of older people living independently, whose families may not be nearby and/​ or who may wish to age in place. As housing expert Belinda Yuen argues (Yuen, 2019a, 2019b), housing development in Singapore long focussed on providing for families, resulting in a dearth of small units that might appeal to ‘empty nesters’ including single older people, couples or friends. As research from Singapore’s Centre for Liveable Cities (2019) suggests, this reflects a broader tendency to construct old age as an individualized problem rather than as a natural process which the city might better accommodate. The majority of older people aged sixty-​five and above live in the typically high-​rise developments which the HDB has been producing for many decades. Much of this housing has been seen to pose issues of access for those with advancing mobility issues and/​or health problems. As Yuen (2019a, 2019b; Yuen et al, 2020) argues, at the broad, land-​use planning level, a key issue has been that, as the services provided by different government agencies within urban districts are not co-​located, housing is often remote from healthcare and social care services. In addition, housing developments constructed before 1990, when Singapore’s first accessibility code was introduced, typically pose numerous barriers including stepped access, a lack of wayfinding systems and so on which are inevitably experienced more acutely by those with age-​related mobility impairments and disabilities. These are barriers for older people who might be able to and prefer to live alone but also for those living with particular family members as well as for the family members who care for and about them. They are future barriers for those wishing to age in place as well. Kampung Admiralty reflects the emergence of new ideas of community planning and design to address this web of issues –​ideas which, as we will see, connect building accessibility to broad notions of how responsibility for caring for health in old age and looking after the state of public finances should be distributed across the ageing Singaporean population (echoing many of the aspects of the changing place of care discussed in Chapter 3). As Yuen puts it, Kampung Admiralty ‘reflects an evolving national effort to develop a supportive network of care amenities, community and eldercare facilities [and] to expand at home and community-​based health and social care so people can age in place and maintain independent lives’. Kampung Admiralty is located in a neighbourhood of the same name –​ Admiralty, which was the site of a British naval base during colonial times. The neighbourhood is part of Sembawang New Town, which was developed by the HDB post-​independence on lands which had been vegetable farms and traditional kampungs. The project was designed by WOHA, a Singapore-​based architectural and urban design practice known for its pioneering approaches to biophilic design as well as for its emphasis on place-​making and climate-​sensitive building in the Asian city context. 77

THE CARING CITY

Figure 4.3: Kampung Admiralty ground-​floor public space

Source: Patrick Bingham-​Hall

The compact development, which comes to all the edges of a 0.9 hectare plot, adopts a typology used the world over for large-​scale, mixed-​use buildings, involving a podium block with towers on top (Figure 4.4). However, Kampung Admiralty is no ordinary tower-​and-​podium project, and it certainly does not replicate the tendency of HDB housing design to merely extrude the ground-​floor plan upwards over multiple storeys. The podium, which rises to eight storeys, is shaped and carved in ways that not only break down the sense of its large scale –​humanizing it –​but also lead to the formation of an exterior public realm that begins with a large, shaded court at ground level (Figure 4.3) and rises up to a terraced roofscape of tropical gardens. Two towers rise not from the topmost terrace on level eight but from level four, thus seeming to merge with the podium rather than simply resting atop it, and therefore help to frame a set of cascading gardens at the project’s heart. Different spaces and land uses are carefully arrayed within this podium and tower structure. Non-​residential uses are set within the basement and podium levels. Starting from the bottom, these include a supermarket, medical centre, hawker centre, a facility called the Active Ageing Hub, a childcare centre, a park and a community farm. These are all substantial facilities designed for access by the whole Admiralty neighbourhood rather than just Kampung Admiralty’s residents, evoking the community buildings that, albeit on a much more modest scale, would have been found at the heart 78

Accessibility in/as Caring

Figure 4.4: Kampung Admiralty section

0 3 6 9

15

25 M

Source: WOHA

of a traditional kampung. The spatial structure of the traditional kampung is also evoked through the gardens and farm, which include native trees such as kaffir limes and rambutans. Meanwhile, sequestered from the rush and noise of the roads below while within easy reach of all the facilities, the two cruciform, nine-​storey towers provide 104 public housing flats for people aged fifty-​five and above. However, the project in no way isolates people in their towers. On the contrary, the planning and design of Kampung Admiralty involved an array of ideas and proposals related to different sorts of mobility and access at different urban scales. As Philipp Rode et al (2017) argue, access is not just about proximity but also ease of movement over distance. Movement is facilitated by the location of the building beside a rapid mass transit (MRT) station, by the orientation of circulation and spaces on the ground floor towards the station and the sense of continuity created between the station forecourt and the lively public space on the ground floor. Admiralty is on the red line 4 that provides access not only to the downtown area, the harbour front and the airport but also to all the other MRT lines serving the city. As a result, the project is accessible from across the city –​helpful for visitors –​but also gives access to the city and its resources to residents. However, the project also embodies a notion of access as proximity related to the mixed-​use approach to urban design, the density of the development and the range of amenities it provides. Such features of urban design are often considered key to ‘walkable’ access (for example, Talen and Koschinsky, 2014; Forsyth, 2015; Pafka and Dovey, 79

THE CARING CITY

2017). Illustrating the key role of governance in place-​shaping, achieving the mix of uses in the project involved a unique partnership between seven different government agencies –​the HDB, the Ministry of Health, the National Parks Board, the National Environmental Agency, the Childhood Agency, Yishun Health Campus and the Land Transport Authority. This was groundbreaking in Singapore, offering a means to address the problem of spatially remote and disjointed servicesacross the city. Owing to the compactness of the site, the layering of uses and the presence of passenger lifts throughout, travel from any flat to any part of the building would involve a walk of no more than 100 metres. The proximity of resources reflects a goal to develop capabilities for independence in old age –​it allows the elderly to reach and access food, medicines, social activities and so forth which may be needed for the maintence of health and wellbeing for themselves. It also relates to the concept of ‘active ageing’, which correlates physical fitness with the maintenance of independence in old age. Thus, it reflects the long-​standing philosophy of the Singaporean government that, as Mehta (2006) puts it, ‘each and every person is responsible for maintaining his or her wellbeing’. But the strategy is not just about elderly people looking after themselves in the sense of being self-​sufficient,’ which would clearly be problematic from a care ethics perspective. State-​run services, after all, form a major part of what is made accessible within the block. The position of the medical centre at its heart, hanging umbrella-​like over the ground-​floor public realm, reads as a metaphor for the safety net provided by the state through this facility. The Active Ageing Hub includes not just spaces for taking exercise to build personal resilience and avoid being a burden on others but also spaces for sociability –​where people might cook together or share an art class –​as well as a centre where personal and home care needs can be professionally assessed. In turn, spaces such as the hawker centre provide not just resources for the elderly but convenient locations for families and/​or neighbours to meet (Figure 4.5). As the majority of Kampung Admiralty’s (current) residents are locals, and as families tend to live in the vicinity, this is feasibly a regular activity. Though design can do no more than imagine and stage the scenarios, family members might co-​ordinate their routines to shop together in the supermarket or pharmacy, meet for coffee and sit in the public plaza, garden together and/​or share a healthy and affordable cooked meal from a stall in the atmospheric hawker centre. The proximity of the childcare centre to the residents’ housing not only makes these sorts of activities even more likely, as parents can drop off children and visit an older relative at the same time, but also helps make it possible for at least some residents to participate in the care of children. In Singapore, as Verbrugge and Ang (2018) found, ‘older people tend to have ample time but limited financial resources while family members 80

Accessibility in/as Caring

Figure 4.5: Kampung Admiralty hawker centre

Source: Patrick Bingham-​Hall

(often midlife children) have the reverse’. Reciprocity in families, which is a traditional practice endorsed by the modern state and also part of the discursive fabric of the kampung, often revolves around the exchange of time for financial support between the generations. Here, that reciprocity is encouraged by accessible design –​by ensuring that proximity is construed as much in terms of access to care-​receiving as access to caring within the context of intergenerational ties. While shouldering some of the support that might be required of family members in the context of less accessibile development and facilitating independence, Kampung Admiralty also fosters care relations in the family. A third important concept of accessibility developed in the building, as WOHA director and senior designer Pearl Chee explained, is permeability. Reflecting Pafka and Dovey’s (2017) definition of permeability as ‘the extent to which a particular urban morphology is punctured and perforated by publicly accessible space’, this involved creating spatial continuity between the project and surrounding urban fabrics and barrier-​free design in circulation areas throughout. As Chee put it: “There’s no gates, there’s no fencing, and anybody can walk in.” Permeability is made possible by the city’s hot, humid climate, and indeed it forms a key element in WOHA’s strategy for passively tempering the environment by drawing fresh air continually through the block. Thus, for example, the lifts open out into a lobby that is shaded but continuous with the gardens just beyond it, helping to keep them naturally cool. The hawker centre, in the belly of the building, is also shaded but unenclosed, allowing cooling fresh air to pass continually through it. From the supermarket aisles to the signage throughout, as Chee put it, “the infrastructure [of circulation] is catered to all kinds of accessibility”. In accordance with the extensive guidelines and standards set out in Singapore’s Universal Design Code, attention was given to how barriers to pedestrian movement may be mitigated at entrances into and out of the development 81

THE CARING CITY

through the careful design of horizontal and vertical access routes, lighting and hearing-​enhancement systems and a host of details related to the use of operating controls from lift push buttons to light switches. As in Vienna, the strategies that have been developed may adhere to universal design principles defined in the context of urban policy in Singapore, but they are evidently also specific responses to the context of the project and the needs of ageing people based on extensive research of ageing patterns encompassing both growing physical frailties and cognitive decline. Permeability is designed to ensure that the whole project is walkable with walking aids or navigable by wheelchair, ensuring accessibility for all. Reminiscent of the Vienna project, this is not just a matter of removing barriers to movement but also of providing spaces of pause, support and rest. For example, on each of the terraces in the podium, seats are provided close to entrances to the lift core. They are also provided on the main route from the housing to the podium. These are stopping points for people to catch their breath but also, potentially, to strike up a conversation with a neighbour or friend, weaving together the attentiveness of the designers to frailty or limited physical capabilities and the potential attentiveness of residents to one another. But permeability is also fostered through consideration of issues of comfort and safety related to climate. On level six, for example, where residents must cross an open court between a garden and children’s play space, a canopy is provided, supported on filigree columns. While sunlight or heavy tropical rains fill the garden, the heads of those walking through it are protected as they cross to the lifts. As with proximity, permeability is aimed at cultivating independence through safe mobility as well as encouraging healthy living through regular exercise. It also brings older people who are able to move around into continual contact with others within the different elements of shared neighbourhood infrastructure and the public realm. As with the projects discussed in Chapter 3, the permeability of Kampung Admiralty allows old age to not only to be visible but also to be seen as a matter of public concern. Just as capacities to cook or garden with other residents hold out possibilities for developing social bonds, so shared paths and ‘buddy benches’ outside each pair of flats create grounds upon which a web of neighbourly connections emblematic of gotong royong might thicken and grow. However, to come back to our opening discussion related to the project’s name, the line between fostering and determining is a fine one here given that encouragements to be neighbourly are laid on thickly by the HDB. Attempts to shape neighbourliness from the top down are reflected in such practices as the launch of an annual, citywide Good Neighbour Award and through HDB pamphlets and web-​based guidance on how to be an alert, kindly 82

Accessibility in/as Caring

and caring neighbour. Such government-​led initiatives could lead people to perform acts of neighbourliness simply in order to comply with expectations or win a prize rather than out of a sense of personal motivation and feeling for others, with potentially damaging consequences for neighbourly care and efforts to recreate the kampung within Singaporean society. In many ways, the project could not be more different from that of Meidlinger Hauptstraße in Vienna –​a huge project that does as much as possible rather than as little, that has been formed in a different cultural and political context and that involves the development of approaches to accessibility within quite different urban forms. However, as I will argue in the next section, both cases provide examples of design that considers the significance of accessibility for care relations and practices. And both, despite their differences, are also helpful for conceptualizing accessibility as caring, reflecting care ethics’ emphasis on relationality and interdependence.

The care of access Meidlinger Hauptstraße and Kampung Admirality embody different ideas of access, reflecting the complexity of the term within urban design discourse. As a streetscape project, key concepts of accessibility in the Meidlinger Hauptstraße build were a permeable, barrier-​free form and sensory access through atmospheric design. As a broader urban block project, key concepts of accessibility in Kampung Admiralty structure included permeability and also notions of access through transport networks, proximity of services and carers and compact, mixed-​use building. Designers of both projects expressly set out to embody within them the equity and justice principles with which universal design is widely associated, namely equality in opportunity for all and the construction of the city as a level playing field (Imrie, 2012; Steinfeld and Maisel, 2012). And yet, in both projects, specific people, places, patterns of use and interaction and climate are key in the development of accessibility strategies. Some of the concepts the practices utilize may be the same, but their results are fundamentally different. Both projects also embody more complex conceptions of the purpose of accessibility than merely personal autonomy. How they do so, however, by no means serves to belittle the importance of accessibility as a means to create opportunities for individuals –​topics which have been a focus of accessibility debates, activism and civil rights claims since the 1960s (Hamraie, 2017). As discussed in Chapter 1, the difficulty that care ethics scholars have often identified with the ideal of autonomy in traditions of Western Enlightenment philosophy is that that it represents a condition in which social ties are devalued or severed, masking the realities of profound and complex interdependencies between people and their environments. The idealization 83

THE CARING CITY

of autonomy in Western society has also often implied the stigmatization of dependencies as well as of the care practices that support dependent people. This has been evidenced in the context of discourses related to the transformation of welfare regimes in the US which have continually emphasized the need for people to take personal responsibility and stand on their own two feet (metaphorically speaking) (Fraser and Gordon, 2002; Dowling, 2020). These, hence, are hallmarks of an individualistic, neoliberal society which tends to privilege values of non-​interference with other’s freedoms over facts, issues and challenges inherent to human and, indeed, more-​than-​human, forms of relatedness. We can identify three potential dangers associated with an emphasis on autonomy in the context of design for accessibility, and three related ways in which the two case studies in this chapter point away from them. The first is a danger of failing in the process of emphasizing autonomy to give sufficient attention to the ongoing significance of accessibility for care practices and relations, potentially involving all or any of the formal and informal types of caring we discussed in Chapter 3. Both case studies revealed a conception of autonomy as relative, with accessibility fostering a greater capacity for independence in movement and action. They suggest a conception of autonomy in the context of care relations that is related to the balance of self-​care and care needs that manifest and are defined within those relationships. Connected to this, they both reveal sensitivity through design to the significance of accessibility to carers for vulnerable people such as the very young in the course of their navigating the city, as well as to those vulnerable groups themselves. Both cases elucidate, in other words, a relational conception of autonomy whereby autonomy is seen as rooted within and largely facilitated by supportive persons and infrastructures, and accessible design is seen as part of a caring assemblage. In doing so, both projects recall Doina Petrescu’s ideas of ‘relationscapes’ which denote the spatial articulation of dynamic interactions and interpersonal relations in space. In the context of our case studies, accessible design is associated with the anticipation and imagination of relationscapes. The second, related danger is of failing to recognize that care is not just something to seek liberation from through access but something that may need to be accessed in itself in order to meet needs. The Singaporean case is particularly helpful in suggesting ways to consider accessibility in this way. Here, as we have seen, the proximity of spaces of care such as the medical centre to housing is aimed at giving older people the capacity to reach healthcare resources including specialists with ease. Similarly, the hawker centre gives access to healthy food that, in effect, cares for the body, and creates a space where family members or friends may gather, enabling residents to connect with people that care for and about them. 84

Accessibility in/as Caring

In turn, spaces such as the nursery and the community garden provide forms of access to the potential for residents to remain carers, even as relatively vulnerable persons. The integration of the nursery facilitates the ongoing care by older people –​who might have mobility issues –​of their grandchildren. The proximity of the gardens brings the possibility to care for plants within easy reach. The formation of habitats for plants and animals within the building in turn creates opportunities for residents to participate in care for biodiversity, if merely by learning about, enjoying and respecting the rights of the growing range of birds that roost there. Given the evidence of a considerable literature in gerontological studies that caring activities, encompassing the grooming of dogs, interactions with children, gardening, bird feeding and the like, are important for the wellbeing of older people (see, for example, Cherniack and Cherniack, 2016), this aspect of Kampung Admiralty’s accessibility, applied elsewhere, could be transformative in the lives of many older people worldwide. A third danger is of underplaying the role of design and designers in the social relations of autonomy and dependency. Design, as Imrie argues (Imrie, 2012), risks failing people if it simply rolls out technological ‘solutions’ to pre-​ examined problems. However, and unfortunately, design is all too often seen to do just this. Tania Titchosky (2011), for example, suggests that design often fails to engage with the specificities of disability ‘as lived’. Hence, designs for disability often enact ‘gestures towards the act of caring’ in Titchosky’s terms but either without ensuring meaningful access or avoiding merely drawing greater attention to disability. Such issues not only mean that people with mobility, learning or sensory issues cannot rely on designers to attend to their needs and capabilities but also that they are more dependent on others to help them overcome spatial and physical barriers. The designers of our two case studies, in contrast, sought to be highly attuned to specificities of people and place, creating novel interpretations of accessibility. Both projects yield highly place-​and-project-​specific interpretations of accessibility. The difficulty care ethics scholars have often identified with universalism is that it is often associated with approaches to morality and practice that skate over or ignore what is fundamental to care: the concrete, situated and particular circumstances of individual people and/​ or things (see, for example, Held, 2006: 97–​100). Of course, the difficulty with attending to the specific, especially in the context of public space, lies in the danger of overdetermining it, thereby creating exclusions and removing agency from users. Overdeterminism as Richard Sennett (2007) suggests, connects, if ironically, the most careful (attentive) observation with the prescriptive cityscapes that have often emerged as concretizations of authoritarianism. Overdetermined places, according to Sennett’s theory, typically lack the flexibility to accommodate change, choice, deviation from the norm and evolution through the passage of time. In 85

THE CARING CITY

multiple ways, hence, they don’t allow for to the sorts of tinkering which, as Mol et al (2010) show, are key to so many practices of care. The case studies in this chapter attend to the specific while avoiding the risk of overdeterminism. Neither case could be said to be subject to what Hamraie (2013) fears of universal design, namely ‘that it appears to dismiss designs intended for certain individuals or to produce ignorance of the differences between individuals in favour of more general understandings of users’ needs’. In the Viennese case, the subtle groundscape project was derived from careful observations of people using a street, without any prior assumptions about what access means or even what a street is. The project, including its social-​space analysis, reflects Henry Miller’s observation that ‘the moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself ’ (quoted in Sevenhuijsen, 2016), and this sense of wonder arising amid the ordinary clearly pervades WES’s ideas about the street’s ‘narrative structure’. In the Singaporean case, city-​specific issues of aging and housing became the focus of research and design for the Kampung Admiralty project. In neither case has an emphasis on particularity led to the isolation of particular groups or to the stigmatization of individuals through the incorporation of dedicated design features. Though the Singaporean project only provides housing for over-​fifty-​fives, it wraps this around a neighbourhood centre which a broad and diverse broader population might access. In addition, like the almshouse project in Chapter 3, its focus is on diversifying the housing offer of an existing, dense neighbourhood. The Viennese project erases steps that discriminate while avoiding creating features that could segregate users. This not only gives scope for users to “find their place”, as Wolfgang Betz put it, among the different atmospheres of the street in Meidling, but also opens up possibilities for all to expand their networks of social support. Such a capacity is vital for the migrants of Meidling, for whom the street is a public living room, as well as for the older people, the youngsters and the homeless, if in different ways. In turn, these design features reflect the principle of responsiveness from Tronto’s ethic of care framework, enabling specific meaning of access to be forged through use over time. Finally, the cases suggest that accessibility is part of the politics of care which centres on questions of who provides care and how care is valued and supported in society. In Vienna, as Ursula Bauer explained, accessibility emerged as an outcome of a political struggle “to transform traditional gender roles which, in the long run, should offer a greater freedom and choice”. In Singapore, accessibility was bound up with a politics of responsibility for care encompassing images and ideals of Asian family values and neighbourliness. Emerging strongly in the context of this case study was also a sense of the 86

Accessibility in/as Caring

role that the distribution of responsibility can play within the management of welfare budgets and the demands created by ageing populations upon the state. Both cases offer examples of government taking a lead role in the (re) organization of care through accessibilities of built form. As part of the gender mainstreaming strategy, the Meidlinger Hauptstraβe project is a response to shifts in the place of care as discussed in Chapter 3 that have accompanied the entry of women into the workplace. It addresses the challenges arising which, in Emma Dowling’s (2020) analysis of the British context, are key to understanding the origins of the care crisis associated with ‘juggling the obligations of work and family or deciding in favour of one or the other’. As Bauer explained, these are challenges relevant not only to access, as in the accessibility of the public realm, but also the accessibility of publicly funded care facilities across the city, and the accessibility of these in financial terms to citizens on different income levels. Overall, the Gender Mainstreaming strategy in Vienna can be seen to exemplify Daniel Engster’s (2007) vision of a ‘welfare state [whose] central goal is to provide public support for caring activities’. With regard to Singapore, I am cautious of the influence of a top-​down state (where one political party has dominated since 1959) in the prescription and codifying of responsibilities with regard to care in families and society. Nonetheless, a similar point can be made about Kampung Admiralty, which, as we saw, reflects the efforts of several national government agencies that have come together to provide public services and infrastructures in response to changes in the organization of care related both to the ageing society and gender balances in the workforce. Overall, the discussion in this chapter suggests that caring urban design entails the formulation of strategies of access that support all those involved in care relations, fostering in the process the development of such relations. It entails attunement to the physical and perceptual barriers that may be experienced by specific people while avoiding the excessive determination of place. As the local lockdowns that have come into force in response to the COVID-​19 pandemic have had the effect of localizing many people’s activities and routines, and as mobility in the form of congested public transport has become a risk for contagion, strategies that place amenities and public services within easy reach of home and that ensure the pedestrian navigability of buildings and infrastructures are only becoming even more significant for care.

87

5

Shaping Caring Urban Atmospheres The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-​panes The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-​panes Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains, Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys, Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap, And seeing that it was a soft October night Curled once about the house, and fell asleep. Excerpt from T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (written 1910–​15)

Introduction In Chapter 4 I touched on the notion of atmosphere in the context of the design firm WES’s work, where it was framed as part of the liveability and accessibility of a street. I did not unpack the notion of urban atmosphere and its wider relevance to care practices and relations, however. I do this now in this chapter. As discussed in Chapter 2, the notion of atmosphere is complex, encompassing different meanings, areas of knowledge and modes of investigation. On the one hand, the atmosphere denotes the layers of gases, held in place by gravity, that surround a planet or other celestial body. The earth’s atmosphere is made up of five major layers together forming a continuous envelope about 480 kilometres thick around our planet. It plays a key role in supporting life on earth, constituting the air that organisms breathe, shielding the planet from ultraviolet (UV) radiation and keeping it warm through its insulating properties. The atmosphere, in these terms, including atmospheric conditions and weather patterns, is a focus of study within the physical and life sciences. 88

Shaping Caring Urban Atmospheres

On the other hand, atmosphere denotes, as Matthew Gandy (2017: 355) puts it, the ‘prevailing mood of a place, situation, or cultural representation such as the feeling evoked by a film or a novel’. This is atmosphere as in ‘affective atmosphere’, a term that Ben Anderson defines succinctly as a class of experience that occurs ‘across human and non-​human materialities, and in-​between subject/​object distinctions’ (Anderson, 2009: 78). Hence, it describes the reality of a place, situation or cultural representation not merely in terms of aspects of its factual, independent existence but as a phenomenon that comes to exist as it is encountered and perceived by sensing, feeling subjects (Pallasmaa, 2014; Edensor and Sumartojo, 2015; Böhme, 2017, 2018). A place, for example, might be perceived as serene, homely, vibrant, stimulating, peaceful, restful, vibrant or caring. Atmosphere, in these terms, is a focus of phenomenological enquiry in the humanities and social sciences. An affective atmosphere is suggested in the brief excerpt of a poem by the English poet T.S. Eliot that opens this chapter. In it, a thick fog, personified as a cat, is enveloping a house inhabited by the poem’s subject, a certain J Alfred Prufrock. It fills the air of a ‘soft October’ night, obliterating, we may surmise, the view from the windows. The image of the fog as a cat may initially convey a sense of cosiness and affection, but it is quickly apparent that the fog is suffocating and dirty, licking up polluted drain water and covered in soot. This, of course, is the famous London fog, which was often described as gloomily thick and yellow, a product of the city’s industrialization in the nineteenth century and the use of coal fires for heating (for example, Russell, 1880 [2009]). So, as the poem unfolds, it helps shape a sense of someone who feels stuck and powerless, his social anxieties and indecisiveness magnified by the gloom outside his house. Ultimately, the mood that is conveyed for the reader of the poem is melancholic and oppressive. Many different aspects of a place or situation can come together to create an affective atmosphere in cities, including social activities and exchanges, spatial/​material characteristics, changing qualities of light and shade, weather and ecosystems including plant and animal life (Ingold, 2012; Böhme, 2018). But when it comes to qualities of air or atmospheric conditions that can be detected by the senses and that shape human emotional and other bodily reactions to landscapes and environments, as weather events such as fog can, clearly there is overlap between both notions of atmosphere (Adey, 2013a). Hence, the fog in Eliot’s poem, while clearly key to the production and representation of a mood, could also be described in terms of its chemical composition, the suspension of atmospheric particulate matter, or relations of wind speed, air pressure and temperature, for example. The same would be true of pollutants commonly associated with traffic and combustion in cities, such as nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and sulphur dioxide (SO2), known to contribute to the olfactory experience of urban spaces as well as to the quality of urban light (Adey, 2013a). 89

THE CARING CITY

This chapter works with both meteorological or aerographic and affective notions of atmosphere to consider how urban atmospheres can be thought of as shaping practices of care in cities and how such atmospheres are a focus for urban design. A way into this is provided again by Eliot’s poem, in which the atmosphere as perceived is clearly material to the emotional state and wellbeing of the fictive Mr Prufrock. At the same time, the composition and conditions of the street-​level atmosphere would also have been material to Prufrock’s health, as to all early twentieth-​century Londoners who breathed in the toxic yellow fogs. In both senses, atmospheres associated with the place of this poem can be seen to create corporeal vulnerability, with likely consequences for healthcare needs. How, we ask, might urban atmospheres, through their corporeal effects, shape the qualities and dynamics of particular care relations and practices in positive ways? How might they forge capacities for wellbeing and flourishing? And how might atmospheres that support the flourishing of individual and collective urban citizens be shaped through urban design? What, thus, is caring atmospheric design? I address these questions over the four upcoming sections of this chapter. In the first, I set out a number of ways in which urban atmospheres can be considered relevant to relations and practices of care. In the second, I explore how urban atmospheres, in these terms, are considerations for urban design and what is required for the shaping of atmospheres through design in order to be considered caring. As in all the chapters, I then proceed to develop an understanding of caring atmospheric design through two case studies. The first, a project by the Danish urban designer Jan Gehl entitled Thrive Zones, addresses issues of atmospheric pollution that are recognized as material to the daily care of children in urban public space. Initiated in Copenhagen, the project now has a sister project in London’s Vauxhall, an area associated with bad atmospheres related to poor air quality and atmospheric toxicity since before T.S. Eliot’s time. The second case study is a public park created by the UK landscape and urban designers Gustafson Porter and Bowman in Spain which provides a new ‘green lung’ in a densely populated inner-​ city area and which stages a range of atmospheres associated with wellness and wellbeing at different stages of life. Although I began the research imagining that the first study would encapsulate a more scientific approach to atmosphere and the second an interpretation of affective atmospheres, in fact different notions of atmosphere interweave within both, revealing the relevance of and relationships between both approaches in the context of particular care practices and relations.

Atmosphere as an issue for care Atmospheric conditions linked to the first definition of atmosphere are often, and increasingly, seen as relevant to practices of care related to human physical 90

Shaping Caring Urban Atmospheres

health. Of course, as all life is ultimately dependent on the qualities of the atmosphere that surround the earth, healthcare in all forms is clearly reliant on the continuity and stability of a habitable atmosphere (Mann, 2002). However, many specific ways in which atmosphere shapes physical health have also been identified. For example, heat stress, in the context of anthropogenic climate change and urban heat islands produced through the interactions of city form with atmospheric processes (Shuai et al, 2021), is known to be becoming more common among people of all ages, and is increasingly a common cause of death among elderly people, even in the temperate regions of the earth’s atmosphere such as Europe. As Lopes et al (2018) show, aspects and technologies of the built environment that can temper encomfortably hot atmospheric conditions become key to avoiding experiences of heat stress and rising heat-​related mortality, though an emphasis on air-​conditioning within private domestic and/​or commercial environments rather than on urban design strategies to achieve this can serve to limit people’s capabilities to move freely within cityscapes and stand to also contribute to global warming processes. In turn, poorly managed pollution levels in megacities have been shown to increase the vulnerability of their populations to diseases such as bronchitis (Hooper et al, 2018) and, more recently, COVID-​19 (Travaglio et al, 2020), and hence to increase needs in cities for respiratory healthcare. This vulnerability to disease is particularly prevalent in socio-​economically deprived areas, including officially illegal slums reliant upon improvised infrastructure and sanitation as these are usually associated with the poorest atmospheric conditions but also the lowest levels of access to healthcare services. Socio-​economically deprived areas haver of course often been stigmatized as places of ‘bad atmosphere’ (Gandy, 2017), with understandings of atmospheric conditions and their impacts on health fusing with sensory reactions to poverty and forms of class-​and race-​based prejudice. As Peter Adey (2013a: 291) argues ‘an analysis of air reveals who belongs and who does not, who is deserving and who is not in a constellation of megacity inequality’. Pollution is also known to contribute to a range of affective disorders or mental health issues which have a complex and not fully undesertood basis in the physical body. The sensory detection of pollution in the form of haze and smog can contribute to the emergence of such disorders, such as by aggravating feelings of being trapped in circumstances recognized as damaging to capabilities for physical health and life expectancy. But toxins that are barely if at all detectable by the senses are increasingly recognized to also contribute to mental health issues. For example, Vert et al (2017) indicate that there is an association between levels of pollutants including nitric oxide (which is odourless and colourless) and depression disorders resulting in the heightened use of antidepressants and benzodiazepines. These physical and mental health issues can emerge over varying amounts of time. While the impacts of heat or pollen can be instant, eliciting quite 91

THE CARING CITY

violent physical reactions, the impacts of some atmospheric conditions can lie dormant for long periods of time, surfacing later in life, such as in the form of lung disease. They can persist long after the condition in question has been removed, creating needs for care and medical treatment, where available, over a lifetime. There is, hence, an intriguing and varied temporality pertaining to corporeal vulnerability related to atmospheric conditions. As briefly highlighted in Chapter 2, a direct link between affective atmospheres and practices of care has most frequently been drawn in the context of studies of how people experience, not urban places and environments but rather formal healthcare settings. Atmospheres of safety, support, ease, comfort and calm in spaces such as hospital wards, for example, have been revealed as key to patients feeling looked after with care in times of vulnerability (see, for example, Edvardsson, 2005; Buse et al, 2018; Martin et al, 2019; Sumartojo et al, 2020). These have been shown to depend on a complex range of environmental qualities, including the performance (and also the aesthetics) of medical practice, the conduct of interpersonal exchange, the pace and frequency of movement of people through space, spatial/​material qualities of a given ward or clinic, the sound and appearance of equipment such as ventilators or heart monitors, qualities of light and shade, arrangements of furniture, the presence of familiar objects or artefacts, degrees of enclosure and perceptible qualities of air, to name just some. Hence, these atmospheres involve both relatively constant aspects of the physical environment and aspects that are continually shaped through the enactment of routines, maintenance of equipment and the the lively movements and interactions of people in space (Sumartojo et al, 2020). They also include a host of intangible phenomena of place that relate to the orchestration of the physical environment and shape its experience including qualities of light, shade and air. Though the role of air in the construction of atmosphere has often been underplayed, as Brown et al (2020) show, the manner in which it is conditioned, heated, filtered, dried and decontaminated in healthcare environments in order to support various treatments and healing processes is key to how those sorts of places feel –​to how they are experienced in sensory terms and to the moods that they can come to evoke. Atmospheres commensurate with support are seen to be produced as these hybrid aspects of lived and directly experienced places interact with the emotional states, prior experiences and sensory capacities of individuals and groups receiving care. Related to this, the composition of atmospheres of supportive care has been recognized as subtly particular to different types of medical practice, from psychiatric, to geriatric, to respiratory, to cancer care (Martin et al, 2019). However, affective urban atmospheres can also be seen to be relevant to care practices unfolding in urban places and environments beyond formal 92

Shaping Caring Urban Atmospheres

healthcare settings. In the contemporary megacity, as Adey shows (Adey, 2013a), atmospheres of ‘wreathing haze and dirty skies’ can contribute to feelings of malaise or impending doom that go beyond the physiological impacts of poor air quality shaping the emergence of fearful or anxious urban atmospheres. In a related way, there have been strong indications that some features of the hectic, consumerist atmospheres of dense urban developments and high traffic streets are sensory stressors (see, for example, Tuan, 1974; Park and Evans, 2016). These features include the noise of people and vehicles, often amplified by the accoustic properties of urban materiality, and relentless artificial night lighting. As with poor air quality, they can be contributory factors in the development of mental health issues such as anxiety, sleep disorders, depression and even violent behaviour which may require or at least benefit from medical intervention (see, for example, Clark et al, 2007; Blume et al, 2019). There have even been suggestions that frenetic or stressful urban atmospheres correspond to a higher incidence of psychosis (encompassing conditions such as schizophrenia) in cities than in rural areas (Winz, 2018). Links between affective urban atmospheres and care are also suggested in a positive sense by studies exploring the role of design in promoting wellness and wellbeing in cities. Stefansdottir (2018) argues that, though they can be stressful, vibrant urban atmospheres can help stave off feelings of loneliness or depression and produce a sense of connection to others which is often associated with wellbeing. Memorable or, as she terms them, ‘historic atmospheres’ that resonate with ‘deep memory’ can be important for the wellbeing and, hence, care of people living with dementia and other conditions leading to memory loss. The ability to identify calm atmospheres in a city, ones which are conducive to practices such as mindfulness or meditation, may, in turn, be key for the stressed executive, professional or exhausted parent, helping them to maintain wellness and wellbeing under duress. Sensory landscapes and therapeutic gardens in the Western context, and Zen gardens in Japan, are among the sorts of designed spaces often associated with atmospheres that promote calm, respite, healing and solace in urban environments (see, for example, Bates et al, 2017, for one example). Beyond these sorts of emotional experiences, Souter Brown (2014) suggests that these atmospheres can carry multiple benefits to health, including restoring cognitive attention and lowering blood pressure. Links between affective urban atmospheres and care are suggested, finally, in the context of studies devoted to understanding the spatialities of particular care practices and routines. These attend, in other words, to how atmospheres shape practices of care related to particular people or care relations –​such as childcare, eldercare, neighbourliness or self-​care. In their investigations of how parents with babies move through urban environments, for example, Clement and Waitt (2018) highlight the significance of affective atmospheres 93

THE CARING CITY

for ‘pram mobilities’. Parents with babies, they found, are acutely alert to the sensory qualities feel of places, devising journeys that, as far as possible, take them through peaceful, tranquil and safe atmospheres. Also focussing on childcare, Kate Boyer (2018) shows how women’s often negative affective experiences of breastfeeding in public help not only to discourage mothers from feeding their babies in public places but also contribute to low breastfeeding rates in the UK.

Urban atmospheres and care ethics Urban design is recognized as having a key role to play in shaping both atmospheric conditions and affective atmospheres in cities. Interacting with seasonal and geographical dimensions of climate, different urban forms and patterns of social activity and movement associated with them are productive of distinctive meteorological conditions ranging from the warmer microclimates of sheltered gardens, to urban heat islands, to wind tunnels. Urban design also influences the composition of air in cities. Thus, for example, low-​density urban forms, reflecting the promotion of private forms of road-​based transportation, have been shown to be associated with high levels of atmospheric pollution from fuel exhaust. Urban design has, of course, also long been associated with strategies aimed at tempering the given climate of a place (see for example, Givoni, 1998). These strategies range from the production of the narrow, shaded streetscapes of the traditional Arab medina as a response to dry heat, to the covered arcades of rainy northern cities like Paris. Thinking about atmospheric conditions in terms of care, however, prompts us to consider not just the general ways that design and cities shape urban airs and weathers but also how specific groups and individuals experience them and how this effects their care needs. Bodies, as we have discussed, respond to atmospheric conditions in different ways. Within certain limits comfort levels relating to conditions such as temperature and humidity vary from person to person. People register and can be affected by pollutants, pollens and dust suspended in the atmosphere in different ways, depending on predispositions to hay fever and other allergies. As Elizabeth Shove has argued (Shove, 2003), there is a cultural dimension to such experiences, and they can evolve as norms and expectations in whole societies over time. But thinking of atmosphere in terms of care may also prompt us to consider how urban design can intervene in positive ways in the atmospheric inequalities of contemporary megacities, impacting on health outcomes across society. Regarding affective atmospheres, the role of urban design is often seen as occupying an orchestrating or staging role. Hence, it sets the scene for the very many aspects of dynamic urban experience that contribute to the assemblage and detection of a place-​based mood. Depending on the atmosphere that 94

Shaping Caring Urban Atmospheres

is sought, the ‘art of staging’ (Böhme, 2017: loc 3046) involves the careful deployment of temporal, spatial and material features of landscapes and buildings that can carry sensory and emotional resonance. These include the scale of built forms relative to the human scale, established relationships between interior and exterior, the accumulated patina of time on historical buildings, the olfactory qualities of places as produced, for example, by aromatic planting, strategies that manipulate day and night lighting, shading devices and so forth. They also, of course, include all the devices that choreograph social activities in urban space, much as a theatrical set helps organize and contain the movement of actors in a play. For Böhme (2017), these features or phenomena are all ‘generators’ of atmosphere, deployed through design to make an unfolding reality, including climate and weather, appear and be experienced in a particular way. Thinking about affective atmospheres in terms of care ethics prompts us to consider not only how design stages atmosphere designed for collective appreciation, such as the energetic atmospheres of a concert hall or a sports stadium, but how it responds to individualized subjective experience. As Edensor and Sumartojo argue (Edensor and Sumartojo, 2015), though urban atmospheres are often manipulated through design to condition experiences and behaviours in particular spaces, atmosphere is always to an extent an individual experience –​something that designers cannot therefore effectively generalize and entirely anticipate. As Kathleen Stewart (2011) suggests, and as briefly suggested in Chapter 4, atmosphere relies on attunement, a complex process combining individual, common and cultural aspects of perception and experience. Different sensory sensitivities, capacities and mental states can influence how particular people attune, as Davidson and Henderson’s (2017) exploration of urban experience from the perspective of autistic citizens indicates. The affective atmosphere of a place can also be radically different for someone who has lost their hearing as compared to someone who hears well. As Yi-​Fu Tuan argues, ‘A world that seems to have lost its dynamism through temporary loss of sound appears less demanding and nervous; it induces a feeling of detachment and peace, as happens in a pleasant way when the sounds of the city are muffled by light rain or a blanket of snow’. But he contends that ‘the silence, the severe loss of information, induces anxiety, dissociation, and withdrawing in the deaf ’ who experience this loss of dynamism long-​term. Thus, what can be lively, if demanding urban atmospheres for those with good hearing can become atmospheres of fear and exclusion for the deaf. Atmospheres may be experienced differently by different age groups as imagination, life-​experience and memory combine to shape capacities for attunement. They may be both generated and lived in distinctively cultural ways, which is how, as Böhme argues (Böhme, 2018), atmospheres characteristic of different cities and places arise –​the 95

THE CARING CITY

atmospheres of Paris experienced through its cafes, for example, or of Barcelona through its food markets. They may also embody an amalgam of contradictory affects, as Stewart (1996), exploring lived cultural poetics in the Appalachian coal-​mining region of West Virginia in the United States discovered, where local residents simultaneously experienced place as fearful and as homely, owing to their place-​attachments. A similar set of contradictions is identified by Alice Mah (2009), writing about affect in the context of areas that have experienced industrial decline. However they are staged, it is clear that designed atmospheres cannot determine experience but merely form part of a process that will continue to unfold through time. Urban design and architecture have, however, often dealt poorly with the subjective, contingent and relational qualities of atmospheres. Urban forms and building technologies have, for example, often assumed imposing universalized notions of bodily experience and preferences for atmospheric qualities of different sorts (Shove, 2003; Adey, 2013b). They have often been insensitive to differences in the ways in which air quality affects people, shaping their everyday lives and care needs (see, for example, Kenner, 2019). At the same, they have often constrained people’s capacities to shape their own environments and forms of attunement, to exert agency in the ways in which atmospheric materiality comes to matter in contexts of need and/or vulnerability. The two case studies that follow both offer illustrations of urban design that, on the contrary, is alert to the specificities, individualities and contingencies of atmospheric experience. In each, notions of atmosphere in both of the ways we have been discussing are in play, though these take very different forms through design. Research related to them involved visits to the sites (in London and Valencia), walks, observation and my own processes of attunement to atmosphere. It involved the analysis of design documents, in-​depth structured interviews with lead designers, and exploration of a considerable variety of background information relevant to each project, encompassing materials as diverse as weather reports, air quality data, historical photographs and urban policies. Each project will be shown to have involved the deployment of strategies that connect to Stewart’s notion of atmospheric attunement, affording capacities for different people to actively/​collectively shape atmospheres for themselves and those they care for, so embodying an ethic of care. In the discussion that follows, I show how.

Atmospheric care for children: Gehl’s Thrive Zones project The Thrive Zones project in Copenhagen and London is driven by concern regarding the significance of poor air quality for children’s long-​term health. The global firm Gehl is a Danish design practice established in 2000 by Jan Gehl. Gehl’s research into public life in cities and ideas regarding the potential 96

Shaping Caring Urban Atmospheres

for a human-​centred approach to urban design first came to prominence in the mid-​1960s, crystallizing within his 1971 book Life Between Buildings. The practice now has offices in San Francisco and New York, as well as in Copenhagen. The Thrive Zones project came about initially through a partnership between the municipality of Copenhagen and the tech giant Google. Since 2009, Copenhagen has had the ambition of becoming the first carbon-​neutral capital in the world by 2025. Although its air quality is already good by comparison to many cities worldwide, the city wished to address the known fact that 550 citizens of Copenhagen die prematurely each year from air pollution (which is 90 per cent of all premature deaths in the municipality) and many more require healthcare treatment for illnesses brought on by or exacerbated by it. Air pollution and the urban forms that help to generate it have, hence, been recognized within the municipal government as productive of specific kinds of healthcare needs, with implications for the cost and scope of medical care. In turn, Google was interested in using the technology engineered to create its Google Street View to develop much more accurate maps of street-​ level air pollution to help members of the public be informed about local atmospheric conditions. In 2018, at the start of the project, Google partnered with Utrecht University to equip one Google Street View car with mobile sensing equipment able to collect air quality data in Copenhagen. The data was then analyzed and mapped by Google in collaboration with the City of Copenhagen. In the same year, Google partnered with the Breath London network, which is run by the Environmental Research Group at Imperial College London, to do the same thing in the UK capital, partnering with the Greater London Authority to map the arising data. The cars measured four kinds of pollutants–​nitric oxide (NO), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), particulate matter (PM 0.1–​10) and ultrafine articulate matter less than (PM 0.1). All are associated with health issues including respiratory problems and lung disease, though not all are detectable visually or by smell by humans. The maps were launched in October 2019. A little later in 2018, Gehl was commissioned by Bernard van Leer Foundation to collaborate with the City of Copenhagen to consider the implications of the data for users of the streets that were the focus of the study. The project brief called for a nuanced understanding of the relationship between air pollution patterns and the urban lives of children under five, including how and where children and their caregivers occupy public space. The focus on children was driven by awareness that they are more at risk from poor air quality than others. In part, this is thought to be because, as particles gradually settle within the atmosphere, the highest densities are closest to the ground and, hence, air quality is worse for children than adults. It is also because young children under five breathe four times more rapidly than adults, thus taking in more particulate matter per minute. 97

THE CARING CITY

As children’s lungs and brains are in development, the effects of poor air quality can be lifelong, leading to decades of dependency on healthcare services. Indeed, research by the European Lung Foundation in 2016 showed that people who were exposed as children to the Great Smog of 1952 in London –​which finally led to the passing of legislation to clean it up –​still sometimes exhibited effects from it nearly seventy years later. They were shown to be more prone to developing adult asthma and were more likely to require medical treatment for respiratory illness. To develop their understanding of the significance of pollution for children, Gehl embarked on a qualitative research exercise to understand the movements of small children in two of the areas of the city covered by the maps –​Inner City and Vesterbro. As the project’s lead designer Jeff Risom explained it, this created the potential to give real significance to the data. After all, he said, air quality data in itself might provide new information but it is “not what really matters to people”. Rather, what is of interest is the effectiveness of care for children and their potential to thrive. The research involved street surveys, the mapping of childcare institutions and playgrounds, observations and in-​depth interviews with day care providers in the local area. One of the key discoveries made by Risom’s team was that the care of children involves all sorts of places in neighbourhoods beyond designated places of play –​from street corners and pavements outside cafés to stairs and “places where there are just some puddles”, for example. Through the research, as he put it, “the participants introduced us to some parts of the city that actually they spend time in that weren’t officially sanctioned play zones” but which were clearly key spaces within the urban landscape of everyday childcare. The team found that, unfortunately, many of these spaces coincided with locations which the Google/​City maps identified as having the poorest air quality. Ironically, it appeared that places with better air quality, such as back streets and block interiors, often lacked atmosphere in the affective sense of the term. Because air quality in Copenhagen does not influence perception a great deal, the routes that children and their carers took through the city appeared to have been influenced more by other components of urban atmosphere. The urban design approach developed in response to these findings involved both notions of atmosphere which we have been developing through this chapter. On one hand, it entailed strategies aimed at mitigating atmospheric pollution in streets that were already used by children. On the other, it involved strategies aimed at encouraging people to spend time in spaces with better air quality. The former strategies included the removal of parking, rerouting traffic in the hours when children are usually outside, the installation of green buffers and relocating bus stops (Figure 5.1). The latter strategies, in contrast, included the installation of greenery, the 98

Shaping Caring Urban Atmospheres

Figure 5.1: Visualization of Thrive Zones proposals

Source: Gehl, Bernard Van Leer Foundation, Copenhagen Solutions Lab, Utrecht University and Google

widening of pavements, the installation of public seating and the careful location of play equipment to create new, safe, caring atmospheres and, as Risom put it, “invitations to spend time” (Figure 5.2). Conceiving design as an invitation rather than, say, as an ordering device implies a view of the city user as a co-​maker of urban space, as able to read the urban landscape and choose how to respond to spatial and, in this case, atmospheric cues. This, of course, is a view which is at the heart of Gehl’s practice ethos. It is also one that resonates with the idea of care through atmospheric design as being alert to the subjectivity of atmospheric attunement. It implies both attentiveness to the lived experiences of specific citizens involved in childcare and, at the same time, recognition that what spaces become relies on those citizens’ perception of their qualities, utility and atmosphere. Not long after receiving the commission for the project, Gehl was invited to produce a similar response to the air quality data gathered in London. The focus of this spin-​off project is an area in the London Borough of Lambeth and the Thames riverside neighbourhood of Vauxhall. At the time of my research, the project was experiencing delays as the social distancing rules coming into force in relation to COVID-​19 had affected Gehl’s own research process. The project had, at the same time, come to be seen by its various sponsors as even more pressing, as evidence grew rapidly in the first half of 2020 of a set of complex links between air quality, compromised immunity, respiratory problems and more severe cases of COVID-​19. Atmospheric pollution in London is generally much worse than in Copenhagen. As Risom put it, Vauxhall has “probably the worst air quality 99

THE CARING CITY

Figure 5.2: Thrive Zones project conceptual sketch

Source: Gehl, Bernard Van Leer Foundation, Copenhagen Solutions Lab, Utrecht University and Google

measured in Europe”. Ninety-​six per cent of the London Borough of Lambeth’s roads exceeded the European legal limit for air pollution in 2019–​20. This is a long-​standing issue in the city. In the nineteenth century, the notorious, sulphurous London fogs, generated largely by the burning of coal for heating by most of the population, were known to cause significant harm. As the meteorologist the Rt Hon Francis A.R. Russell argued: We must reckon a large annual loss of life from the perpetual presence in the London atmosphere of smoke and soot, blocking up the air passages and irritating the mucous membrane so as to lead to consumption, lowering the vital energy, depressing the system both by the impurity of the air breathed and by the deprivation of light. (Russell, 2009 [1880]) In the mid-​twentieth century weather conditions combining with pollution suspended in the atmosphere to produce the choking ‘pea-​souper’ fogs led finally to the passing of the Clean Air Act in 1952. This led rapidly to the clearing of the ‘yellow smoke’ that Eliot depicted as rubbing ‘its muzzle on the window-​panes’ and the smog that blackened buildings, a blowing away not just of the pollutants but of the affective atmospheres associated with these conditions. However, as traffic grew to replace coal-​fired heating as the dominant form of fossil-​fuel combustion in London, the production of airborne toxins persisted. These toxins are not associated with fogs in the manner of earlier forms of pollution, but they are just as harmful in high concentrations. According to the London Air Quality Network, they create ‘a very large 100

Shaping Caring Urban Atmospheres

public health issue’, with 9,400 deaths per year estimated to be strongly influenced by air pollution. In London, Gehl adopted the same approach as in Copenhagen, triangulating scientific data with spatial site analysis and social research aimed at capturing the lived experience of day care providers navigating the public realm in the process of looking after children. Here, however, the result of preliminary research yielded different findings. While in Copenhagen even detectable pollutants seemed to barely register with people, high levels of other pollutants in London seemed to strongly shape the feel and mood of Vauxhall for many of the interviewees. As Risom put it, “People were like, ‘Oh yes, I never go in that park –​it smells bad –​and I don’t even go in that street’ ”. The harsh smell and occasionally reddish hue of NO2 combined with perceptions of local crime, the sensory experience of noise and experience of darkness at night to produce fearful atmospheres. Further, because the pollution is so widespread, Gehl found that people could not easily choose safe routes –​indeed, one primary school was found to be located right in the middle of a pocket of the worst NO2 and PM 2.5 concentrations in the area. The result of this, as the project develops, is likely to be a stronger focus on mitigating air pollution in secondary streets through traffic-​calming measure and the adoption of measures to address other issues that contribute to how people attune to spaces in the public realm in an affective sense. At the same time, as in Copenhagen, the project will seek to reinforce positive affective atmospheres in spaces that people identify as conducive to childcare –​the cheerful atmosphere of the local Vauxhall Gardens, for example, which happens to also possess better air quality than the surrounding streets. Overall, the project illustrates and embraces the complexity inherent in the notion of atmosphere, recognizing mood and air quality as being distinct yet imbricated in various ways in the context of childcare in urban public spaces. In the process, it speaks to the issue of how atmospheres are known as material to flourishing. Gehl’s research seems to suggest that people tend to be motivated to make choices in terms of navigating cities based on what they perceive; that it is when pollution can be detected by the senses and/​or when it directly shapes feelings such as fear, worry or a sense of powerlessness that people choose less polluted routes. This is perhaps also when pollution best stands a chance of becoming –​as it did in the 1950s in London –​a political issue of national significance. In such a context, making dangerous realities legible on a map in ways that cause imperceptible atmospheric pollution issues to become visible is of political and ethical significance. Clearly, this has also served an important purpose in the context of urban design, concentrating attention on the potential for interventions in the built environment to shape relationships between visible and invisible, meteorological and affective atmospheres in ways relevant to children’s long-​term health. 101

THE CARING CITY

The project also speaks to the nature of responsibility in relation to air pollution. In contemporary cities like Copenhagen and London, this responsibility clearly involves everyone from the carer on the street choosing the safest routes to take their children to school, to the office worker considering their travel options, to city authorities, planners, vehicle manufacturers and international emissions regulators. The responsibility of the designer, Risom explained, emerged as a key area of discussion in the Gehl office in the context of the project. The team were acutely aware that, given the small scale and exploratory nature of the project, it was impossible to tackle larger problems of car use and emissions or the regulations that allow households to rely on wood burners for heating (particularly in Copenhagen). As he put it, “We have had lots of interesting conversations [in the office] around, well, are we really doing enough here? Are we just chopping at the edges and accepting the horrific amounts of emissions in places like Vauxhall?” In the end, they had to recognize the limitations of the project while drawing attention to its possible effects. These hopefully include the development of higher levels of understanding in planning departments of the capacity of urban design within existing cityscapes to reduce children’s exposure to air pollution. Air pollution is the quentiessential systems problem. Addressing it requires collaboration across multiple agencies. Public health, transportation, parks and planning departments as well as education and social services that cater to families all have an important role to play. On the bright side, systemic challenges like this could be supported with multiple funding streams, leading to the formulation of new policies and practices regarding the location of play spaces and day care facilities in urban settings in relation to street infrastructures. But, as the project serves to reveal to citizens the relationships between urban form, transport, pollution and the long-​term health of future generations that are otherwise dangerously invisible, it may also help to politicize air quality, encouraging them not just to attune to better atmospheres but to demonstrate a new care for air at the ballot box.

Gustafson Porter’s Parque Central in Valencia Colguen les gents ab alegria festes, lloant a Déu, entremesclant deports, places, carrers e delitables horts sien cercats ab recont de grans gestes Let people joyfully celebrate the feast-​days, and mix fun with their worship Let them go and fill the squares and streets and pleasant gardens, and listen to long tales being sung. Ausiàs March, excerpt of poem XIII, translated by Robert Archer and the Anglo Catalan Society, 1992 102

Shaping Caring Urban Atmospheres

The design of the Parque Central in the Spanish city of Valencia began with the inspiration and sense of atmosphere of historic Valencia as conveyed by the evocative poetry of the fifteenth-​century Catalan writer Ausiàs March. Valencia, as this brief excerpt from one of his poems suggests, has been a city of festive streets and pleasant gardens for centuries. Parque Central was to be one of the latest additions. Designers Gustafson Porter and Bowman were established in London in 1997, initially as Gustafson Porter. Today, the practice undertakes commissions all over the world and has offices in New York and Paris. A key component of the practice’s ethos, however, is the aim to develop projects that are well suited to and embedded in their contexts and are responsive to different climate zones, geographies and historical and cultural backgrounds. Parque Central involves not only the staging of different affective atmospheres that relate to the city and its regional landscape but also considerations of atmosphere in relation to air quality and pollution. Parque Central began as a competition launched by the ayuntamiento (city council) of Valencia in 2010. The competition sought a masterplan for a large, mostly derelict set of train yards close to the central station. As this is the first time the term masterplan has arisen since the introductory chapter, I will clarify here that this term and the meaning that accues to it stand opposed to the particularistic, relational ideas of urban design and care ethics that I am developing through the book. As the term suggests, ‘masterplan’ carries connotations of the designer as a male authority figure, reshaping place from the top down, creating a comprehensive vision and determining the future. This said, masterplan is a very common outcome of urban design in practice, and, while I may prefer a term such as relational framework, it is clear that such a plan can be produced in quite different ways, defining built form to quite different degrees and in more/​less participatory ways. In focussing on Parque Central, my interest is less in the production of the masterplan, and the practice’s potentially critical interpretation of this notion as a firm led substantially by women, than in how they approached the staging of new urban atmospheres through their landscape design. This site is located at the junction of several neighbourhoods –​Eixample, Extramurs, Jesús and Quatre Carreres –​areas marking various stages of the city’s expansion beyond its medieval walls from the late nineteenth century. The neighbourhoods are separated by railway lines and these cross the site itself. Historical photographs suggest that neighbourhoods either side developed and existed under a pall of smoke from the steam trains plying the routes between Valencia and other Spanish cities until at least the mid-​ twentieth century. The ayuntamiento planned to bury the lines underground to reconnect these neighbourhoods, looking to the competition entrants to provide a vision of development across the tracks. Gustafson Porter and Bowman 103

THE CARING CITY

was selected from among a series of other international practices for the vision it presented of a new ‘green lung’ for the city –​a public park rather than a mixed-​use development –​that would incorporate and repurpose the existing buildings on the site for social uses and create a new, connective green fabric over the rail lines. Following the financial crash in 2008, however, the government was not able to complete the railway plans. In 2011 Gustafson Porter and Bowman were only able to begin work on half the park, and this was as much as had been delivered in 2019–​20, at the time of my research. The aim of the project was to create a quite different atmosphere in both senses of the word, from the disused rail yards. As a green lung, air quality at the site was a consideration from the start. The site is bordered by major roads; air quality varies through the day, as in all cities, but there is also a strongly seasonal dimension to air quality in Valencia. Poor air quality and haze are common at times of year when straw left over from the harvest of rice fields to the south of the city is burnt off. However, the composition of the park is informed by other ideas of atmosphere that seem to blend notions of the environment as tempered by design to allow bodies to find their comfort zone with ideas of affective atmosphere. Working with the material qualities of the existing site –​from the bricky train sheds to the uneven urban elevations around it, understandings of climate, weather and geology –​a series of gardens was created. These were made by transforming the originally flat site into a three-​dimensional topography. Gateways into and routes through the site were laid out and, then, between them, a series of depressions were formed, making reference in the process to the glazed ceramic bowls crafted traditionally in the Valencian region and used for serving food. Each garden was conceived as having a particular affective atmosphere, and all are simultaneously part of a strategy of sustainable water management. Their bowl-like forms act as collectors of water, which can be scarce in Valencia in the summer months. Filtering through a gravel bed, collected rainwater is returned to the aquifer that underlies the city and which is vital for the agricultural plain of the wider Valencia community with its rice fields, citrus groves and olive and kiwi fruit plantations. Water is a key element in the staging of different affective atmospheres too, appearing in different ways and guises through the different gardens. Overall, as Mary Bowman, the practice partner in charge of the project, explained, “The inspiration, really, for the different atmospheres within the garden was the local landscape”, including the mountains to the north and south with their typically jagged limestone ridges, the pine forests around the Turia River, the patchy, often scruffy allotments or ‘horts’ that fringe the city, the incredibly flat and orthogonal, often submerged, rice fields and the freshwater lagoon of the Albufera near the coast with its extensive reed beds and the long beaches that front onto the Mediterranean Sea. This 104

Shaping Caring Urban Atmospheres

preoccupation with local landscape and the attempt to recreate an impression and feel of it reflects Gustafson Porter and Bowman’s interest in the classical Roman notion of the genius loci, the search for which became an import principle of garden design in eighteenth-​century Britain. This has involved into efforts to draw out or enhance the ‘inherent qualities’ and/​or ‘spirit’ of a place. As Bowman put it, “We wanted to bring a memory of these different landscapes into the project”, thereby creating a distinctly Valencian “feel” to the park. For Bowman, an atmosphere is generated by a vast array of aspects of place which link, as Kathleen Stewart suggests, to form ‘some kind of everything’ (Stewart, 2010:340). It depends on the architecture, the planting, the weather, light and shade, the different users and uses of the park, the maintenance of the gardens, the chirp of birds, the buzz of insects and all the ways in which these interrelate and change across the day and through the seasons. It also includes the ways in which the broader culture of the place shapes the uses of public spaces –​for example, the Spanish tendency to occupy the public realm in the cool part of the day, from the late afternoon on. But the staging of atmosphere through landscape design, Bowman indicated, is not just a matter of composing the static elements of place but also of imagining how the gardens will mature over time, how they may appear in difference seasons and how the characters of spaces will evolve in different lights and weathers. It is a matter of recognizing the dependency of atmosphere on conditions which design can’t always mitigate or control. Hence, for example, an atmosphere staged as vibrant will likely not be experienced as such in a heavy downpour or in the dead of night. There is a need to consider the different atmospheres that place can convey in different weathers, seasons and other circumstances. It is also also a matter of acknowledging in subtle ways the contingency of atmosphere on perception, and hence of creating experiential possibilities for bodies and communities inhabiting design in the future, though these may refract into very varied experiences through atmospheric attunements. Starting from the Russafa neighbourhood edge of the park, which is closest to the railway station, the first key space is the main plaza. Hard-​ landscaped, framed by the bricky gable-​ends of restored train sheds and bordered by planters and trees, yet at the same time open to the street, the plaza was imagined as a gathering space that could support a mix of activities, including occasional markets and/​or small public events. Hence, it stages the exuberant atmosphere of such activities, though these would likely be sporadic, seasonal or coincident with particular festivals or holidays. Brightly lit at night, the designers also sought to stage an atmosphere of safety that would help sustain the flow of pedestrians between neighbourhoods after dark. A still pool at the centre of this space, raised to the height of a bench to allow seating all around its edge, offers a place of calm amid comings and goings however, a place from which potentially to people-​watch, 105

THE CARING CITY

Figure 5.3: Parque Central water channel

Source: Richard Bloom for Gustafson Porter and Bowman

catch one’s breath or revel in the sun. The pool overflows into a channel that meanders, floodlike, through the centre of one of the main tree-​lined pedestrian avenues across the park –​a channel shallow enough and so subtly formed that people on bikes or scooters can ride through it and which forms a permanent puddle for small children to play in too. This is shown at sundown in Figure 5.3, the last rays of sunlight turning the water in it pinkish and silver, somehow luxurious yet soothing. The atmosphere of the second garden, referred to as the Huerta (or ‘Hort’ in Catalan which means market garden or vegetable garden), is strongly shaped by planting, aroma, the formation of an enclosure and scale. The 106

Shaping Caring Urban Atmospheres

space is laid out to include olive trees, lemons, herbs and other plants that would be typical of allotments and market gardens around the city –​plants whose different aromas seem to intensify and meld together under a hot sun. A quiet space and sense of removal from the hectic city is created by the setting of the garden in a hollow between paths and by using larger trees at the edges of paths and plots. As Bowman put it, overall, the Huerta “is imagined as a contemplative area, a bit more of a … not a monastic experience but somewhere where you can go and quietly be”, surrounded by aromas of citrus and herbs, aware perhaps of creative activities of gardening and harvesting in the background. The staged atmosphere of the third garden is inherent in its name –​the Romantic Garden (Figure 5.4). This is set around the remnants of a small element of the site’s pre-​industrial past –​an alqeria or small farm building, now restored. Though a link between flowers and romance may be a cliché, certainly the aroma and the colours of flowers are key to the design here, chosen and arrayed to excite the senses. So, too, is water, found in the form of long, shimmering pools lined with stone or blue tiles that mark the edge of the garden, creating the sense of being on an island. Where the tiles appear, the reflection of the blue sky above is suddenly magnified, and an impression of the salt-​sharp sparkle of the Mediterranean Sea evoked –​romanticized perhaps, as in the paintings of the Valencian impressionist painter Joaquín Sorolla (1863–​1923). This is a garden for meandering rather than rushing through, as is strongly suggested by the staggered paths which cut through the planting. Here and there, these paths open out into small garden rooms, each set under a shady tree or two and furnished with picnic tables or benches –​spaces to stop, sit and potentially gather with others. These are not just places for lovers but for love in the broadest sense of conviviality through greeting, conversation, the sharing of a meal or small celebration. Through attention to the scale of interpersonal exchanges, enclosure, light and shade, they anticipate and stage the friendly and festive atmospheres of such occasions. In contrast to the Huerta and Romantic Garden, the atmospheres of the children’s garden were imagined as lively, playful and active. Key elements are an open lawn, interactive fountains, play equipment and a huge slide. The movement of water, night-​time illumination and bright colours are all part of the staging of these atmospheres, though, of course, they are also produced by the sounds of children calling and playing and their playful interactions with the fountains and ball games on the lawn. When the remainder of the park is delivered, a series of other affective atmospheres will be staged by the designers. These include a calm and sensory garden for those with visual impairments, a lively central plaza lined with palm trees and jacarandas, a Mediterranean garden that recalls the coastal landscapes of the region and a festive amphitheatre that could host large public events such as concerts. 107

THE CARING CITY

Figure 5.4: Parque Central Romantic Garden

Source: Richard Bloom for Gustafson Porter and Bowman

Gustafson Porter and Bowman’s approach to atmosphere and to the staging of diverse atmospheres in the park can be seen as relevant to care practices and as reflective of an ethic of care in a range of ways. First, as became clear in my interview with Mary Bowman, care practices of different kinds –​from childcare to the care of elderly and disabled people, the care of pets, the feeding of birds and socializing with friends and neighbours –​formed part of their imagination of different affective atmospheres through design. These atmospheres can be seen to be staged in ways that promise to support both to those cared for and those caring in these relations. Shady, quiet paths in the Huerta, for example, are places where carers can bring babies to sleep in their prams, finding solace 108

Shaping Caring Urban Atmospheres

and an atmosphere of ease for themselves in the process. They are places where older people can sit, meet, absorb the fragrances and spend welcome time outside the home. In the children’s garden, fountains, pools, play equipment and lawns allow children to release pent up energies and potentially overcome the sorts of irritations that are fueled by proximity indoors. The park’s various water features also create cool spaces for childcare, which are clearly vital in a city where the use of air conditioning is prevalent from the spring until the middle of the autumn. At the same time, a sense of enclosure formed by the setting of play areas in a hollow ‘bowl’ and the creation of a café for parents at the upper level helps to promote an atmosphere of safety. As Mary Bowman put it, carers, who are often women, “have a need of these sorts of spaces [that] is much greater than perhaps in the majority of the male population, who are going off to work and then using the park for sport and exercise”. Second, the park’s atmospheres are staged so as to be conducive to care in the broad sense of promoting health and wellbeing. Each is clearly generated by drawing on understandings and intuitions of how different elements of design shape sensory and emotional experience in general within the given climate and cultural context. Calm, contemplative and romantic atmospheres are seen to offer people respite from the stimulation of many aspects of city life as well as from the intensities of indoor life. They are seen as particularly important here as so much of the surrounding neighbourhoods are dominated by dense residential development and hard landscaping –​they are “a real lifesaver in terms of [people’s] mental health and ability to cope, really”, as Bowman put it. Many parts of the park, including sources of shade and water, naturally cool the air, providing relief from the heat in the summer months that can be a source of stress, with implications for health and wellbeing for many people. In turn, atmospheres that invoke a sense of the rural landscape beyond the city provide a sense of orientation and may potentially cultivate feelings of rootedness, perhaps especially so for those with long-​term affiliations with Valencia and its regional landscapes. And yet, while supporting health and wellbeing in a general sense, the staging of different atmospheres within the park also allows people to identify the spaces best suited to their own needs, emotional states and capabilities. As Mary Bowman put it, “I think there’s something for everybody … you can find your space or find your place here”. As a result of the composition of the different garden bowls, an individual can seek out the warming winter sun, if that is what they crave, or a spot beside water and beneath the shade of palms or jacarandas for example. They can seek out quiet space, tucked among the roses, or alternatively, the noise and hilarity of children jumping in the fountains. People are also able to forge atmospheres that build on the design by participating in all sorts of activities that may be hosted within it (and a few 109

THE CARING CITY

that are not officially allowed but which happen anyway) –​from yoga classes to climate change demonstrations, birdwatching, pop-​up food markets and children’s birthday parties. Given that the park is barely commercialized, the opportunities for such activities are quite varied and open and free to people with diverse needs, sensory capacities and material means. The continuity of this inclusive approach depends, however, on how some of the dynamics of urban change currently reshaping the surrounding neighbourhoods unfold. The adjacent neighbourhoods of Russafa and Malilla are both multicultural areas –​12–​18 per cent of the population are first-​ generation migrants to Spain. However, the depressed property values that gave rise to this rich social fabric have, since 2011, been rapidly increasing. The heating up of the market is due, at least in part, to the enhanced breathability of urban life stemming from the presence of the park as a new green lung, as well as the new affective atmospheres that it offers. Russafa is recognized as a frontier of gentrification within Valencia, and migrant populations are being displaced to less affluent areas where, inevitably, less attention to atmosphere has been paid by means of urban design. The attraction of tourists and well-​heeled investors helps to accelerate losses in terms of neighbourhood atmospheres, but it also risks transforming the park’s invocations of rural, local atmosphere into images only. Struggles for place in the city touch the park directly through the calls of one neighbourhood association, the Plataforma per Russafa, for the historic railway sheds on the site to be turned over to neighbourhood management for uses that reflect current demographics and local needs –​a day care facility for the local elderly, for example, and a youth centre. This group supported the development of the park and its high-​quality design but campaigned for a ‘Parque Central sin especulación’ (a Central Park without speculation). It highlighted the potential for the park to eventually exclude (through the desirability it creates and the commodification of atmosphere by developers) the the very people who might most benefit from the park’s design and atmospheres.

Caring atmospheric urban design Where does this leave us in terms of the possible nature of a caring urban atmosphere and of caring atmospheric design? Both of the cases discussed in this chapter have demonstrated how understandings of affective atmospheres and atmospheric conditions can fuse within the context of urban design practices and projects. Both, indeed, in their different ways, integrated these different understanding in the production of spaces seen as conducive to care. Studies of both Thrive Zones and Parque Central have shown how urban design can support and nurture the formation of atmospheres conducive to caring practices, much as the design of formal healthcare settings has been 110

Shaping Caring Urban Atmospheres

shown to do. The Thrive Zones project does this through its focus on the impacts of air quality on children and the routes taken by children and their carers through neighbourhoods. Similar projects to Thrive Zones might perhaps in the future be developed around the care of elderly people and of disabled people as well as, of course, around the needs and capabilities of those that support them. The Parque Central does this through the close attention to the characteristics of its surrounding urban context, the local landscape and climate which it embodies, creating places to find shade or to cool down beside water, for example. It also does this through the experience it offers to particular user groups, including children and blind people, for whom atmospheres conducive to particular sensory experiences were staged. Both cases show that urban design can be sensitized and sensitive to the contingent and subjective nature of affective atmospheres. This sensitivity is apparent in Thrive Zones through the strategy of staging new, possible atmospheres of childcare in Copenhagen and London, and through the language of an open-​ended invitation to children and their caregivers to co-​create these atmospheres (taking responsibility for the wellbeing of children in the process). In Valencia, in contrast, Gustafson, Porter and Bowman reveal it, again, through the diversity of different gardens they created, which allow individuals to attune as suits their different physical and sensory capacities and emotional states. It is also embodied by the non-​deterministic nature of the design which allows people to be creative and exploratory in their uses, configuring and remaking atmospheres for themselves through time. Both projects also show how specific urban design projects can be part of the process of responsibly taking care of the broader atmosphere upon which life, and all care therefore, depends. Thrive Zones does this by helping people to make choices related to children’s health and take action through their daily routines. The Parque Central does it through its clever drainage strategy, the use of natural landscape features to temper environments and through the introduction of trees and other planting that will help cleanse the air in an area that was once smoggy and industrial. Finally, then, these projects suggest that a caring city is one in which sources of ill health connected to pollution and atmospheres that promote negative or damaging experiences are not only addressed but in which people are prompted by design to care about these issues and address them for themselves. However, a caring city must also be one in which a capacity to attune to places that feel safe, welcoming and supportive, and to breathe wholesome air, is available to all.

111

6

Openness and the Unfolding of Care ‘As architects, we don’t normally design for people who are gradually growing and changing their lifestyle and really making that house their home.’ Balkrishna Doshi, Interview Ahmedabad/​Cardiff, 2019

Introduction Over the last three chapters, we have looked at different ways in which urban design shapes care practices and relations, and considered how it can do so for the good and in ways reflective of an ethics of care. In this chapter, I move on to consider how it can attend to the ways in which care needs evolve through time. As Sophia Bowlby (2012) puts it, taking a long-​term view of care reveals how ‘our need for physical care varies through the lifecourse, from the physical dependence of the child to the physical competence of the adult, and the growing physical and sometimes mental dependence of people as they age’. As care needs change, of course, we can understand the practices that attend to them as also being in flux, continually changing. How they change, in turn, as I briefly discussed in Chapter 2, has implications for the spaces, infrastructures, technologies and materials that care practice enrols and requires in different circumstances and contexts. Here, I build on that discussion, asking about the strategies that urban design might develop in attending to the unfolding and transformation of needs for care over different stages of the lifecourse. Picking up on the quote above by the Indian architect Balkrishna Doshi, it asks about the forms of openness in urban design that might allow people to change their lifestyles within place.

112

Openness and the Unfolding of Care

Caring, time and materiality My first step is to consider more closely at how needs unfold over the lifecourse. This may initially seem impossibly varied but, as Sophia Bowlby et al show (Bowlby et al, 2010), key patterns and themes can be detected. For a start, some needs for care are inescapable facts of life. All human beings begin life as helpless babies requiring care to meet their most basic needs. In turn, whatever course life has taken, declining capacity and increasing vulnerability also characterize the end of life in old age (Engster, 2007). While each person is different, these needs for care are, in essence, predictable and unavoidable. Other needs for care, however, can surface through more random events that pepper the course of life, such as emotionally traumatic experiences, accidents, exposures to toxins and illnesses. The evolution of needs for care can be shaped by many factors. These factors can include the presence of disabilities, which may be congenital or acquired during the course of life. They can include the impacts of various life events on people’s mental health and wellbeing. They can also include the experiences of care that people acquired at earlier times of life. This evolution can be characterized by a lessening, transformation or intensification of needs over time. As children grow up, for example, their needs for help in securing the basic conditions for survival typically lessen, while their needs for support in countless other ways transform. Over the duration of an illness, in contrast, care needs can lessen or intensify depending on the course it takes. Needs for caring support from others can be radically different in different stages of life, however, as discussed in Chapter 3, characterizing adulthood as a time of independence in contrast to childhood dependency is problematic from a care ethics perspective. As Sevenhuijsen (2003) argues, when we view care needs in a broad sense, beyond basic necessities, it is clear that people always ‘need each other in order to live a good life’. Again, there are aspects of the evolution of care needs that are more or less predictable across the majority of people’s lives, such as growing up in childhood or steady weakening in old age, and others that are far less so and which are more specific to individuals and the subtly yet infinitely varied pathways they may take through the lifecourse. Looking at care needs over the lifecourse helps unsettle notions of dependency as pertaining only to some categories of people –​children, the poor or the infirm, for example. Instead, it reveals that, while the human condition may allow times of greater and lesser independence, a condition of dependence unites all (Engster, 2007: loc 561–​78). It can serve to show how the independence that people enjoy at certain times in their lives often results from the care they received at other times, from the relations they were immersed in then. It can of course also show how people’s progression through care relations is a progression through different roles, becoming at different times both cared-​for and carer. Looking at care over the lifecourse, 113

THE CARING CITY

therefore, helps to reveal interdependence, which care ethics scholars have long viewed as intrinsic to specific care relations and as a feature of complex, intersecting circles and chains of care relations that not only extend across society but are vital to human continuity. As care needs change, so evidently do practices of care and the relationships that pertain to them. The care of the parent, for example, is often steadily supplanted in later childhood by the care of friends and, later still, partners. As Bowlby et al argue (Bowlby et al, 2010: loc 215), these practices and relationships often reflect ‘people’s mapping and shaping of their routes through life’ –​the choices they make regarding care, the relationships they seek to foster and the goals they set out to pursue. They are, however, often shaped by financial matters, as people’s choices regarding formal care for themselves and their dependents are often shaped by their means to pay for support. Care relationships and practices characterizing people’s lives at different stages are, as several of the case studies discussed in this book have already suggested, influenced by cultural factors given that care is organized and subject to different norms and expectations in different cultural contexts. Recalling again the discussions of the place of care in Chapter 3, these practices and relations are strongly influenced by the ‘actions of the State, particularly in countries in which the State is able to provide a range of welfare services’ (Bowlby et al, 2010: loc 206). Beyond individual financial resources, they are also influenced by markets and the ways in which care is commodified under neoliberalism in advanced capitalist societies (see for example Smith, 2005; Held, 2006: 107–​24). As the unfolding and transformation of care needs has implications for the relations of care that people are involved in, it also creates different needs related to the materialities of the settings within which care takes place. As Bowlby et al (2010: loc 1730–​986) argue, care practices related to growing up in the home, being ill in the home and growing old in the home all have a bearing on the utility of spaces and objects within the domestic environment, and often require material changes. At least temporarily, changing needs and care practices may disrupt ‘ “normal” time-​space routines within the home’ (Bowlby et al, 2010: loc 1858). This is relevant to urban design as these changes don’t necessarily relate only to interiors but also to the broader form of housing and to the relationships between interior and exterior space. Given these connections between care needs, place and time, the journey of care through the lifecourse can be understood as a ‘caringscape’ (Bowlby et al, 2010). Like any landscape, the caringscape unfolds, opening up new vistas and horizons as well as new settings and stages for everyday life as people travel through it. In developing the notion, Bowlby et al draw on Doreen Massey’s (2005) conception of space not merely as the static container for social activity but as 114

Openness and the Unfolding of Care

a dynamic assemblage of elements all recognized as being in flux in different ways. These relational elements indeed are not conceived as things as such but rather as ‘trajectories’ which are each transforming over time. Trajectories, she suggests, may unfold synchronously or their links might become increasingly tenuous over time as patterns of evolution and co-​dependency diverge. To consider the relevance of this for urban design’s role in shaping care over the lifecourse, it may be helpful to begin by considering this scenario: Imagine a home inhabited by an older person which has a stepped entrance off the street. Over time, since the home was first constructed, the steps up to the entrance have lost some of their slip-​resistance because of the actions of weather, but their number, height and depth of treads have otherwise remained constant. The resident, who has aged since moving into the property, is no longer able to walk easily up the steps to her front door. This is impacting her capacity to take care of herself but also her feelings about her home, her resilience and her future. The trajectories of change in the stairs and of advancing frailty are part of a growing misalignment between the home-​as-​fabric that is subject to wear and tear over time and the resident’s capacities and horizons, with implications for her housing needs and needs for care. The caringscape, in other words, has become jarring and problematic. For places, infrastructures and environments to remain supportive, the trajectories of care needs and their material settings need to unfold in a more synchronous manner. To do so, these settings must, in the manner that Martin Heidegger suggests in his essay ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’, be able to be cultivated over time in response to care needs (Heidegger, 2008 [1971]: 349). Cultivation, for Heidigger, denotes those practices that ensure the ongoing alignment of physical dwelling with needs, including extension, adaption, repair, maintenance and, even, for Heidegger, tilling the soil of family food production. As a result, cultivation is very much part of the process of caring for the members of a household, even intergenerationally. In Heidegger’s words, to cultivate the home and the land on which it sits is to ‘cherish and protect, to preserve and to care for’, thereby helping to ensure the continuity of wellbeing and the flourishing of dwelling over time. Thinking in this way focusses attention on how places are changed and adapted, but also on how they come to embody capacities for cultivation. How, we may ask, does design enable materiality to remain aligned with unfolding care needs? What capacities for alteration or reorganization in response to anticipated or unanticipated, gradual or rapid, evolutions in the trajectories of individual and collective care needs does it embody? Massey (2012: 12) argues that ‘For the future to be open, space must be open too.’ How then to think of urban design as creating openness to changing configurations of care over the lifecourse? 115

THE CARING CITY

Openness, design and the city Openness is a well-established theme within urban design and architectural theory. Its origins lie in the 1960s, a time of reaction to top-​down, deterministic approaches to urban change. A key thinker was the Dutch architect N. John Habraken. His influential book Supports: An Alternative to Mass Housing, first published in Dutch in 1961, set out to challenge dominant modernist approaches to the construction of mass housing as well as conceptions of the roles of the state, the construction industry and architects with regard to the provision of shelter. His contention was that there was a problem with the top-​down way in which such housing was often designed and constructed, which offered little to no scope not only for resident involvement in design but for future adaptation in response to their changing needs and desires. It created the kind of ‘brittleness’ which Sennett (2007) has theorized more recently as a feature of modernism and, more widely, of top-​down city-​making. The observation led Habraken to propose, instead, a separation of building components into categories of ‘support’ and ‘infill’. While the support would be designed and provided for residents, the infill would be added by residents themselves according to their own resourcefulness and to suit their tastes and needs. This offered a means not only to invite non-​experts to shape the city but to forge an expression, through time, of a pluralistic, as opposed to an homogenous, mass society. Related reactions to Modernism’s quests for control and permanence from the 1960s include situationist visions of the city such as Constant’s New Babylon, produced from the late 1950s. This was an attempt to explore the potential for the dynamism of modern life to be expressed through a cityscape which in itself would be in ‘a perpetual state of becoming’ (Sadler, 1999: 123). Though very different in character, these related reactions also include Jane Jacobs’ detailed analysis of incrementalism and gradual change in New York’s historic neighbourhoods in her book The Death and the Life of Great American Cities (published in the same year as Habraken’s book), with its damning critique of large-​scale, comprehensive urban renewal programmes. Though the list here is not definitive, they also include the early work of Christopher Alexander. In his seminal article ‘A City Is Not a Tree’ from 1965, he proposed that cities should take the form of ‘semi-​lattice’ or open structures, allowing connections and relationships to form organically across their different parts in response to emerging and changing patterns of everyday life. In later work, he articulates a ‘morphogenic’ idea of the city as a dynamic assemblage continually undergoing adaptation, repair and transformation. This is a city made incrementally and piecemeal, by many different people, rather than through ‘tabula rasa’, top-​down urban change. 116

Openness and the Unfolding of Care

Over time, the notion of openness has, in a broad sense, continued to be used to denote ideas about the agency of users in urban change and the dynamism of the city as a social-​spatial assemblage. This is certainly the case in Richard Sennett’s 2007 conceptualization of the ‘open city’, according to which openness relates at once to the accessibility of urban form, to its scope for refinement and continual adaptation and to the politics of urban design and development. Hence, openness implies a limitation of the role of professional designers regarding the determination of urban forms and places. For designers, this means holding back from the temptation to prescribe and control everything, and allowing, through whatever means, inhabitants to orchestrate their own routines as well as to refine and adapt their environment ‘as the needs of habitation change’ (Sennett, 2007: 296). It implies a democratization of design and the elevation of ordinary people within the power structures of city-​making. This, however, is not simply a matter of leaving the future open for others to define. As Stephen Kendall suggests (Kendall, 2000, 2017), design can embody various degrees of capacity for change. This can, in turn, reflect designers’ anticipations of the likely or possible course of events, including the emergence of maintenance and repair issues, technological changes and transforming lifestyles. These capacities can be created through a host of different design strategies, including loose-​fit forms, porosity, non-​ prescriptions of use, flexibility through moveable elements and unfinished building (Kendall, 2000, 2017; Dovey and Fisher, 2014). With its emphasis on the extension of the opportunity to ordinary citizens to shape their cityscapes, openness offers a lens through which to theorize justice in the contexts of planning and urban design. Thinking of openness in terms of care, however, concentrates attention on the role and potential of transformative capacities to enable care settings and infrastructures to respond effectively to the evolution of care needs, practices and relations over time. It also concentrates attention on the relationship between design governance and the different roles played by the state, by individuals, by finance and by culture in specific practices of care, as outlined above. To what extent do urban design strategies that invite inhabitants to shape and shift space in accordance with changing needs succeed in articulating a non-​paternalistic vision of care? To what extent do they reflect ideas of care as the responsibility of citizens, communities or welfare states? In what follows, I explore how designers in very different contexts have developed approaches to openness that help take forward these lines of thought. The case studies are both housing projects, but they embody quite distinct approaches to openness. The first is a self-​build neighbourhood in the city of Indore in India known as the Aranya Low Cost Housing scheme. Laid out by Balkrishna Doshi in the early 1980s,1 it is an example of openness produced 117

THE CARING CITY

by leaving design unfinished, enabling users and occupiers to complete it to suit their requirements as well as to adapt/​cultivate it over time. The second, Polgarstraβe 30a, is a new neighbourhood project in the city of Vienna designed by the Viennese practice Delugan Meissl Associated Architects. In contrast to Aranya, it is an example of openness produced though ostensibly finished building, but one which offers different possibilities for use and the configuration of the home. Research in both cases involved visits and interviews with lead designers and the analysis of drawings and other design materials. In the case of Aranya, which is now forty years old, research also involved eleven semi-​structured interviews with family groups to develop an understanding of how homes had been built and evolved over time. These were undertaken with Tanvi Jain, an architect from Indore and a former student of Doshi’s at the School of Planning and Architecture in Ahmedabad. She was able to translate the interviews and, assisted by her mother, who directs an interior design practice in Indore, she surveyed and produced drawings of six of the homes where we interviewed residents. Questions put to these residents focussed on how homes had emerged and evolved, and on how changes reflected the unfolding of care needs and practices within the households as well as their responses to the given parameters of Doshi’s urban design.2

Aranya Low Cost Housing, Indore The Aranya Low Cost Housing Project exemplifies a form of urbanization that became popular in the 1970s and ’80s in rapidly growing cities –​site-​ and-​services development. In India, urban growth from the late 1940s led to the development of huge squatter colonies in the 1950s. By 1980, one-​ fifth of India’s urban population –​some twenty-​three million people –​was living in slums. Site and serviced schemes typically entail governments assembling land, laying out basic services and often also offering low-​interest loans and technological assistance to people to buy and build their own homes and communities, creating the means for them to overcome precarity and deprivation. By the early 1980s, it had been adopted as a favoured mode of development for the urban poor by the World Bank, not only because it offered a less expensive route to providing support for housing development but also as a notion of self-​help chimed with the liberal-​democratic values the bank espoused, including the principle that the role of government with regard to housing should be to assist citizens to become homeowners rather than to provide housing per se (Ward, 1982; Spodek, 1983). In turn, this is a notion according to which the principle of self-​sufficiency at the level of individuals and small collectives is idealized, while forms of dependency are viewed as flaws and weaknesses. From a care ethics perspective, this is 118

Openness and the Unfolding of Care

clearly problematic; as I discussed in Chapter 1, the notion of self sufficiency stands opposed to care ethics’ vision of interdependence and its emphasis on flourishing as an outcomes of care practice and the meeting of care needs. Though I will return to this issue in the Conclusion to this chapter’ here, the Aranya project offers far more to reflect on in terms of care, and particularly care through open city design. To provide some background to the project, Indore is the commercial centre of the state of Madhya Pradesh. The region was recipient of a large World Bank grant of $24.1 million in 1980, in recognition of high levels of unmet housing need across its cities. A hefty portion of this went to Indore as the commercial capital –​a city of 827,000 people which was rapidly growing. The funds were allocated to the Madhya Pradesh Housing Board by the central government and from there went to the Indore Development Authority (hereafter the IDA) that identified the 400-​acre site for Aranya and later went on to lead in its development. The IDA commissioned Doshi’s practice, Vastu Shilpa, to plan it in 1983. By then, Doshi was already a renowned voice in housing for the ‘economically weaker sections’ of Indian society. Doshi was impassioned about the life of buildings in time and interested in teasing out the implications of this for design. Christopher Alexander was a friend who visited both his practice and the architectural school in Ahmedabad in the 1970s, and the two shared a common interest in incrementalism, unpredictability and the importance of deriving the broad ‘patterns’, to use Alexander’s (1997) term, of city form and architecture from everyday social life. His thinking was also shaped by research that his Vastu Shilpa Foundation had carried out on the formation, dynamics and transformation of informal settlements. Doshi saw informal settlements not, as government agencies often did, as aberrations to be swept away but rather as embodiments of everyday life in urbanizing India with much to teach the generation of designers addressing the challenges of its post-​ colonial cities. As Doshi explained at the start of our meeting in December 2019, this was a radical idea in 1983, but it also remains so now. It is still all too often assumed, he said, that an architect should “talk about certain rules, certain scales, certain modalities” and be concerned with the creation of “static” things. Echoing Sennett’s critique of brittle determinism, he bemoaned the relative neglect bythe majority of designers worldwide of the realities of constant change and evolution in cities. Not designing for change risks preventing people from adapting their environments in response to their unfolding needs but also from developing a sense of ownership through their cultivations of place that enhance their wellbeing. Describing his own approach, he said: “I don’t think of architecture particularly per se, connected to a nature of form and structure and volume.” 119

THE CARING CITY

Instead, through his long career, he has thought of it in a far broader sense “as life”. Following from this is a commitment to empower people to live how they would wish to live. In his words: “If you empower people … then what happens is that it creates incentives for people that are self-​generated” (rather than imposed). This empowerment is not just expressed but facilitated by creating openness within design, as this enables people to cultivate their environments as embodiments of their everyday lives as they unfold over time. To ensure an ongoing correspondence between the built fabrics of homes and cities and everyday life, it must be possible to modify or reconfigure them and for them to embody openness to change, as he summed up in this rhetorical question: “Do you allow people to live the way you want, a designer wants, or do you give them a home that they will call their own?” The Aranya commission provided an opportunity for Doshi to develop these ideas at an urban scale. It involved a major reimagining of the typology of site-​and services schemes from an urban design perspective. One of the problems with site-​and-​services schemes, for Doshi, was that they were often treated as engineering projects without sufficient consideration of the significance of infrastructure for the formation of liveable places. Indeed, many led to barracks-​like developments within which communities struggled to form and which lacked atmosphere and the makings of a public realm. In contrast, informal settlements, though deprived, were often evidently structured around community life, their organic, often labyrinthine routes and housing assemblages expressive of local economic activities, religious rituals and patterns of sociality and caring. His goal was thus to create a plan that would both provide needed infrastructures and allow the sort of urban form observed in the informal settlements to emerge organically, avoiding the paternalistic imposition of a form that would be alien to people. It would establish, in other words, what Alexander refers to as a ‘genetic code’ for open city development according to which ‘the sequence of small-​scale transformation will, of its own accord, create the larger patterns, piece by piece’ (Alexander, 1979: 501). As I argued earlier, openness in design is not simply a matter of leaving the future open for others to define. In designing the neighbourhood, Doshi explained in our meeting, his team placed considerable emphasis on how it might unfold and how, indeed, design might help shape its unfolding in positive ways. To this end, he worked on the financing arrangements that would allow the poorest of Indore’s citizens to access sites, considered how materials would be sourced, and how people might exchange skills and band into cooperatives to build collectively and help one another, and how loan repayments would work and relate to site and infrastructure costs (Steele, 1998: 116). Though he did not design most of the housing above foundation level, his team undertook substantial research and analysis to understand the potential of different plot layouts and infrastructures –​from 120

Openness and the Unfolding of Care

the configuration of streets to the position of water taps –​to condition the development that would follow as well as to shape health outcomes, environmental comfort and a sense of community as the project developed. Through the plan, the site was divided into six neighbourhoods providing 6,500 homes in all. The edges between the neighbourhoods were characterized as active, mixed-​use borders (including social infrastructures such as schools as well as commercial spaces) avoiding the creation of hard ‘border vacuums’ of the sort that Jane Jacobs identified as features of segregated, spatially closed communities. Each was to be bisected by a pedestrian lane running broadly diagonally across it. The centre of the site, at the ends of the lanes, was dedicated to amenities and resources of different kinds, including recreational spaces and, in the early days of the development, repositories of building materials. Reflecting Doshi’s passion for environmental design, the layout was formed with the variable climate of Madhya Pradesh in mind (Steele, 1998: 118). The orientation of the lanes was established to maximize shade and keep the public realm cool. All areas to be built upon, in turn, were set on dry plinths to protect interior spaces from the penetration of ground water. The lanes were designed to narrow and widen along their lengths creating the potential for mini public spaces to be formed between groups of houses. Eleven housing types were identified. Though housing types in residential development are often defined according to size, number of rooms or square metres, here they reflected different degrees of openness/​completion at the time of sale to their first occupants –​ranging from the most basic arrangement, entailing a concrete plinth and access to running water, to semi-​built structures (incorporating a toilet/​shower and/​or kitchen), to fully built demonstration houses. Almost all plots are the same size –​a bare 12 x 32 feet –​tiny, in other words, by European space standards, especially given that they were largely destined for families. The range and the scale reflect the aim to create private housing that would be accessible to those on low incomes, with the most basic arrangement clearly being the cheapest. Aside from the demonstration houses, the plots were expected to develop over time. A series of evocative hand-drawn sketches was produced by Doshi to convey the idea of the gradual growth of a home to forge an increasingly attuned structure and set of spaces within which care for and of the family might occur (see Curtis, 1988). The process would begin, Doshi anticipated, with “protection and cover”, potentially using quite basic materials, and go on to produce a series of indoor spaces, outdoor terraces and a courtyard to provide for the emerging needs of an “extended family”. Gradual improvement in the size and quality of the shelter would, in turn, reflect improvement in the financial circumstances of the family. The drawings thus illustrate an idea of space and building emerging in line with different stages of life in the family and different stages in their progress towards economic 121

THE CARING CITY

security. It is a vision of building and adaptation in response to the caring relations of family life melded with a vision of economic growth at the level of each and every household within a burgeoning post-​colonial economy. The eighty demonstration houses reflected the potential outcomes of gradual growth. They served to demonstrate how space could be configured within such a tiny area. In turn, features such as thick walls, carefully positioned windows and lanterns over stairs illustrated how standard, easily procured materials could be deployed to achieve greater levels of environmental comfort than would be found in informal settlements. Hence, though they were occupied and adapted over time just as a the most basic plots were, the demonstration houses’ major purpose was to provide support for new Aranya residents to envision and develop their future homes, helping them to conceive the material means of developing their homes and communities. To many, of course, the idea of giving people no more than a concrete plinth and a water tap can sound more like negligence on the part of urban authorities than care (see, for example, Foster Gage, 2018). Certainly site-​and-​ service schemes have often been tarnished with such critique. Housing needs, arguably, were present right away, when people first acquired their sites; they did not unfold over time. For Doshi, however, it is important to remember what tenure itself represents in cities where precarity and a complete lack of public services are so widespread. It means, as he put it, that “now you are given the chance that you will not be thrown out. It means hope”. At the same time, the openness of the scheme shows respect for the real skills and capabilities of residents and communities. Hence, while creating incomplete ‘infrastructures of care’ (Power and Mee, 2020), the project can be seen as a kind of ‘care of empowerment’, in Morris’s terms (Morris, 1997). By care of empowerment, I mean that people are given support to make those infrastructures for themselves and their loved ones, drawing on their existing skill base. In 2019, thirty-​seven years later, the fruits of Doshi’s ideas have taken shape and matured. The lanes described above have indeed become a focus of each neighbourhood. Each unfolds as a unique sequence of spaces, and the widenings include small temples and shrines built by the Hindu community, micro parks with trees and patches of ground where children play cricket. Though suddenly silenced during the COVID-​19 lockdown, the lanes were full of activity in 2019 and again in the later months of 2020. Tanvi Jain’s photograph (Figure 6.1) was captured in the run-​up to the festival of Diwali, when people were engaged in adorning their houses. As she eloquently described the scene: ‘People sat on the plinths while little kids rode tricycles and bicycles or played games under the watchful eyes of elders. Older children and women were engaged in adorning their houses by drawing rangolis on their entrance plinths.3 One family also started a small business by making, packing and selling the coloured rangoli powder to the residents 122

Openness and the Unfolding of Care

Figure 6.1: Aranya lane

Source: Juliet Davis and Tanvi Jain

of the neighbourhood. Hawkers selling brooms, earthen lamps or other household items frequented the neighbourhood while everyone began the preparations to light up the houses with oil lamps as it became darker.’ Across the neighbourhoods, houses range from one to three stories in height. They reveal multiple strategies regarding the accommodation of stairways, rooftops, balconies, space layout and so forth. Inside, a range of different ways of thinking about how to build living spaces and sleeping areas around the family are also apparent. The eleven homes we visited in 2019 were a mix of those that had formed part of the original cluster of demonstration houses (four) and those built around sanitary cores (seven). Our interviews sought to elicit narratives of making and adaptation, and to understand how these related to care practices in different phases of people’s lives. The fabric of the demonstration houses, which were not built incrementally, had adapted least over time. It seemed likely that governance arrangements had a bearing on this, as many of these houses had continued to be owned and leased by the IDA. However, there was some indication that some residents felt that the adaptability of these houses was limited by the construction materials used to form their walls. These, though robust and cooling, were difficult to break through or otherwise shift –​though they would be strong enough to take additional floors. Where the input of residents was most apparent was in the different ways in which similar elements were used, furnished and decorated. For example, the external stairs that are a key feature of these houses were treated, variously, as 123

THE CARING CITY

Figure 6.2: Aranya demonstration house

Source: Juliet Davis

places to hang out washing, to sit outside, to watch out for children playing in the lanes, to sort rice for the evening meal and so on. Shaded balconies at the first-​floor level accommodated, variously, plants, hand-​crafted wind chimes, bird cages and washing. In turn, threshold spaces on the ground floor, which were typically a step up from the street, accommodated (in changing configurations) bikes, motorcycles, toys and shoes removed before entering homes (Figure 6.2). Those houses with more substantial threshold spaces or front gardens additionally afforded spaces for plants, pets and the like. One owner whose home was at a junction between lanes and set back from the corner had formed a garden which acted as a place simultaneously 124

Openness and the Unfolding of Care

for caring for plants, passing the time of day with neighbours and gathering local news and gossip –​she listened as she swept and watered. The seven homes that had begun as sanitary cores had gradually developed and also been adapted more substantially over time. Five examples of the houses as we found them in 2019 are depicted in Figure 6.3, revealing a diverse Figure 6.3: Plans and sections of five Aranya houses as built in 2019

Source: Juliet Davis and Tanvi Jain

125

THE CARING CITY

range of spatial layouts. How they had been adapted, however, was strongly influenced by how long the residents had lived in their homes and the number of times the houses had changed hands since their inception in the mid-​1980s. The most long-​standing owner in our sample, whose house reflected well what Doshi had imagined, had moved to Indore to take up employment in the growing textiles industry in the town in the early 1990s (though this has since declined) and had subsequently been allotted his plot (on the condition of a 5,670 rupee down payment and a subsequent payment of 75 rupees a month over twenty years). He and his family built their home much as Doshi anticipated, room by room, beginning with a tin shed that covered the kitchen, toilet and washing areas plus one single room. Later, a concrete roof was added that provided better protection and which eventually formed the first floor. Better finishes were added over time –​tiles in the wet areas and ground-​floor rooms, and plasterwork in the front room, including a decorative cornice. These changes all reflected the family’s growing economic capabilities and also its evolving care needs and relations. The addition of a first floor reflected the expansion of the family when the daughter (not yet born when they had acquired the site) married and had children of her own. At that point, the original occupants, now the grandparents, moved down to the ground floor beside the kitchen so that the new family could occupy the upstairs. Here, with the lane just feet from their bed, they would likely grow old, able to pass the time of the day with the neighbours and be cared for by their daughter. Another owner, who had built her house with her husband (since deceased) from the ground up, told a similar story of growth and change related to intergenerational care relations. She had an unusual corner plot that was exactly twice the size of the standard plot, and had brought her two children up there. When the eldest had gone on to higher education, space was freed up on the ground floor for her to run a small hair salon and to rent out a room. This, clearly, served to generate needed income for a widow, but it also reflected Doshi’s idea that homes might accommodate cottage industries. Now that the son was getting married, however, the space would be needed again as living quarters, and so in 2019 a new round of changes to prepare for his return was being planned. Adaptations, in both cases, were facilitated by the simplicity of space which, while often extremely compact, lent itself to different uses, and by the simplicity of block, mortar and render construction. Adaptations of several other homes in our sample had been undertaken by different owners over time. It was clearly significant that later occupants were not beneficiaries of the financial schemes offered to the original owners but purchased their homes on the open market. In some of these cases, improvements reflected the escalation of land values since the 1980s which Aranya, like other areas in urban India, has experienced, and the attendant 126

Openness and the Unfolding of Care

investment in property and its improvement. Hence, they revealed not simply a morphing of built fabric to suit evolving care practices in householding but the gentrification of a neighbourhood. Illustrating this, one homeowner described how her family had bought a two-​storey house and then added a further floor to add value as well as to accommodate growing space needs. This showed, in turn, how needs are a matter of perception and are connected strongly to financial means; what the original occupants made do with is not the same as what today’s residents require. Notwithstanding these illustrations of growing prosperity, some of the homeowners we interviewed had not been able to realize Doshi’s vision of gradual growth. A widowed mother with two teenage boys living in a generously sized corner property with two floors and a roof terrace, for example, relayed the story of how she and her husband had purchased their substantial home intending to gradually improve it. He had died in the home some years later. As a result of the loss of his income and her inability to find work, the family had become unable to pay even for upkeep and repairs. The first floor of the property was no longer in use, and the house had, in effect, contracted over time, awaiting the maturation of the boys and their entry into the workforce. This clearly illustrated how responsibilities for care –​of home, self and others –​are concentrated upon private citizens in models of open city design and development such as this, and how state-​endorsed autonomy can empower while failing to create a safety net. Across all the housing, the usability and reusability of spaces, and their adequacy in meeting needs, clearly depended on how the buildings were maintained. As suggested by the example above, lack of roof maintenance could render certain rooms uninhabitable, leading homes to contract. In 2019, a number of the demonstration houses were in a poor decorative state of repair. However, by the time of Tanvi Jain’s 2020 visits, repairs had been undertaken and all had been repainted. Interviews with residents revealed that this work was made possible by the ease by which the houses could be repaired and maintained. Render/​block materials could be cheaply sealed, recoated and renewed, and the application of coatings to roofs and walls required relatively little skill (though producing Aranya’s multi-​coloured lanes clearly entails a great deal of artistry) (Figure 6.4). As a result, the residents were able to undertake this work themselves, often enrolling everyone in the family. In some lanes, residents had banded together to jointly provide and share equipment like ladders and tall stools, thus creating collective resources with which to care for buildings. The work had a ritualistic dimension in that the maintenance of homes and the deep-​cleaning and decluttering of interiors were carried out by everyone in the days before the Hindu Diwali festival. Thus, maintenance emerged in Aranya at once as a practice of caring for one’s own home –​fusing pride with the practicalities of keeping the damp out –​of participating in collective care at the levels of street and 127

THE CARING CITY

neighbourhood and of facilitating the continuity of the living traditions that bind people together. In general, the research showed that the radical openness created by Doshi’s urban design had created capacities for people to make, remake and maintain homes and neighbourhoods over time as everyday life and related care needs unfolded. These activities occurred not only at the household level but also at the neighbourhood level too, with members of local communities mutually supporting one another in the construction and maintenance of homes as infrastructures of care. However, echoing some of the concerns that scholars raise about values in privatized healthcare settings (Buse et al, 2018), the primary danger presented by this model of private housing development is that, over time, the balance of forces shaping its transformation tips progressively away from the values of satisfying the housing needs of the poor through much-​needed tenure security and piped water towards those of financial opportunity and real estate. While, in some ways, the unfolding of broad economic forces lies beyond the scope of design, in fact, the possibility for escalating property values was set from the beginning of the project within the ownership and financing model that Doshi developed. As our research indicated, this development model coexists with a model of community-​based care within a patriarchal and largely Hindu society. More vulnerable people are heavily dependent on support from within their households, predominantly from women. While the arrangement certainly fosters an intergenerational culture, captured clearly in Figure 6.4, households Figure 6.4: Aranya house being painted prior to Diwali

Source: Juliet Davis and Tanvi Jain, 2020

128

Openness and the Unfolding of Care

and the members within them can also fail to thrive, with consequences for the integrity of their care infrastructures as well as for their choices in life.

Polgarstraβe 30a, Vienna In contrast to Aranya, Polgarstraβe 30a is a social housing project. Hence, how it was planned, developed and financed was very different from Aranya, as is the way it is managed and maintained. It was initiated much more recently than Aranya –​in 2011 –​and developed over a much shorter timeframe –​opening in 2014. It is also a much smaller scheme than Aranya, providing 241 new homes in contrast to Aranya’s 6,500. The project is located in the twenty-​second district of the city of Vienna, Donaustadta name which refers to its location beside the River Danube. This is a part of Vienna that urbanized from the late nineteenth century but was only formally incorporated into the city in 1954. Today, it is the city’s second largest district and an important focus for the city’s growth. The urban fabric around the project is a mix of suburban low-​r ise, typically private housing and large, high-​r ise social housing blocks constructed from the 1950s onwards. Although the district contains a greater share of Vienna’s population than any other, parts are sparsely developed, reflecting its historic peripherality, and these are seen by the City of Vienna as strategic locations for progressive urbanization through densification and infill. The site for the project and the overall planning strategy were respectively identified and outlined in development plans for the district produced by the City of Vienna. Polgarstraβe 30a was an industrial site –​a concrete plant. The plans proposed its transformation into housing, complementing a housing development on the other side of the street. Development was initiated through the city’s launching a developer competition –​a common way in which development and design services are procured in the city. The key concept presented in the competition brief was ‘cost-​effective living’ –​ housing that would be affordable for people to rent and also cost effective to run. Unlike in Aranya, where the starting assumption was that infrastructure rather than housing as such would be provided, here the goal was to create ostensibly finished housing that residents would move into on completion. The competition was won by two separate teams, who each became responsible for three buildings providing a total of 760 homes. Site B, as it was called, which forms the focus of our case study, was awarded to a team comprising two non-​profit developers. These were EBG and Heimbau, both well-​established housing developers and managers founded respectively in 1910 and 1953. The histories of both firms are deeply rooted in the history of social housing in Vienna (see Blau, 2000), and though Vienna’s housing development has been affected in recent years by financialization issues with roots in the 129

THE CARING CITY

Figure 6.5: Polgarstraβe 30a site plan

Source: Delugan Meissl Associated Architects

global financial crisis of 2008, these firms remain committed to affordable housing provision for low-​to middle-​income residents. On their website, Heimbau emphasize that their focus is ‘not on profit maximisation but on the interests of those looking for accommodation’.Working with these two 130

Openness and the Unfolding of Care

developers in the competition was Delugan Meissl Associated Architects (DMAA) and the landscape architect Rajek Barosch. Key to producing affordable housing in this case was the award of a ‘super-​ grant’ by the city to the developers. In other words, the remediation of the land and the construction of the project were heavily state subsidized, significantly reducing the level of financial contribution and rent that was needed from residents to ensure the project’s viability. EBG director Michael Ludwig expressed the view that “with the super-​funding we have [been able to] develop an instrument that takes care of people”. DMAA is a Vienna-​based practice that was founded in 1993 by Elke Delugan Meissel and Roman Delugan. Their work spans the full spectrum of design areas, from interiors, to infrastructure, to urban design. While the core of their business is in Austria, they have also built internationally, with projects in the USA, Latin America and China. Openness is an important theme running through their portfolio. As Christian Muhr and Robert Temel (2006) write, in DMAA’s work, ‘space is not primarily regarded as static but rather as a dynamic and variable interaction between people and their environment’. This idea resonates strongly with Doreen Massey’s conceptualization of place as an assemblage of trajectories that continually reshape not just uses but also meanings and values. Understanding space in this way gives rise to strategies that, in diverse ways, seek to create a sense of potentiality, with “things left open” for different configurations of space, materiality and use to emerge, as Dietmar Feistel, one of DMAA’s practice directors, put it. These strategies involve two distinct meanings of openness –​openness as spatial porosity and openness as in a capacity for change. Interestingly, as in Alexander and also Doshi’s work, these meanings are continually overlapping as spatial openness or fluidity are seen as key to enabling different scenarios of living to unfold. Throughout the practice’s portfolio, openness is reflected in attempts to blur the edges between different territories or spatial conditions, creating open thresholds. But it is also reflected in efforts to create flexibility and a convertibility of space that allows different socio-​material assemblages to take shape over time. Spatial generosity, variability in terms of the types of spaces created and a frequent reluctance to prescribe functions all also form part of this approach. As in Doshi’s work, and as in Sennett’s concept of the ‘open city’, empowering both users and managers as creative agents and makers is part of the objective. According to Feistel’s view, “Mostly, things which are not defined work the best”. Delugan Meissl’s design for Polgarstraβe 30a created three blocks (as show in the site plan in Figure 6.5) encompassing 241 apartments along with a café, children’s day care centre, a common room, a laundry and a building management centre. Within its ground floor areas, it also accommodates a 131

THE CARING CITY

Figure 6.6: Polgarstraβe 30a axonometric drawing showing flat types

Source: Juliet Davis and Tanvi Jain, based on Delugan Meissl Associated Architects’ plans and sections

132

Openness and the Unfolding of Care

range of storage spaces –​for prams, bicycles, garden tools and garbage –​that illustrate the scope to imagine housing not just as a cluster of individual homes but as a collective home with shared domestic resources (rather as in Aranya with its shared ladders and stools). The form of the project takes cues from the surrounding urban fabric –​a curiously fragmentary combination of modernist blocks and ad hoc single-​ family dwellings. A ‘long house’ is formed to address the larger-​scale development and also form a coherent new street edge. However, this is carved and punctured along its length in ways that break down the scale and sense of a superstructure. As each element in the carving is part of the creation of distinctive spaces within the block, for Dietmar Feistel, the approach exemplifies an idea of care as “creating room for the individual to make their mark” within the context of a common infrastructure. Housing blocks are one of the most difficult types of building through which to express spatial fluidity. The need to provide security, ensure thermal comfort and reduce energy costs creates challenges regarding the potential to create a sense of porosity between building interiors and the outdoor public realm. A key strategy for achieving a sense of porosity on the ground floor involved punching passageways through the block that freely connect the pavement to the internal gardens. These gardens were, in themselves, envisioned as a series of porous zones including children’s play spaces, food-​g rowing areas, seating and picnic spaces. Subtle borders rather than hard barriers were formed to suggest if not determine the limits of interfaces between these different uses. Tiny playgrounds, for example, are formed not with obvious, standard play equipment set within a fence but with different surfaces and inclines set under shady, tent-​like canopies. Within the main long​house, the circulation space between floors and between all the apartments was formed as a continuous space, running the whole length of the building unbroken on level one and projecting fingers of access to each flat on the other levels from the main vertical circulation cores. Creating this was a challenge given that fire regulations locally require the formation of spatial compartments at set intervals. A clever system of doors that could not only be held open but which were also recessed into the walls allowed this challenge to be overcome. The sense of flow was further cultivated by creating a series of double-​height spaces that link floors visually. Visual links and porous thresholds in turn were aimed at creating possibilities of use for residents to discover for themselves, as well as at conveying a sense that the building is one house as well as many homes. Spatial openness, in other words, becomes key to the flexibility of space and its capacities for adaptation. A sense of openness to different uses and ways of inhabiting the project is created via several different design strategies. First is the incorporation 133

THE CARING CITY

of playful and surprising features throughout the long house, such as the irregular façades, the double-​height spaces in the corridors, the varying width of the circulation spaces and a series of accessible terraces on the upper floors. Such features, Feistel explained, create ambiguities in terms of functionality and, at the same time, offer “many possibilities to use”. Hence, they empower residents by inviting them to “start to think, ‘What’s that?’ ” and by facilitating new configurations and relations of materiality, people and activities that may be novel and distinct. In this assemblage, walls, volumes and materials as well as people are understood as having agency, together shaping both space and events. This, hence, is not conventional participatory design, involving consultation with residents in the design process, but participatory design rather as Cameron Duff (2013: 224) conceptualizes it –​drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of assemblage –​as design that builds from a recognition of the more-​ than-​human ‘society of concrete, bodies and things active in the everyday making of the city’. Second, openness is achieved through the configuration of housing types. An important aim of the project was to enable prospective residents to find a layout suited to their own tastes and circumstances, and to create apartments that could be amenable to many different lifestyles and phases of life. But, it was not, Feistel explained, to “write” a particular vision of community through the designation of housing types. The project is not, for example, as he put it, “an experiment for how can elderly people live together with young ones” (of the sort formed by the Sargfabrik project discussed in Chapter 3). Four main flat types are on offer, though each is manifest in the building in different configurations, with different orientations and proportions (as shown in Figure 6.6). They run from very small, single-​room arrangements (‘plug-​ins’), to studios (Type A or ‘Kompakts’), to two-​to-​three bed flats (Type C or ‘Einliegerwohnungen’). The smallest type is not really a housing unit at all. Rather, it was conceived as either a temporary home for someone in sudden need or as a ‘plug-​in’ room which a family or couple living in the building might acquire to be able to extend their home. This might be for a grandparent, a teenager or adult child. It might otherwise be for a professional care-​provider such as an au pair. Neighbourhoods, Feistel explained, are often characterized by turnover and change, and it is important for designers to recognize this as it can help encourage an understanding of the need for openness to create flexibility for different configurations of community through time as well as to allow for change and transience within individual lives. However, DMAA also sought to make it possible for a person to live in the block across their whole lifecourse should they wish to. Households could expand or contract, for example, by either taking on or letting go of one of the plug-​ins. People could decide to take interest in the 134

Openness and the Unfolding of Care

collective garden. They could move within the building when units became available and as financial circumstances changed. Stairs within the duplex family flats would present a challenge to a frail older person or someone in a wheelchair, but all the other flat types –​and hence all the choices and opportunities for stating a preference and shaping a home –​were designed to be accessible to those with limited mobility. “It’s, somehow, a very relaxed kind of house; it’s not a very strict one where you have to live like this”, Feistel emphasized. The result is a situation in which, according to DMAA’s post-​occupancy analysis, “they’re really living –​elderly people together with young ones –​[even though] it’s not written on the buildings”. The same is apparently true of different ethnic groups. Third, openness is facilitated by the structural strategy adopted for the buildings as well as by the choice of materials for different elements of the structural assemblage. As is common for residential buildings of this sort, Polgarstraβe 30a comprises a relatively fixed infrastructural ‘shell and core’ (Kendall, 2020) and a far more flexible secondary structure. Emphasis was placed on the quality and durability of the frame elements, as these are understood to embody and preserve the investment of the city, the developers and the residents over time. Feistel explained that the practice would have wished to introduce more flexibility through reusable elements, allowing users to reshape the interiors with ease. They could still, however, with the agreement of the housing managers, knock through rooms without a great deal of cost or difficulty and without compromise to the quality of the framework. However, unlike in Aranya, the residents are not private owners but must operate within the constraint of building management regulations. Fourth, and finally, openness is facilitated by endeavouring to move away from ‘machinic’ ideas of living –​strategies that seek to boil everyday life down to rationalized essentials. Though cost-​effectiveness was a key element in the brief, as would be fairly standard for affordable housing efforts were made to create spatial generosity where possible in order to allow residents room to move and breathe as well as to create adaptive capacity and the sort of sense of ownership that Bates el al (2017) view as an important measure of care through design. Thus, in designing the circulation areas, the architects contrived to expand the width where possible beyond the minimum required by the building regulations. As Feistel suggested, the generosity (as well as the spatial openness and ambiguity) means “it’s not only a corridor. When it’s a standard width, it’s only a corridor; but when it’s a little bit wider, you can do something with that”. Another example of generosity can be identified in the balconies that burst forth from the façades of the three buildings towards the gardens. Each is a simple L-​shape formed with concrete and cantilevers out over the landscape below. 135

THE CARING CITY

There is a common assumption and fear among architects that finished design –​that is, particularly design that does not incorporate an explicit element of self-​building, as in Aranya –​is spoiled by occupants’ possessions and clutter. This is reinforced by conventions in architectural photography which, as Mike Christenson (2017) suggests, include the tendency to focus on what is judged to be Architecture (with a capital A), sweeping the ‘mess’ of bicycle sheds and the like out of the frame of view in the process. Here, at the back of the long house, the simplicity of the naked concrete structure, which is not intended to embody all that the balcony can be but rather to initiate a process of becoming, reflects a kind of caring trust that occupants will make the project more rather than less in the process of inhabitation, addition, dressing and adaptation. This is trust in the manner that Annette Baier (1986) defines it, as in trust in someone to do something or to take on a care responsibility. It is trust in people to care for the project through use, appropriation and furnishings. The result of this process is depicted in Figure 6.7, which also captures the first moment of my own encounter with the project in 2019. At that point, I had only seen photographs from before the residents had moved in, when the concrete looked austere, and the building forms seemed abstract and even a little contrived. As indicated here, the dressing of the rear elevation to suit the needs and preferences of occupants included colourful canopies to provide summer shade, supports for plants and screens for privacy. As fragile, frivolous and cheap as many of them are, these additions rely on the durable materiality and space defined by the concrete. These additions concretize, if only for a season, some of its possibilities –​they forge new interdependencies between structure and infill. Figure 6.7: Polgarstrasβe 30a rear façade balconies in use

Source: Juliet Davis

136

Openness and the Unfolding of Care

And though concrete embodies qualities that are the very opposite of diaphanous and mutable, for Fesitel, the project is “like a cloud”. One may discover different shapes within it, shapes which may be thought of as the unfolding of the caringscapes of individuals and collectives through time.

Openness as care In this chapter, I have explored two very different projects. The designers in both cases, however, sought to avoid the sorts of static ideas that characterize so much mainstream housing for demographic categories such as young professionals, families or the elderly. Instead, both projects sought to develop forms of openness in order to create capacities within urban forms and places to address needs, care practices and relations that shift across the lifecourse. These capacities can allow space to be adapted, changed around or, to return to the quote from Balkrishna Doshi at the start of the chapter, allow for “people who are gradually growing and changing their lifestyle” to make their urban environments their own. Showing care through attentiveness to needs that may unfold in the future clearly demands quite different skills than those required in order to address immediate needs. Of course, it is important to remember that design is always involved in the anticipation of needs and ways of life. However, a lifecourse perspective focusses attention not just on particular needs, practices and relations, which might be the focus of a client brief, but on their possible evolution. While, as discussed in the first section of the chapter, some evolutions over the lifecourse can be anticipated, others are particular to individual people and changing circumstances. What is required, and what both case studies show, is an attentiveness that involves the anticipation of such processes as the growing of families, the growing up of children and growing old (Bowlby et al, 2010), yet one that is alert all the while to the contingency and uncertainty of individual and collective trajectories and futures. This must be integrated with a clear sense of how the ‘creative users’ (Hill, 2003) of a given place might be able to (re)shape it over time to suit their changing circumstances, whether simply by using it differently, by refurbishing and redecorating or by, more substantially, adapting and changing it. Accordingly, the skill of the caring designer lies in how effectively different needs and possible journeys are accommodated and how the long-​term and iterative responsiveness of the user is enabled and conditioned by design. The result of such skill could not be seen more clearly than at Aranya, which, as built, is the antithesis of generic (universalized) urbanism: it is an environment that seems to celebrate the quirks and particularities of individuals, their tastes, choices, capacities and aspirations. 137

THE CARING CITY

The strategies embodied by our two cases are, as we have seen, very different. The differences reflect the breadth of the concept of openness as it has developed in design theory. In the first, as we saw, openness is expressed through incompletion and gradual growth, whereas in the second, it aligns with concepts such as generosity and ambiguity. However, the different approaches run deeper than mere choice and theoretical context. As we have seen, they have arisen in different geographical, social and political contexts of both housing provision and care. Through them, indeed, different caringscapes, in Bowlby et al’s (2010) terms, are brought into view. In the design of Aranya, openness was aligned to an idea of the state as enabling individuals to become homeowners able to substantially meet their own needs regarding their homes as infrastructures of care. The result is an approach to city-​making that respects the skills of ordinary people as place-​ shapers while ensuring that access to vital resources such as water are provided. Viewed in the context of cities where so many are cut off from services, this is a remarkable achievement. The processes of building and maintaining have also fostered the development of valuable support networks at the street​, court and community-​levels. And yet, the project also reveals how a model of private ownership can become associated with the production of economic inequalities that can also be readily viewed as inequalities in terms of access to care and of means to care for the fabric of the home. As we saw, not all are equally able to forge ahead and develop their homes. Those residents who are private tenants, furthermore, cannot adapt their homes or benefit from escalating land values either. An ethic of care involving Tronto’s notion of ‘care-with’ as discussed in Chapter 1 comes to be at stake in these contexts. In the second case, openness was aligned to an idea of social housing as substantially funded by the state. There is less scope for transformation, and none for the creation of inheritance assets for children and grandchildren. And yet, there is still significant scope for residents to make choices, change direction, organize homes and neighbourhoods, develop a sense of ownership through creative use and define community from the bottom-​up through the cultivation of shared and semi-​public gardens. What this suggests, therefore, is that openness is not merely a matter of empowerment and bottom-​up (as opposed to top-​down) development, as has often been argued in the past (Sennett, 2007). These notions all too easily align with liberal, market values according to which freedom and autonomy are paramount (Held, 2006). Openness is also a matter of how all those in care relationships receive support in caring at different stages of their lives. We learn from both case studies, then, that for open city design to be caring, it must facilitate change and evolution over time while, at the same time, providing means for users to build stronger and thicker structures of support across households and communities but also involving public services and the State. 138

7

Continuity, Attachment and Care ‘Perhaps the Shard has caused this … this undertow of rebellion, saying, “No, we’re not having this, we’re not having our city ripped apart, our communities ripped apart.” ’ Joanna, Leathermarket JMB, 2018

Introduction These powerful words were spoken as part of an interview in a 2018 documentary called In the Shadow of the Shard, by the filmmaker and writer John Rogers. The film looks at how residents experience development pressure and urban change in a formerly industrial, Central London neighbourhood –​Bermondsey. Traditionally a working-​class, production-​ oriented district of London, Bermondsey lies just to the south of the River Thames, outside of the old twin cities of Westminster and London, urbanizing from the seventeenth century. Though long a peripheral place, since the late twentieth century Bermondsey has been the focus of expansions of the City of London’s office development and recognized as an ‘urban frontier’ of gentrification (Keddie and Tonkiss, 2010). The Shard –​a ninety-​five-​storey, ‘super-​tall’ (Graham, 2014) skyscraper designed by the Italian design practice Renzo Piano Building Workshop and built between 2003 and 2008 over the London Bridge railway station –​is seen in the film as symbolic of the encroachments of the centre, the city, capitalism, iconic architecture, and middle-​class residents on the neighbourhood. Joanna is a long-​term social housing resident. In the interview, she describes some of the ways in which locals not only experience but also endeavour to resist the effects of these encroachments on their homes and communities to which they are attached. The Shard itself may glitter and gleam, but change involving the twin processes of redevelopment and displacement, she suggests, is not renewing, not improving, not leading to a better future for existing residents but is instead “rip[ping] apart” vital, life-​supporting 139

THE CARING CITY

socio-​material fabrics of lived place. These impacts are part of the Shard’s shadow upon the neighbourhood, its history and its future. In the last chapter, we explored how the openness of urban design can shape care relations and practices, contributing to how care is given, received and experienced at different stages of life. Here, drawing on Fisher and Tronto’s (1990) definition of care as a practice of ‘continuing worlds’ of meaning, relationship and attachment, my focus is on conceptualizing the continuity of place-​based relations over time as a form of care through urban design. Thus, I extend the focus established in the last chapter on relationships between design, temporality and care, but through quite a different concept. This chapter begins by exploring the multiple connections established in existing research between the continuities of urban places and place-​ attachment. It goes on to consider how urban design might care for a given place by attending to and fostering existing place-​attachments. The examples used both relate to areas in London under pressure of change. Both encompass large existing tracts of housing along with social infrastructures, commercial spaces, and gardens.1 The first is a development in the area of West Bermondsey in Southwark, where Joanna lives, which is run as social housing by an organization called Leathermarket JMB. This has been the focus of infill development by the firm Bell Phillips Architects aimed at providing new accommodation to cater better to emerging housing needs. The second is a neighbourhood called Central Hill, a few miles to the south in Crystal Palace. Originally designed in the 1970s by Lambeth Borough Council architect Edward Hollamby, it became the focus of a community-​ led struggle against the prospect of discontinuity through demolition in 2014. Designs in both areas have been framed with the desire to organize a change without displacement as well as to identify and reinforce existing ties to place. Both, it will be argued, illustrate an ethic of care through sensitive, participatory design predicated on sustaining emotional ties to place.

Continuity/​discontinuity and place-​attachment It may be tempting to imagine that continuity in the context of architecture and the built environment simply denotes the persistence through time of spaces, structures and materials. But as Juhani Pallasmaa (2009) argues, the continuity of architecture may otherwise be seen as a part of a continuity ‘of lived worlds’ encompassing traditions and cultural activities, and also memories, meanings, perceptions, feelings and values formed in the context of everyday life. This reflects a relational understanding of the built environment akin to Massey’s conception of place as discussed in Chapter 6 according to which, as Pallasmaa puts it, place is not an ‘objective world of matter and facts’ but is rather constructed and maintained through people’s ordinary and continual engagements with it. To the extent, 140

Continuity, Attachment and Care

then, that continuity denotes a sort of persistence through time, it is the persistence of those memories, meanings and so forth as much as of urban and architectural physicality, with these often providing the motivation for practical activities of maintenance and repair (Graham and Thrift, 2007). Accordingly, discontinuity in the built environment is also not just a discontinuity of material forms while life goes on amid the rubble. Rather, it can be considered as the discontinuity of ‘lively infrastructures’ (Amin, 2014) characterized by the interdependencies of materiality and everyday life and by the web of experiences that form among these relations. As numerous studies of discontinuity through demolition, displacement and redevelopment have shown, place-​attachment is a common experience forming in the context of everyday life in place over time, and something that can be brutally servered by urban change (Low and Altman, 1992; Gustafson, 2001; Manzo and Devine-​Wright, 2014). One of the earliest pieces of social scientific research to identify the phenomenon of place-​attachment and show how displacement and discontinuity adversely affect it was Marc Fried’s study of the impacts of urban change in Boston’s West End (1963). The early 1960s of course marked a high point for the comprehensive (or tabula rasa) urban renewal programmes so hated by Jane Jacobs, that characterized the modernist replanning of American cities. Prior to the West End’s redevelopment, Fried identified a widespread feeling of being at home, which was attributed not just to physical aspects of place but to its people and their intertwined everyday lives. When people were displaced against their will, the same research participants reported widespread feelings of loss and grief. This led Fried to the ‘startling realization that [affective experiences of loss and grief] could be extended beyond the death of an individual to the tragic loss of a community or even of a building that symbolized the community’. Such feelings have continued to be identified in contexts of top-​down urban change. As the psychiatrist Mindy Fullilove has shown, the ‘tearing up’ of city neighbourhoods in the US has produced widespread affective experiences of loss and what she terms ‘root shock’ (Fullilove, 1996, 2004). Root shock is defined as an emotional and psychological reaction to being detached from the web of relations that characterize place which typically impacts negatively on wellbeing and mental health (see, for example, Greene et al, 2011). It may be produced suddenly, as Abramson et al (2013) found while working with children and their families in New Orleans following the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina in 2008. There, entire communities were forced out of their homes in a matter of hours, giving them no time to prepare for departure, and no sense of what the future might hold either. Root shock can, alternatively, unfold in stages that correspond to the phases of gradually unfolding processes of urban decline and/or regenerative transformation leading to displacement. Drawing on their analysis of interviews with families that experienced a variety of displacement situations, 141

THE CARING CITY

for example, Greene et al (2011) show how the experience of root shock can begin before a displacement event, in what they call the ‘antecedent stage’, when people first hear that change is on the horizon. This is followed by an ‘unrooting phase’ (during which ties are severed through preparations for relocation), a ‘transition phase’ (during which displacement occurs) and then, finally, a ‘resettlement phase’ in which people endeavour to piece their lives together again. As Paul Watt (2018) shows through his study of people living in temporary accommodation in London, root shock can also become a long-​term experience. Temporary accommodation is an increasingly widespread form of housing provision, arising as a direct consequence of government cuts to housing benefits and to social housing budgets in wake of the 2008 global financial crisis in Britain. The experience of continuous discontinuity or of ‘being out of place’ everywhere all the time is characterized by drawn-​out distress, with those already vulnerable tending to suffer the most. Place-​attachment is often associated with positive, cosy feelings of connectedness and resilience stemming from continuities in the relationships between materiality and everyday life. But as Lynne Manzo argues (Manzo, 2014), it is important to recognize that there is also a ‘shadow side’ to place-​ attachment. This shadow side is characterized by negative feelings that residents experience concurrently with positive aspects of place-​attachment. Negative feelings might stem from awareness of social stigma associated with an area, whether connected to planning departments, media representations or the police. They might stem from issues of access or atmosphere of the kind we discussed in Chapters 4 and 5, or from awareness of urban decline (Mah, 2009). They may stem from ways in which cities become ‘marked by past structures of violence and exclusion’, become ‘wounded’, characterized by painful experiences and affects (Till, 2012). But they may also stem from particular relationship issues within communities –​from invasions of privacy, misunderstandings or encounters with prejudice. Recognizing such ambivalences is important, as Larry Vale (1997) argues, for understanding both how people respond to the prospects of urban change and the politics of urban change. Often, he suggests, people faced with change weigh up positive and negative experiences in deciding whether to support or reject plans. Their choices, hence, reflect the balance of these in their daily experience of place. But development elites often make use of negative feelings to legitimize their proposals for regeneration process, even when these proposals will not necessarily resolve the issues and when they may detrimentally impact on positive place-​based bonds. Recognizing ambivalences or the shadow side of place-​attachment is also important for considering how design and development might intervene in place while sustaining meaningful continuities. 142

Continuity, Attachment and Care

Continuity, care and attachment Urban design has commonly been instrumental to processes of uprooting and ‘wounding’ as I touched on in Chapter 2. These processes are clearly anathema to caring, which in Fisher and Tronto’s terms (1990) as what ‘we do to maintain, continue, and repair our “world” so that we can live in it as well as possible’. Discontinuity in terms of caring relations, indeed, as widely recognized as a problem for people. Repeated changes in the lives of children who are fostered, for example, have been associated with the development of behavioural problems and attachment disorders, whereas constancy in caring environments and relationships has been shown to often (though not always) produce better mental health outcomes (Gauthier et al, 2004). Continuity of care has also been seen as vital to positive experiences and outcomes of formal care for older patients in hospitals (Cornwell et al, 2012). In the context of dynamic and unfolding circumstances and needs, which can induce fear and a sense of uncertainty, continuity provides a level of predictability and security. It can also create the opportunity for relationships to be built which, when positive, may foster interpersonal bonds that have an affective character. The reliable and constant provision of safety and comfort by one person to another underpins the development of attachments and in particular the creation of ‘attachment figures’ (Scannell and Gifford, 2014). While it would be unwise to draw too close a parallel between interpersonal and place-​based attachments, it is nonetheless interesting to note that links between care, continuity and attachment extend over different areas of life. Care is often seen to depend on continuity, and that continuity produces and consolidates attachments. In turn, severed attachments often signify a discontinuity of things and/​or people associated with care, creating new needs for support in order to deal with impacts on wellbeing. In what follows, I consider caring in the context of urban design as a way of sustaining, rebuilding and tending to place-​attachments, and of endeavouring to heal wounds in the process. How, I ask, can design, which is inevitably change-​oriented, attune to ‘the liveliness’ of places as well as to experiences of ‘rootedness’, security and attachment? How can continuity in these terms become a goal for designers and what does this mean for design processes, concepts and projects? In what follows, I address these questions through the two London-​based case studies briefly described in this chapter’s introduction. Research on each focussed on understanding the nature of design strategies and processes employed to avoid traumatic displacements while also improving the affirmative support of housing and responding to place-​based attachments. Leathermarket was explored extensively on foot during two episodes of research between 2018 and 2019. In contrast, researching Central Hill during the first COVID-​19 lockdown in 2020 involved remote communications and much more reliance on drawings, Google Street View 143

THE CARING CITY

and photographs. Research also involved attendance at planning meetings studying digital recordings of planning meetings, and in-​depth interviews with designers, local councillors, housing managers, a developer and, in the case of Leathermarket, members of tenant and resident associations (TRAs).

Continuing Leathermarket through infill urbanism The Leathermarket area of West Bermondsey centres on a historic commercial hub –​the Leather, Hide and Wool Exchange. Here, from 1879 until after the Second World War, the products of Bermondsey’s extensive tanning and leather-​working industry were traded. Much as with the Lea Valley in East London, Bermondsey’s association with tanning stems from its location far from London’s most elite West London neighbourhoods and downriver from the City of London. These were the sorts of places deemed most suitable for noxious, noisy industries and the typically cramped worker housing that grew alongside them. In 1900, Bermondsey was already fully developed, a dense mass of buildings beginning at the wharves along the Thames and extending south as a mix of industry and housing, peppered here and there by churches and their graveyards. Though poor-​quality private housing was the norm, just north of the Exchange, philanthropically motivated housing built by the Guinness Trust was developed in the 1890s to much higher standards. During the first half of the twentieth century, much of the poor-​quality housing was condemned as unfit for human habitation and/​or bombed during the Second World War, leading to extensive redevelopment. Today, the general area of West Bermondsey, south of London Bridge Station, encompasses a series of housing estates that reflect different eras of state-​led rebuilding in the twentieth century. These include cottage developments and mansion blocks that formed part of the housing programme devised and executed by city-level authority, the London County Council (LCC), in the period between the First and Second World Wars. They also include towers produced by the Greater London Council (or GLC, which supplanted the LCC in 1965) as part of its mass housing development drive from the mid-​1960s (Boughton, 2018). Historically, the estates of West Bermondsey were managed by the local authority –​Southwark Borough Council. In 1996, residents from a group of estates in the area (depicted in Figure 7.1) made use of the introduction of new legislation allowing council tenants to form a tenant-​managed organization or TMO to take over the management of their homes, totalling 1,500 properties in all. These comprised a mix of 1,050 social-​rented homes and 450 leaseholds, with the latter reflecting the taking-​up by many council residents of the ‘Right to Buy’ introduced by Prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government in 1980. 144

Continuity, Attachment and Care

Figure 7.1: Leathermarket estates site plan

Source: Juliet Davis

The new organization was named the Leathermarket Joint Management Board (JMB). Residents of the estates voted in favour of the transfer of management responsibilities to the JMB on the premise that this would provide the means to “improve day-​to-​day repairs and estate cleaning services”, seen by many to have been neglected because of the remoteness of the council bureaucracy from the everyday lives and needs of tenants (JMB, 2018: 8). What the JMB offered was a personalized in-​house maintenance service run by people who worked on the estates daily and who might become familiar faces to the residents. The arrangement gave the JMB an annual budget to carry out these works. After 1997, there was also funding related specifically to the incoming Labour government’s Decent Homes programme, and this was key in shaping strategy in terms of improving living conditions across the estates as well as managing and maintaining them by renewing kitchens, bathrooms, heating 145

THE CARING CITY

systems, electricity supplies, fire safety installations and the like.2 The JMB’s retention of their management role would rely on tenants electing them in preference to Southwark Borough Council on a five-​year basis. After managing the estate for eighteen years, in 2013 the JMB’s role was substantially expanded when Southwark Borough Council agreed to devolve the powers to collect and manage rents from the estate directly to it. Hence, rather than being allotted a budget which, as executive manager of the JMB Andy Bates explained, was usually “adjusted downwards”, the organization became self-​financing. This transformed its capacities not only to manage its finances day-​to-​day but also to plan over a longer period, anticipating revenue streams and maintenance issues concurrently. In addition, as the JMB had completed the majority of its Decent Homes compliance work by 2013, it was able to start freeing up income to develop a business plan and a programme of major works. This had implications for the impact that the JMB could have on the estate, and it was in this context that ideas of the potential for incremental, non-​displacing development took root. Tronto argues that ‘purposiveness’ or an awareness and discussion of the ends and purposes of care is a key quality of institutions ‘organised to care well’, whatever the focus of their care might be. Within the JMB, purposiveness revolved around three key themes that are closely intertwined with our themes of continuity and attachment. First, there was a goal to ensure that no decision was taken affecting service provision or transformation that was not resident led. As Andy Bates put it, “Resident participation is absolutely what we are about”. One of the key reasons why this was so important was that many residents in the area carried deeply held suspicions of both state-​led and charitable approaches to welfare. The works of churches and missions of the early twentieth century were “paternalistic, judgmental sorts of handouts, assistance”, one long-term resident and TRA member, John Paul Lynch, explained. Southwark Borough Council were seen to have been remote managers and to have, additionally, become embroiled in controversial redevelopment programmes, most notably of the large Aylesbury and Heygate estates, which in uprooting and dispersing long-​term residents came to be badged as social-​cleansing strategies. In contrast, the JMB’s self-​styled participatory democracy allowed people’s lived experience of the estates, their needs and their attachments to drive the agenda. Bates described this as a relational form of management centred on caring for place. Attitudes in the organization were shaped by the “daftness”, as Martin Green (another JMB manager) put it, of Britain’s Right to Buy legislation, which had served to erode connections to place by reducing the stock of social housing, intensifying patterns of short-​term private rental in the locality, increasing the number of people who were living in temporary accommodation and/​or homeless and leading gradually to the relocation 146

Continuity, Attachment and Care

of Southwark people “to the periphery of London”. These processes were widely construed as forms of harm by members of the JMB. The second dimension of the JMB’s purposiveness stemmed from the awareness of managers of the importance of the security of tenure. “Bear in mind”, Bates said, “that a lot of people get a council tenancy because their life previously has been insecure –​maybe homeless, maybe in the private sector, maybe fleeing violence”. According to a 2018 study, 20 per cent of residents on the estates described themselves as vulnerable, with this status encompassing mental health issues, poverty, physical disability and frailty as a result of old age (JMB, 2018: 19). Many of the elderly residents had lived in council housing for a long time –​some as long as fifty years. Among those, a few were from families that had been rooted in Bermondsey for generations and whose sense of personal history was deeply interwoven with its twentieth-​century urban evolution. Tenure security provided, for some, a lifeline and the means to stay safe and connected to place through memory, routine and community. For others, it was key to being able to begin to recover from the emotional impacts of traumatic life events, including past upheavals. The third dimension of the JMB’s purposiveness related to the adequacy of housing. For the JMB, understandings of this concept went beyond the generic requirements of the Decent Homes programme. Reflecting Tronto’s conception of attentiveness as not taking ‘needs as given’ (Tronto, 2010: 165), managers sought to understand the varied dimensions of housing need and its relationship to existing provision –​including, for example, ongoing maintenance issues associated with particular building fabrics, issues of fit between the existing housing and the needs/​capabilities of vulnerable residents including elderly people and those with mobility issues and the impacts of this phenomenon on housing conditions, mental health, community relations and service use. They found in the process that people’s attachments to the neighbourhood often took precedence over any complaints they might have about housing conditions. This helped to reinforce managers’ commitment to identify ways to improve the area while avoiding displacement. In 2013, at the inception of the major works programme (and the associated business plan), the JMB embarked on a new stock condition survey. The survey was not just an assessment of the existing state of buildings but an assessment of the anticipated longevity of their various systems and building components. It enabled the JMB to project a timeline for carrying out reinstatements of elements of building fabric –​such as bathrooms, kitchens and lighting –​as well as to anticipate cash flow related to these works, thus becoming strategic rather than just responding to maintenance issues when they arose. Thus the survey functioned as a way to ensure the maintenance of ‘order’ in Graham and Thrift’s (2007) terms in the context of housing fabric and finances. It also allowed the JMB to develop a timeline within which other improvements 147

THE CARING CITY

might be made, such as environmentally upgrading or extending buildings, and within which new housing could also be planned, all aimed at delivering ‘the greatest possible good for the local community’ (Leathermarket JMB, 2018). The nature and priority of these improvements were framed through extensive consultations across the estates. The urban design strategy the ensuring major works programme suggested is one which seeks to enhance place through a mix of maintenance/​repair works to continue existing relations between materialities and everyday activities associated with housing and carefully considered infill development to address pressing housing needs. In order to be able to develop new housing within the estates, a new organization was created in 2013: the Leathermarket Community Benefit Society (CBS). As a form of community land trust (CLT), any housing it built would be excluded from the Right to Buy scheme and the CBS would be able to set its own rent levels to ensure that homes were affordable for existing residents. In addition, it would be able to apply for sources of funding from the government for community-​led housing, which was gaining popularity and receiving government endorsement in the wider political context of localism in the UK. This new organization then, became the client for the first piece in the JMB’s emerging urban strategy (which began in the major works programme and gradually evolved into a more ambitious Estate Improvement Plan) –​Marklake Court, designed by Bell Phillips Architects and developed by the regeneration firm Igloo. Opened in 2018, this infill project provided twenty-​seven new homes for social rent, all provided to existing residents in the JMB estates with housing needs that could not be met by their existing living environments. The aim, Bates explained, was to keep local people in their area, avoiding creating experiences of root shock while also ensuring that the design of their homes was suited to their needs. In both of these respects, then, the aim was to enhance connections, including affective attachments, to place. Achieving this involved, in Bates’s own words, “careful attention” to the design of the new building within the existing urban environment in order to ensure it not only fitted in but could be felt to belong to the area. This involved delving into archives to find maps and local history books that explained Leathermarket’s development and evolution. But it also involved engaging residents from across the JMB area to understand their lived experience of history and their complex feelings about the area based on its transformation. The architects led numerous walks around the Leathermarket area with small groups of residents to experience its hybrid character –​a mix of industrial buildings, Victorian warehouses, social housing and a wide array of adaptations and developments that reflect the area’s transformation following deindustrialization, including the Shard. These led to discussion among those that took part about the relationship between the urban character of the area and the nature of their attachments. 148

Continuity, Attachment and Care

As lead architect Hari Phillips explained, one of “the things that was noted was the flimsiness of the late twentieth-​century or twenty-​first-​century buildings –​the render materials that were used, the metal cladding, the board-​type materials … the perception [was] that they didn’t have a sense of permanence, solidity about them”. Recognizing that people who have experienced a lot of urban change might be especially attuned to this aspect of building, Phillips took this as an important cue to design the building “to feel like it’s grounded and it’s going to last a hundred years and it’s not just going to blow away in the wind”. Another key observation made by residents was that, as a result of Bermondsey’s turbulent history, the urban landscape could feel ruptured and fragmented. As Bates put it, “There’s a big feeling that [spatially] there’s no continuity … that each block is almost like a spaceship landing pretty much at random”. This led to a sense that, “from day one, Marklake needed to integrate into the estate”, thereby helping to heal the broken urban fabric. Bell Phillips also identified that there were ambivalent perceptions of place and change in the area, recalling Vale’s (1997) work on such perceptions in the US. Many people they spoke to still remembered Bermondsey from before it was bombed in World War II “and [had] connections with the docks or the food processing that was there”, as Phillips relayed, which were often a source of pride. Yet many also recalled that there was a time of feeling trapped in Bermondsey as industry faded within the bombed-​out landscape after the war. As Lynch, who was a child in the immediate post-​War period, put it to me: “Funny thing is … growing up everyone was like, ‘Oh, you got to move out’ … It was drummed into you, it was, that council housing, there was something wrong with it”. Some residents were also ambivalent about regeneration –​negative about how the sell-​off of council housing since the 1980s and rising property values had served to erode the sense of insular, tight-​knit community, and yet often very positive about the arrival of new resources, amenities and people. As Lynch explained, laughing with the irony, “Now, people [who had left] want to move back in”, and those that had remained did not want to leave. Designers at Bell Phillips were aware that there is a constant danger in the context of design of developing an over-​simplistic understanding of place –​whether as a romanticized working-​class neighbourhood in the context of gentrification and the renewal of industrial buildings or related to, as Phillips put it, “That negative mental image that people have of post-​war housing estates”. Their research led to understandings of the complexity of place as “loaded with memories”, good and bad, happy and painful, of place-​attachment as a tangle of emotions and of the need to tap into that complexity and ambivalence. These understandings helped shape the firm’s approach to the height, massing and materiality of the building. For example, the overall form, which looks like 149

THE CARING CITY

a pair of lozenges in plan and is broadly U-​shaped in the vertical plane, came about, Bates explained, because “people who live in the low-​rise block opposite were really insistent that they kept their view across to the park”. Such claims can be and often are seen as a form of NIMBYism and as annoying distractions for an architect keen to deliver their vision. Here though, Phillips was aware that some neighbours were vociferous and that residents would expect to have their voices heard, so the decision was taken to regard their claims as valid. In turn, the façade material of choice, brick (shown in Figure 7.2a and 7.2b), allowed the building to relate to both industrial buildings in the area as well as to much of the council housing, while also giving the building a human scale and a feeling of weightiness, durability and security that participants had sensed to be missing in the glass and steel materiality of the Shard. The use of a single façade material was key to keeping the costs of the building down while at the same time achieving a level of quality that should help the JMB keep maintenance costs low in the future and thus help the organization, as Bates put it “care for place”. Figure 7.2a: Marklake Court brick façade at ground level

Source: Kilian O’Sullivan

150

Continuity, Attachment and Care

Figure 7.2b: Marklake Court brick details

Source: Bell Phillips Architects

Attending to people’s sense of home and endeavouring to mitigate any experience of loss and uprooting for those moving into Marklake involved an extensive participatory design process involving the tailoring of each flat to the specific residents and their needs –​“a genuine listening exercise”, as Phillips put it. Place-​ attachment has to do with ‘outward aspects of place’ (Seamon, 2014) –​streets, parks and other elements of public infrastructure. But it also has to do with interiority –​the condition, character, fitness for purpose and sense of belonging afforded by the home. The process was established to ensure a good fit (Lynch, 1981) of fabric to needs, but also to signal to the future residents that the building really was for them and to cultivate a sense of belonging before they had even moved in, reminiscent in these terms of the Sargfabrik project we explored in Chapter 3. The result was, as Phillips described it, that “we were given, unusually for us, a very specific brief. So usually, we get a planning policy or whatever. In this case, we had a jigsaw puzzle of complex flats to try and work on”. Achieving this in the context of the planning process was not without difficulty. Customization, Bates explained, “was anathema” to some of those co-​opted onto the client team in the CBS board and in the local planning authority. The outcome of negotiation was an agreement that, while all flats could be bespoke, none should, as Igloo’s Chris Brown put it, “actually be incapable of use by other people”. There was also a need to ensure parity in terms of construction costs across flats. In order to achieve this, the architects endeavoured to whittle down the diversity of ideas into a range of options for layouts –​including open versus closed kitchens, and wet rooms versus showers and baths –​surfaces, materials and colours that broadly met the CBS budget while also satisfying residents. The result was a kind of pattern book of possibilities. 151

THE CARING CITY

Figure 7.3: Marklake Court in the context of the wider estate

Source: Juliet Davis and Tanvi Jain

In discussions which continued through the construction process, residents were able Bates said, to “see their homes emerging … and get to know [them]”, ensuring that the move would feel like a creative, home-​making, ownership-​ building process. To allay feelings of fear at the prospect of moving, the JMB provided assistance to residents to prepare packing lists, pack belongings and plan for where things would go in the new flats. As Bates put it, “There’s an assumption in council housing that people will be completely self-​sufficient and will move themselves [but in fact] it’s really intimidating”. Care, he suggested, must run through every aspect of the development, design and inhabitation process to ensure it is experienced as such –​as continuous and conducive to the maintenance and reinforcement of attachments. Though I did not have the opportunity to interview many of Marklake Court’s new residents about their experiences of this, one illustration of the significance of the approach was given by a TRA member who had helped people move. As she put it: ‘One couple, they’ve been living on the JMB for so many years, as long as I’ve been here [twenty-​eight years]. [rg] the wife cannot –​they lived in a maisonette –​make the stairs. The husband is getting on as well, so can’t carry her as he used to. When they go into Marklake, you know the first thing she said? For the past thirteen years, she’s never had a bath because she couldn’t get into the bath in the flat. [But here] there is a wet room, there’s everything on the level and she’s on the ground floor. When she saw it, she cried, and tears came to my eyes as well.’ 152

Continuity, Attachment and Care

The account resonates with the notion of responsiveness in care ethics as a positive reaction and experience that corresponds with the processes and competencies involved in taking care, but it also shows how, in the right circumstances, new buildings can repair damaged relations between people and places (and, indeed, repair fractured urban fabrics as indicated in Figure 7.3). At the broader level of the local community, Bates explained the importance of the building in “making [the residents] incredibly proud of what they have done” and emboldening them to persist in fighting to remain in Bermondsey. Care for place, it seemed, was not only predicated on preserving place-​ based relationships and feelings of affiliation but also on building a sense of rights –​rights to contribute to place making, as in Henri Lefebvre’s concept of the ‘right to the city’. For Phillips, the project was an exemplar of what sustainable urbanism should both involve and forge. As he put it, “If you can build a building that a community loves, feels ownership over, wants to cherish, take care of, welcome into its community, then that’s got to be positive –​the most sustainable thing that you can do”. It is clear that it is a sense of love and a sense of rights combined that, together, shake Joanna’s voice as she speaks the words in the quote at the start of this c­ hapter –​that “we’re not having our city ripped apart, our communities ripped apart” –​and which this project set out to protect as vital to her and other residents’ wellbeing. Since 2018, the JMB has built on the approach developed at Marklake Court, producing its Estate Improvement Plan with the involvement of Bell Phillips for adaptation, enhanced environmental performance and infill development across the estates. At the time of writing, the aim continued to to be to enhance housing conditions and respond to emerging housing needs while avoiding, as Phillips explained, erasing any important places or “displacing anyone from there [as] that’s really, really important to them”.

Design as opposition to demolition of Central Hill estate Awareness of the potential harmful impacts created by impending discontinuity and ideas of what care for established and meaningful relationships between people and place might otherwise entail have also shaped urban design processes related to the Central Hill estate in Crystal Palace. These have been led by Architects for Social Housing (ASH), an organization founded in March 2015 by architect Geraldine Dening and writer Simon Elmer ‘in order to respond architecturally to London’s housing “crisis” ’ (Architects for Social Housing [ASH], 2015). ASH has been heavily critical of both the rhetoric and the strategies underpinning the regeneration of countless social housing estates across London through demolition and the displacement of existing residents (see, for example, ASH, 2017). Since its foundation, 153

THE CARING CITY

it has undertaken substantial research to understand the history of estate regeneration and its legislative contexts since 1999, revealing this as far more insidious and complex than is often portrayed let alone officially claimed. ASH has also challenged the ethics of architectural practice at a national level, drawing attention to the complicity of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA)3 and of many architects in the production of ‘devastating consequences’ for working-​class Londoners unable to afford market rents through estate regeneration (ASH, 2016). In what follows, I show how this position corresponds to rigorous efforts to demonstrate, through a design alternative to demolition, the economic viability of refurbishing, maintaining and increasing the housing capacity of the Central Hill estate, and how in turn this can be interpreted as care for place. The design and development of the Central Hill estate, as with many of the buildings in the Leathermarket area, emerged at a time when urban design and architecture were practices performed in the public sector, in the architects’ departments of local-​and city-​level authorities in London, often with implications for the political and moral values which they came to embody through housing projects. The estate was designed and developed later than most of the Bermondsey housing, by Lambeth Borough Council’s Department of Architecture and Planning between 1970 and 1974, then under the leadership of the socialist architect Edward (Ted) Hollamby (Boughton, 2018: loc 2078–​91). The project architect for the scheme of 476 homes was the town planner and architect Rosemary Stjernstedt, who was a renowned practitioner for her contribution to the Alton East part of the vast Roehampton Estate developed by the LCC following shortly after the end of the Second World War. Hollamby joined Lambeth in 1963 as an architect already experienced in the design of social infrastructures, including public housing, having served in the architects’ department of the Miners’ Welfare Commission and the LBC previously. In common with other architects of the period adopting a humanist approach to modern architecture, he saw architecture as a social art aimed at ‘serving the needs of town dwellers’ and building communities (Rawstorne and Hollamby, 1965). By the time Central Hill was on the drawing board, some of Britain’s contemporary architects, including Hollamby, were beginning to move away from the pattern of large-​scale housing projects including point towers that had characterized inner-​city social housing development in the 1950s and ’60s. Hollamby, was interested in the potential to create high-​density development with compact, low-​r ise buildings. This interest became reflected in a number of schemes, including Central Hill and Cressingham Gardens Estate. In Central Hill, it resulted in an urban design strategy involving an arrangement of short, low-​r ise blocks that run along the contours of a steeply sloped site leading, as Rowan Moore puts it 154

Continuity, Attachment and Care

(Moore, 2016), to the formation of ‘quiet enclaves in the spaces between … buildings’. Via a series of pedestrian routes which offer vistas through the estate and access to buildings, the development was made permeable by its surroundings. The residential blocks comprise a mix of two-​storey terraced houses and three-​to-​four-​storey blocks that exploit the slope of the site to create a staggered section, with entrances to interlocking flats at different levels and generous, sunny roof terraces. Central Hill was labelled in 2014 as a potential area of regeneration by the local authority of the London Borough of Lambeth. Lambeth Borough Council set about developing a case for this, with a date of June 2015 identified for confirming it. Part of the process involved the appointment by the council in December 2014 of a design firm called PRP Architects to produce a masterplan. Revealingly, the masterplan was predicated from the start on the principle of comprehensive demolition and redevelopment, though residents had not had the opportunity prior to the appointment to offer their perspectives on the qualities of the existing buildings and community. A housing ​needs survey produced by private consultants on behalf of the council in May 2015 provided a series of questions that seemed to imply that residents’ needs and living conditions were of primary concern to the Council but which gave little sense of what it was planning and, therefore, the contexts in which these needs would be interpreted. However, the concern these actions prompted, as Dening explained, were sufficient to mobilize a group of residents to form a campaign organization called Save Central Hill as well as to seek out and make contact with ASH in April of 2015. The group was particularly incensed when, in February 2015, PRP posted a picture of the estate taken at night on its Twitter feed along with a clearly hastily written caption reading: ‘Consultation in South London. Would you walk this alleyway [?]‌’ It seemed designed to portray the estate as threatening, dangerous and empty, a far cry from the new ‘mixed community’ that PRP would supposedly create. For ASH, the clumsy post drew attention to the power of flat representations of existing places in the social construction of justifications for their erasure, reflecting the UK national government’s broader tendency to depict crime and anti-​social behaviour through the imagery of modernist social housing as a wasteland. In response, ASH helped residents to organize and promote a London-​ wide event which was designed to challenge the widely held but inaccurate perception of council estates as ‘concrete jungles’ that had been used to justify David Cameron’s plans to ‘blitz’ one hundred so-​called ‘sink estates’. This Open Garden Estates event created an opportunity for residents to represent their local environment for themselves through tours offered to visitors of the estate’s landscape. Over a weekend of tours, visitors were able to explore individual gardens, communal gardens and green spaces. Residents also staged 155

THE CARING CITY

barbeques, seed-​planting and gardening activities with hand painting and banner making, and there was a puppet show that dramatized the politics of estate regeneration. What ASH and the residents sought to show through the event was not only the fact that much of the Central Hill estate was not concrete but actually green, but also that a “relationship of care” as Dening put it, existed between residents, their homes and gardens. This was a relationship that had often developed over many years of life on the estate, leading to the personalization of space, its gradual evolution and the maturing of the landscape. Hence, visitors were able to form a very different impression of the estate to that which PRP, the government and many others involved in regeneration sought to convey. In the process, they were invited to become conscious of the lack of engagement and experience with estates that snapshot images such as PRP’s convey, recognizing them for what they are –​“careless misrepresentations”, as Dening put it, that deliberately ignore the complexity of the place as lived, reproducing old habits of judging poor people. In turn, as ASH’s publicity materials set out, they were called upon to help ‘banish the myth of council estates as concrete jungles’.4 Following the success of the weekend in 2015, an annual Open Garden Estates weekend was held on the estate over two subsequent years. Independently of the first Open Garden Estates event, Simon Elmer also assembled a series of photographs of the estate taken on numerous occasions when he was visiting residents there. These showed the buildings and gardens drenched in sunlight, full of life and clearly being enjoyed and cared for by older and younger members of the community. They were published by ASH as a set in February 2016. Each was captioned, as Elmer explained in a talk which he gave at the Braunschweig University of Technology (ASH, 2018), with “stereotypical statements made by the government, mayor, councils, developers, journalists and architects as part of the propaganda that is crucial to winning public acceptance for estate regeneration programmes” in order to expose the divisive nature of such statements and demonstrate the potential for a very different view. From April 2015, ASH also began to meet regularly with residents from the estate to understand their own ideas and priorities for the future of the estate. They held numerous workshops at which they were able to get to know the estate. Residents provided tours of the buildings, so they were able to understand the different ways in which flats were configured, how they aligned with different housing needs and how they had been maintained over the years. As Dening put it, creating space for residents to demonstrate to an architect their expertise as inhabitants “really makes you realise that these are people’s homes; they are not just units of investment” (Figure 7.4). Echoing the descriptions of Sevenhuijsen (2014) of the qualities of attentiveness, Dening explained that understanding properly how homes 156

Continuity, Attachment and Care

and neighbourhoods are constituted takes time, beginning with letting go of preformed assumptions about how a space should work or look. In turn, the act of showing the estate to newcomers seemed to help remind residents, who she found to be often battered by harsh judgements of their circumstances and all too conscious of maintenance issues on the estate, of what they care about in it. Neither she nor Elmer seemed keen to view this process of engagement as a kind of empowerment, believing that this language often conforms to a paternalistic and class-​based attitude often coupled with the erosion of public services which they fought hard to avoid. For a similar reason, they did not wish to be seen as caring directly for people on the estate through their work. Rather, the goal as they conveyed it to me, and as I have interpreted it, was to draw out and express what residents cared about, the values they associated with continuity and what they felt they needed, these becoming the priorities for their design project, underpinning its objectives. As Elmer describes it (2018), it reflects a responsive model of consultation that works in the opposite direction to mainstream consultations related to the regeneration of London’s estates: “A process that moves from the inside to the outside –​from the community to a genuine estate regeneration that works for the benefit and continuation of the existing community.” As care, then, it is care for others’ cares, materializing as care through design that supports the continuity of an existing place. A key value of continuity for residents on the estate would be the chance to preserve long-​established social ties, given that the estate included a significant number of individuals who had lived on it since its construction. As one resident of forty-​two years put it at a Save Central Hill gathering, these included ‘rich and rewarding friendships’ that were key in promoting feelings of safety as well as the sense of a living in a supportive environment. Another value of continuity would be the preservation of a sense of orientation within the built environment. For older people in particular, the estate was imbued with memories which its ongoing presence in the world helped to recall. For one blind resident, knowing the estate was vital to his capacity to take care of himself –​without its familiar paths and surfaces, he would be lost. As Pete Elliott, a local Green Party ward councillor who was against demolition, explained to me in interview, familiarity and orientation for vulnerable people are about far more than just being able to find your way around; they provide, rather like constant human carers, vital forms of reassurance and constancy when dealing with difficult personal circumstances. In contrast, uncertainty and the prospect of discontinuity led rapidly to an escalation of mental health issues. Across the estate, as people’s hopes for continuity waned, their wellbeing deteriorated. Some people started smoking again having not done so for years; others were prescribed antidepressants in response to panic attacks, insomnia and anxiety. More designers, Elliott 157

THE CARING CITY

argued, should be alert to these sorts of impacts; design is playing a direct role in the production of the UK’s care crisis. A final, and most important, value of continuity for tenants and leaseholders is the avoidance of the loss of secure homes set at affordable social rents. Such a loss, after all, would mean being forced into temporary housing or being made homeless, possibly relocated outside the borough, and being unable to afford to return to the new, far less affordable properties at Central Hill on their completion. By November 2015, ASH had drawn up their scheme, taking the form of alternative design proposals to those produced by PRP (ASH, 2018). These were not just presented as rejection of demolition but as the means to ensure the refurbishment of the existing homes up to the Decent Homes Standard and to increase the housing capacity of the estate. They also reflected, importantly, a rejection of the notion of the masterplan with its historic connotations of erasure and top-​down rationalistic planning as a means to realize regeneration through urban design. Through rigorous costing analysis and an evaluation of the environmental impact of development, ASH was later able to demonstrate, as Dening put it, that it was “more environmentally and financially viable to do our scheme”; it was a climate-​friendly alternative as well as a financially and socially sustainable one. Given that residents had not been given any choices apart from either accepting that their homes would be demolished or living in an increasingly unmaintained environment, ASH’s alternative scheme offered something for residents to get behind, to actively choose as a future. It was crucial, as refurbishment and infill were the only ways to avoid major disruption to people’s lives, the break-​up of the community and the possibility of making vulnerable people more vulnerable by destroying their homes. Having choice, indeed, became an increasingly important theme for Save Central Hill and a cornerstone of its campaign in 2015–​16. The key urban design concepts that express ASH’s alternative proposals are refurbishment/​repair, reuse, extension and infill. Maintenance and repair issues are often presented in regeneration cases as insurmountable or as challenges unique to buildings slated for redevelopment, tarnishing the reputation of ostensibly impractical, poorly formed modernist architecture. In turn, as Crosby and Adams Stein (2020) argue, repair ‘has often been understood as the unfashionable antithesis to design’. For ASH, maintenance and repair were key to realizing sustainable regeneration and avoiding the displacement of residents. Drawing on residents’ knowledge as well as their own observations, ASH was able to reveal a family of maintenance issues which would be common among buildings constructed prior to the 1984 Building Act in the UK when requirements regarding environmental performance through the ‘conservation of fuel and power’ first came into force. These are challenges for which solutions are readily available (and 158

Continuity, Attachment and Care

for which ASH devised specific solutions) without resorting to demolition of a single existing home. Mould and condensation issues, for example, could be addressed through ventilation, double glazing and the installation of insulation, particularly at the locations of structural cold bridges which encourage water vapour to condense on surfaces. These strategies would also help address issues of thermal comfort and reduce energy bills, key issues for older residents and those on low incomes. Roofs and floors could be replaced across the estate. That the infrastructural fabrics would need to be cared for in these ways, ASH argued, should only be expected given wear and tear, weathering and corrosion after nearly fifty years. In other words, it might have been anticipated better –​perhaps through the sort of major works strategy developed by the Leathermarket JMB. Reuse took the form of strategies for repurposing obsolete elements such as the old boiler house to generate new housing units. The potential for extensions was identified through analysis of building structures (supported by a study by Arup who were the engineers of the original estate) as well as through the close observation of how buildings were lived in. Structural analysis suggested that many buildings could be extended up by a floor, allowing additional flats to be provided for those in need of housing in the borough while also allowing repair issues associated with flat roofs to be addressed. The observation work revealed, in turn, that, while some spaces in buildings were intensively used and even under excessive pressure, others were vacant. Living areas in flats, for example, which were heavily used, could be extended onto underused terraces, creating more generous interiors (Figure 7.5). Lastly, sites of possible infill development were identified, as Dening put it, by both “spending time looking very carefully at what was already there” and “carefully understanding the design decisions that were made” by the original designers, with care clearly denoting here both the quality of the observation and the sheer amount of time dedicated to the work. Infill was proposed along the street edges, addressing the common issue of modernist residential buildings that they stage a retreat from streets and the ground in general (Figure 7.4). Infill, hence, was used to repair the street edge by inserting a new layer of building beside the blocks that currently show their backs to it, responding to the older terraced housing and twentieth-​century ‘semis’ surrounding the estate. Without demolishing a single home or displacing anyone, up to 242 new homes could be created, ASH demonstrated, through this approach of caring for the existing buildings and the values of continuity for residents. While the council’s various options all resulted in a mass loss of homes for social rent, half the new flats ASH proposed would be for social rent. Thus, as Elmer explained, care also meant working with the financial ability of existing residents to afford their rent or mortgage and creating new units that would address the wider housing crisis. Throughout the course of 2016, 159

newgenrtpdf

Figure 7.4: Overview of Central Hill estate from the south

THE CARING CITY

160 Source: ASH

Continuity, Attachment and Care

Figure 7.5: Visualization showing proposed roof extensions to low-​r ise maisonettes

Source: ASH

the participatory design process served to deepen relationships between designers and residents, building trust and, at least for a time, energizing Save Central Hill (shown in Figure 7.6). However, this trust was fragile given that, throughout the process of developing the alternative scheme, the official redevelopment plans continued to advance. Uncertainty, Pete Elliott explained, “just grinds people down”, removing the capacity to hope, fight or, in fact, trust. Many residents were also afraid that resettlement options would be foreclosed if they were perceived as troublemakers. By the end of 2016, it seemed clear that the official scheme had triumphed and ASH’s vision of a new ‘socialist architecture’ had been cast aside. Of course, this was not really the case as the project gave residents of the estate, as well as residents of many others, a strong sense of there being an alternative to demolition. At a Lambeth Borough Council cabinet meeting in March 2017, the plan to redevelop the estate –​based on PRP’s masterplan and a set of ‘Key Guarantees’ that the council had devised to reassure both tenants and leaseholders regarding their rights –​was officially approved. A number of residents from Central Hill estate and two other Lambeth estates that were also the focus of regeneration plans raised objections and concerns at the meeting however. Emerging from their testimonies were common experiences of feeling coerced to leave rather than being given choice and of being sold a poorer deal in terms of tenure security. There was a lack of emphasis on “what we need”, as one resident put it. There was “no moral compass in their mechanisms”, said another, referring to the council. The final speaker, who identified herself as a sufferer of bipolar disorder and who spoke eloquently about the health and wellbeing impacts 161

THE CARING CITY

Figure 7.6: Save Central Hill campaigners outside the estate

Source: ASH

of uncertainty and discontinuity, concluded: “Our elected representatives don’t care enough about us to actually give us the support we need … to look after our wellbeing.” In different ways, these residents sought to appeal to the humanity of decision makers by exposing their vulnerabilities, their anguish and their need for secure infrastructures of care. Seven years after Central Hill estate was identified for demolition it is still standing at the time of writing in 2020–​2021. A surprising turn of events was that the PRP masterplan was finally dropped in 2018 as it was found to be structurally (and financially) unviable given challenging ground conditions which it seems that neither PRP nor the council were aware of (though ASH was). There was thus no longer a masterplan in place to guide the process towards the future at all, just the devastation that ensues from devaluation and uncertainty. Remaining residents’ sense of attachment to the area had been further eroded in this context. There had been a process of ‘managed decline’ whereby entropic, disordering processes (Graham and Thrift, 2007) had been allowed to progress, so reflecting the wider breakdown of social housing in London. As Elliott put it, “They’re not clearing gutters, they’re not doing drains, they’re not inspecting, so gradually things just start falling apart”. Leaseholders were alleged to have been persuaded to leave with generous buyouts, and their vacated homes were now “just units”, conveying for Elliott the sense of a community come loose of its moorings. The break-​up of the established community had also been hastened by the movement of people in temporary accommodation into flats vacated by council tenants. These were people who, as Elliott put it, have had “years in real substandard accommodation and then 162

Continuity, Attachment and Care

they’ve moved them onto an estate that’s due to be demolished, where you’ve got this general malaise and where they don’t feel any sense of community”. Many residents still on the estate in 2020 knew they would either not be able to wait or perhaps not live to see new homes built on the site, sometime between 2025 and 2040 according to official estimates. They feared too that, even were they to wait, they would not be able to afford them, though Lambeth had promised to protect the tenure category of council-​level rents. As all these processes interweave, they achieve the opposite of care practices such as maintenance and repair with their emphasis on the continuity of a lively infrastructure. They cultivate the shadow side of place-​attachment as discussed by Manzo (2014), creating a sense of entrapment in an unhomely, stigmatized environment, one which people may fear to leave and yet also deeply fear to become enveloped by. For Dening, this situation and these outcomes for residents exemplified a combination of carelessness and un-​care. The former was evident in the council’s pursuit of the unviable, costly PRP plan, neglecting to discover its flaws. The latter may be identified in those bureaucratic processes that, however diligently they adhere to established procedure, fail to consider the emotional impacts of discontinuity voiced by residents as sufficiently significant to cause them to change tack. Uncare could be discerned in the misrepresentation of residents’ needs and desires regarding the demolition of the estate. Regardless of how the mechanism works in detail, it is also clearly evident in the process of decline, in the withdrawal of maintenance services from a piece of the living city. ASH’s repair-​and-​extend scheme offers a sense of what an alternative to destructive regeneration process from the perspectives of existing residents might be. For it to go ahead, however, many enabling contexts would need to be in place, from political will to urban policies and practice guides, to economic models, to governance arrangements. Architecture, as Ted Hollamby himself wrote, ‘starkly mirrors the society it serves and which creates it’, and thus, for the continuities and caring that ASH suggests to be realized, all these complex aspects of the development process need to come together, unified by the same sense of concern.

Caring continuity Our two case studies in this chapter have shown how continuity can be interpreted as a kind of care through urban design. In neither case is this care focussed on protecting buildings in isolation or in some sort of time-​frozen state as in conservation. Rather, it is continuity in the sense of established yet dynamic relations between places and their inhabitants. In both cases, effort to enable continuity can be seen to reflect a care for place in Jonathan Metzger’s (2014: 1002) terms, as action to sustain or mend ‘complex 163

THE CARING CITY

compounds of entangled subject-​object relations and often friction-​r idden nexuses of strong attachments’. In both cases, design processes and strategies reflect an ethic of care that begins by taking seriously and caring about the relations, stories, memories and feelings of affiliation that that local people form in place. Both draw attention to the importance of seeing and hearing rather than engaging in hasty assessments of work required or relying on fixed, predetermined ideas of what the solution to the problem might be. In their different ways, they illustrate the time and labour necessary for seeing and hearing effectively, recalling Puig de la Bellacasa’s (2015) arguments about how the need for time in care often runs against the values of efficiency and speed that are so strongly prized in the context of capitalism. Caring, in turn, is reflected in strategies of maintenance, repair, incrementalism and subtle adjustment aimed at enhancing and thickening attachments, addressing perceptions of stigmas, reinforcing the things that people themselves care about, and keeping social housing in working, liveable order. These are strategies that align with Jackson’s (2014) concept of repair as a process by which ‘bridges from an old world to new world are built, and the continuity of order, value, and meaning gets woven, one tenuous thread at a time’ into the future. In both cases, accounts of trust building in those developing the design strategies seemed to indicate a positive experience of the projects as caring. For Geraldine Dening, feeling trusted was especially significant as, in her experience, a lack of trust often characterizes local, working-​class people’s responses to London’s social housing estate-​regeneration programmes, feeding into experiences of being uncared for. Hence, transforming perceptions of regeneration was, for her, fundamentally about recultivating or repairing trust, recalling Walker’s (2006) concept of ‘moral repair’ after wrongdoing. Of course, not everyone reading this will agree that these projects embody care, or that other regeneration projects in London’s landscape are untrustworthy and uncaring. This is beside the point, however. The point of this analysis has been simply to show that urban design, so often shaped by objectives and logics which exclude or belittle experiences of connection to place from local people’s perspectives, can, alternatively, prioritize them, such that lived places can continue to be and become a source, to use Yi Fu Tuan’s words (Tuan, 1974), ‘of assurance and pleasure [containing] objects of profound attachment and love’. Such urban design is of the essence in a caring city.

164

8

Urban Design as Tending Futures ‘There’s this famous saying that rivers are the birthplace for civilizations and civilization is the graveyard for rivers. So that is not something that we can live with. We can’t become the graveyard for rivers and water.’ S. Vishwanath, Biome, Interview, Bengaluru 2020

Introduction Throughout this book thus far, I have focussed on ways of thinking about the role of urban design in shaping everyday and unfolding care practices and relations, albeit ones that stretch and transform through time. In this chapter, in contrast, I wish to consider how urban design might be thought of in relation to care in a somewhat different sense –​as care for the world that future generations will inhabit. Thinking of urban design in terms of, or as, care, as I have shown throughout the book, always requires an understanding of the potential for care to extend beyond settings of face-​to-​face encounter and practice. This is because design-​as-​built continues to shape needs, practices and relations well beyond the timeframes of design. It is also because, in a related way, the people who shape a given place when it first emerges are not necessarily the same as those that do so later, and these groups may, in addition, never meet. Thinking of care in the context of design, therefore, requires a different framing of the nature of care relations to that developed by early care ethicists such as Nel Noddings (1984) and Diemut Bubeck (1995), for whom face-​to-​face encounter and exchange was paramount. As I began to suggest in Chapter 1, it requires a framing akin to that developed by Engster (2015) and Sevenhuijsen (2003), for whom care can also be performed for and with others in non-​face-​to-​face contexts such as through social care policy. However, thinking of design as care for future generations poses a particular challenge given that it requires an anticipation of needs that lie well 165

THE CARING CITY

beyond the present, needs that may be substantially shaped by actions and decisions that those living on planet earth today take. Those future people, in addition, are not only not in the world now to express their needs but, in the future, will have no means of giving feedback on the quality of care that their ancestors demonstrated for the environmental contexts of their lives. In this chapter, my focus will be on practices of design that tend to the future by taking care in the present of fragile resources –​including water, soils, air and land –​and environments upon which the wellbeing and even life of future generations will rely. These are resources and environments, hence, that connect present and future generations materially, yet which human kind now is drastically shaping (Adam and Groves, 2007). Urgency around the development of such practices is widely recognized. The pace at which resources such as water and forests are exploited is exceeding the pace at which they can regenerate. In turn, the pace at which the waste products of consumption are discharged into environments –​the air, water and soil –​also vastly exceeds capacities for their absorption. Cities, of course, are a key focus for our hedonistic consumption and waste practices (Pickett et al, 2013; Rawes, 2013; Thompson and Newman, 2018). Dire warnings abound regarding the consequences of allowing these consumption and waste-producing processes to proceed unchecked, including catastrophic impacts on landscapes, weather systems and biodiversity extending as far as millions of years into the future (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2015, 2017). The quote above by the Indian planner and architect S. Vishwanath constitutes just such a warning. His concern is with how the rivers of India, which were so vital to the birth of cities, are dying because of overuse and exploitation. It is a warning that pertains not only to the lives and futures of people living on earth now but also to those of future generations as yet unborn, for whom the arid regions of the Indian subcontinent may become unliveable. As Puig de la Bellacasa argues, awareness of these sorts of futures creates the need for a ‘speculative commitment to think about how things could be different’, and for ‘situated and positioned visions of what a liveable and caring world could be’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017: 60). It creates the need for a perspective of caring for the future. As in previous chapters of this book, I focus my analysis on two case studies which each offer ways of thinking about design as care for the future in the visionary sense that Puig de la Bellacasa suggests. These cases are located in very different corners of the world, within different landscapes and climates, and are, as such, not comparable in those terms. They are also quite different examples of urban design practice. The first consists of a pair of related non-​profit projects aimed at reshaping mainstream planning policy and development practices. The second is a commission by a private energy/​housing company. The first, carried out by S. Vishwanath’s practice Biome Environmental Solutions, is set in the city of Bengaluru in India and involves the restoration of water management infrastructures to revitalize groundwater reserves. The second is a housing 166

Urban Design as Tending Futures

project in South Wales in the UK by Cardiff-based architects Loyn and Co. Where they are comparable, however, is in terms of how they develop strategies related to the consumption of resources encompassing visions of what a future made through the care of these resources might offer and entail. They are both small projects but, as I will show, each carries implications for urban design at a far larger scale. Both were researched during the context of COVID-​19 lockdowns in 2020. The first case study relied on Tanvi Jain’s presence in India as researcher on the ground and as an expert on water-​storage infrastructures and architectures. The second was in theory easier for me to access in Wales but in reality impossible to reach for much of the year. Both, however, relied heavily on digital communications for interviews and sharing research materials that formed part of the analysis, as on satellite imagery, photography, drawings, reports and other such means of getting a sense of landscape and place from afar.

Introducing the case studies S. Vishwanath, lead designer of our first case study has been involved in citizen-​ led projects around water security and water management since 1990 when he founded a Rainwater Club to share knowledge on best practices for rainwater harvesting and other environmental water-​management strategies such as water recycling and ecological sanitation.1 In 1995, the activities of this club were fused with the architectural practice of his partner Chitra Vishwanath to form Biome Environmental Solutions. Over the past twenty-five years, Biome has become known for a distinctive, cross-​disciplinary approach to design practice integrating water management, ecological sanitation, energy efficiency and place-​making at different scales. Though it carries out commercial design projects on behalf of diverse clients, it also undertakes research activities, design-​based activism and non-​profit projects under the aegis of its philanthropic arm, the Biome Environmental Trust, which is maintained by the proceeds of the commercial practice. The two initiatives that come under our first case study, the Million Wells project and Lake Jakkur, are examples of such projects. India, of course, offers many historical examples of architecture designed as part of water-​management strategies. These include elaborate subterranean water structures like stepwells, stepped ponds and tanks found across the subcontinent. Designed and constructed from as early as 200 CE, these structures provided a continuous supply of water in spite of seasonal fluctuations in rain levels by tapping into groundwater reserves and storing harvested rainwater. Their designs often reflect not only the importance of water for human survival but also how water infrastructure was historically deeply intertwined with the social rhythms and ritualistic routines of communities, contributing to a wider culture of collective reverence and care towards water (Jain et al, 2020). The Million Wells project sprang from the realization that water scarcity in contemporary Indian cities had emerged at the intersection of urban growth, 167

THE CARING CITY

Figure 8.1: A cleaned and revived well, part of the Million Wells initiative

Source: Biome

climate change and unsustainable water-​extraction and management practices. In response, the initiative, which launched in 2018, sought to offer a solution by reviving open wells across the city (such as the one depicted in Figure 8.1) and digging ‘recharge wells’ to replenish groundwater. Rebuilding a relationship with aquifers has become a primary goal of water-​sensitive urban design for cities facing water shortages worldwide (Lerner, 1990; Wong, 2006). In this case, understandings of water-​sensitive design draw on water management strategies from the region’s past. As Vishwanath explained, the initiative’s catchy title derived from a calculation of what might be required for the city to generate and manage its own water supply. As he put it: ‘There are two million houses in Bangalore. If every other house digs a well –​a recharge well –​then you get one million wells. Every well has the potential to recharge 100,000 litres of water a year. So, a million times 100,000 means you get 100,000 million litres of rainwater going into the aquifer.’ This quantity of water, he estimated, would ensure that the city could meet its water needs, but it would also be of huge significance to wider ecosystems. Biome’s related project of Lake Jakkur also had the replenishment of Bengaluru’s depleted and polluted groundwater as a primary aim. This lake is in the north-​eastern part of the city. Bengaluru has been termed a city 168

Urban Design as Tending Futures

of lakes, with around a thousand known to have been formed within and immediately around its territory. They were made to provide stores of water for drinking and irrigation, sources of food in the form of plentiful fish and dhobi ghats or places where clothes could be washed. It was long understood that the lakes also played a role in the replenishment of groundwater which could be tapped through wells within surrounding residential communities. As Vishwanath explained in our interview, “In and around Bangalore, 800 lakes have been filled” since the 1960s. Those that remain are often heavily polluted and choked with waste. Lake Jakkur had not been fully filled in, but it had become heavily silted and polluted by effluent from an adjacent sewage treatment plant constructed in 2004, and by raw sewage from the neighbourhoods around. Some initial restoration was carried out by the government to deal with the worst contamination between 2008 and 2010, which included the formation of a constructed wetland to filter and cleanse water from the plant. Biome became involved in 2014 when an active citizen group, Jala Poshan Trust, took over the maintenance of the lake from the municipal government and invited them to advise on how to do this sustainably, continuing the revival in the process and ensuring that water quality was good. The focus of this project, in other words, was less on spatial intervention than on the design of the management of the lake to ensure the continuity of water and lake ecosystems, and on tackling the impacts of unsustainable design and development in the city in recent decades. Together, then, the Million Wells project and Lake Jakkur revival work to replenish the city’s water reserves, rebuilding the city’s relationship with its subterranean aquifer. This is a process which S. Vishwanath conceptualizes as care. Thousands of miles away, our second case, Parc Hadau by Loyn and Co Architects, is a project to design and develop a small zero-​carbon neighbourhood in a part of the world deeply connected economically and culturally with the extraction of fossil fuels. It forms a small urban extension to the town of Pontardawe, part of the wider urban area of the city of Swansea. The town’s industrialization starting in the eighteenth century occurred concurrently with the increasing exploitation of the South Wales Coalfield. Within the town itself, coal-​fired industries developed in the nineteenth century for the production of iron, tinplate and steel. Coal from South Wales, however, was sold all over the world and was the fuel of empire, powering steam trains that helped to extend communications and trade links deep into colonized lands such as India. The metal-​manufacturing industries declined as much as the coal-​mining industry in the late twentieth century, and today the town and its hinterlands are post-​industrial. This decline is associated with widespread socio-economic deprivation, with the town recognized as among the 25 per cent most deprived areas in Wales. Parc Hadau was initiated by Sero, a Cardiff-​based energy company and housing provider. The company was founded on a vision of establishing 169

THE CARING CITY

Figure 8.2: Parc Hadau plan and sketches

Source: Sero, Loyn and Co. and Farrer Huxley

high-quality sustainable homes that would address current housing needs locally and also create a legacy for future generations. A private company with close links to the Welsh government, it seeks to address intertwined issues in Wales of fuel poverty related to deprivation and unsustainable development involving the production of carbon emissions. Zero-​carbon design, the integration of localized solar energy harvesting within housing, ecological landscape design and long-​term ownership lie at the heart of its strategies. The Parc Hadau project (depicted in Figure 8.2) establishes a new relationship between carbon, development and community in South Wales. Though not yet fully built at the time of writing, it was seen as an emerging exemplar of the objectives underpinning the Wellbeing of Future Generations Act introduced by the Welsh government in 2015 to tackle the sources of poverty, health inequality and climate change. This groundbreaking legislation obligates ‘public bodies in Wales to think about the long-​term impact of their decisions’ and ‘make a positive contribution to global well-​being’,2 a requirement that resonates with Adam and Groves’s (2007) notion of ‘tending futures’ in the present as a process that anticipates the impacts that may ensue from present action and/​or recognizes the uncertainty of outcomes and associated risks (also see Groves, 2014). The designers Loyn and Co3 are a Cardiff-​based architecture practice committed to ‘caring for people, place and the environment’. Through Parc Hadau, they developed a set of urban design principles which respond to the 170

Urban Design as Tending Futures

site’s existing landscape and biodiversity while contributing to its zero-​carbon credentials, discussed in detail below. The project received planning permission in December 2019 and was shortly thereafter to begin work on site at the time of research in late 2020. According to the Welsh government’s future generations commissioner, “It will be the first scheme in the country to meet the UK Green Build Council’s definition of net-​zero carbon”. As these brief introductions have shown, both case studies, in different ways, are concerned with resources and environments that are under threat as a result of human exploitation and consumption practice. In what follows, I explore how, as practices of design, they can be seen to tend to the future by taking care in the present of those resources and environments upon which the wellbeing and even the lives of future generations will rely. I begin in the upcoming section by discussing how caring corresponds to recognition of the dependencies of future lives on resources and environments, and how this reflects the concern of care ethics with the relations of dependency and interdependency.

Care as a recognition of dependency As projects that deal with water scarcity, Biome’s Million Wells and Lake Jakkur revival projects are clearly responses to how the future of Bengaluru and the wellbeing of its citizens rely on the availability of water. Dependence on water, of course, is a basic fact of life, cutting across lines of class and caste, age, culture and religion. But in Bengaluru, in the state of Karnataka, people have increasingly not been able to depend on water’s continuous availability in order to satisfy needs. The city was one of twenty to be identified in a Government of India report in 2018 as being at risk of running out of groundwater in 2020, already a year ago at the time of writing, after the nation suffered the worst water crisis in its history, threatening hundreds of millions of lives and livelihoods. The water crisis is driven by numerous factors. Rapid urbanization and population growth since 1947 have transformed a small city of just over half a million into a megacity of 12,765,000 today. This growth is emblematic of population expansion across India in the same time period –​from 330 million to a staggering 1.2 billion –​much of which is concentrated in cities. Forecasts suggest that Bengaluru could swell further in the coming years, if at a slower rate, to reach some 13.2 million by 2050. It is a city with hugely inflated and still-​growing water demands. However, changes in the climate in the past twenty years or so have typically entailed more concentrated periods of rain, significantly lower levels of rainfall across the year and longer periods of drought than in the past. Over three years of drought from 2018 to 2021, the region of Karnataka experienced 35 per cent less rainfall than it would normally expect. There is therefore increasingly less water to meet demand. As S. Vishwanath explained to me, the crisis is also driven by changes in water-​m anagement practices, including a shift from localized to 171

THE CARING CITY

centralized systems of water provision which occurred across the nation in the twentieth century. For him, these changes illustrate how a “notion of development in the USA was imprinted in India in terms of water management and dam construction” during this period. They led to a combination of a failure to harvest rain locally and the exploitation of rivers and aquifers beyond their capacities for replenishment. In Bengaluru, piped water is drawn from the River Cauvery, a river that ran dry at its source in 2016. Of course, not everyone has access to piped water in Bengaluru. Across the city, in 2021, 30 per cent of households, typically those located in informal settlements, were not connected to the municipal water supply, relying on purchasing water from tanker trucks and other private suppliers. For these households, the experience of the water crisis is particularly pronounced and, indeed, water is a major facet of social inequality and uneven development in the city. Unless circumstances change, the future of Bengaluru looks to entail increasing incapacity to depend on the availability of water, which will eventually touch all levels of society. As Vishwanath put it, if we continue to “collapse our ground water or deplete our aquifers, the rivers and streams that are not glacier fed will [simply] stop flowing in peninsular India”. Were this catastrophe to happen, of course, peninsular India would become uninhabitable. The prospect of a deepening water crisis is clearly a huge problem for people, society and the economy, but also for the wider, complex chains of interdependencies that characterize riverine ecosystems. These, encompassing watersheds and forests and diverse plant and animal life – including many species of birds and fish, along with mammals including elephants, tigers, panthers and otters are under huge stress. Biome’s aim was to identify strategies to enable citizens from different walks of life and different levels of affluence to depend, with confidence, on the availability of water and to manage it responsibly themselves. In the process, it also aimed to develop the means through design for water to be replenished and recycled, recharged into the aquifers where it can be stored as groundwater and thereby managed sustainability by governments and citizens alike, securing the wellbeing of future Bengaluru citizens. Parc Hadau in Wales, in contrast, emerged as a response to the recognized fact that the entire future of humanity is threatened by anthropogenic climate change. This is created by a negative dependency on greenhouse-​ gas-​producing fossil fuels which lead to the release of CO2 into the world’s atmosphere at rates far exceeding capacities for reabsorption by the earth’s terrestrial and marine plant life. A positive future for humans and non-​human forms of life, hence, depends on the extent to which climate change can be averted and its impacts mitigated, as well as on the extent to which people can adapt. As Sero’s Andy Sutton explained, helping to realize this positive future was the major driver for the project. 172

Urban Design as Tending Futures

At the same time, however, Parc Hadau is a response to impacts caused by that fossil fuel dependency on the local landscape and its life. Records show that the river that runs through Pontardawe, the Tawe, was highly polluted by contaminants from tinplate mills and other industries. There were periodic pollution accidents when the river ran black from coal or brown from the pickle acid used in the tin manufacturing process. The use of cyanide in metal manufacturing for a time during the mid-​twentieth century led to major die-​off of fish species, though, since the onset of industrial decline in the Welsh Valleys, these have returned and the ecosystem of the river more broadly has had a chance to recover.4 Industrial processes also led to the production of man-​made barren land in the Tawe Valley, as elsewhere in South Wales, encompassing barren spoil heaps, craters and other traces of excavation running deep underground (Thomas, 1966). Over time, the spoil heaps have at last grown over, producing the substrate of new biodiverse landscapes encompassing heaths and grassland. The Parc Hadau project seeks to avoid harming that landscape anew, recognizing that the capacity of future generations to enjoy biodiverse landscapes and cultivate interdependencies with other species depends on the will and skill of designers to protect them. Through their ways of recognizing human dependencies on particular resources, both cases speak to some of the ways in which matters of dependency have been discussed in the context of care ethics, particularly among environmental care ethicists. For scholars such as Bonnie Mann and Lorraine Code, practices of resource extraction and excessive consumption as well as logics such as climate denial are all denotative of a failure to recognize relations of dependency. Instead, they reflect the tendency in liberal political and moral thought to emphasize the rights of autonomous individuals acting with independence (Code, 2013). Common results include the positioning of human (typically white, male) subjects in relation to the earth as masters, ‘worldmakers’ and ‘authors’ (Mann, 2002). These sorts of anthropocentric positionings, Peg Rawes (2013) argues, are also apparent in the histories of architecture, urban design and planning. For much of the twentieth century, these practices were deeply complicit in environmental destruction, shaping the escalating depletion of fossil fuel reserves, the consumption of huge areas of land and the paving over or eradication of nature. As Rawes puts it, the predominant goal of many architects and urban planners of that era was ‘to design out, or ameliorate against nature’s forces’ through their masterplans (for example, flooding, or extreme heat and cold) while also harnessing its energy sources through technological means, with all too little regard for the interdependencies of humans, other species and the climate, or for the potential future ecological impacts of their actions. The recognition of dependency entails the adoption of a critical stance towards forms of thinking that have placed human beings in a preeminent position with respect to nature. In common with post-​humanist thought, 173

THE CARING CITY

environmental feminist care ethics typically endorses a decisive shift away from dualistic understandings of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ towards an acknowledgement of the endless ‘continuum’ between them (Braidotti, 2018). According to this perspective, landscapes, cities and artefacts of diverse kinds are no longer conceived as neither natural –​wild, savage, untamed, irrational –​or as human made –​cultured, artificial, rational –​but rather, as Harrison et al suggest, as entanglements of both (Harrison et al, 2004). Related to this, the recognition of dependency in the context of care ethics (and eco-feminism) also inevitably embodies a critique of anthropocentrism –​ as the belief that human beings can act with autonomy. As Bonnie Mann argues, at the most basic level, ‘We have to breathe to think’, and it is a simple, commonplace fact that ‘human beings cannot survive for more than a few minutes without the air and warmth the Earth “provides” ’ (Mann, 2002: 354). Of course, the earth doesn’t care itself as such; it lacks the intentionality of human carers, and it does not renew itself in order to provide anew for human beings. Though it has often been characterized as such, as Mann argues, the earth should not be viewed as ‘Mother’. Maternalistic conceptions of the earth tend, as McGregor (2014) argues, to reproduce nature/​culture dualisms, to impose gender stereotypes on human/​ non-​human relations, to imply that care is a private matter rather than a public concern and to fuel paternalistic conceptions of ‘man’s’ responsibilities towards and rights related to ‘her’ and ‘her’ body. To recognize dependency on the earth’s resources and environment, in an even more radical way than we discussed in Chapter 6 in the context of the lifecourse, is to know this as an intrinsic, inescapable fact of the human condition. It is to lose all notion that dependency is in any way an exceptional trait or something that money or technology might liberate people from. This, as Mann argues, in turn helps us to see that the dependency of all human beings on one another, which I have drawn attention to throughout the book, is nested within their broader dependency on the earth. Hence, to affect resources and environments that life depends on, whether in a positive or a negative way, is to affect those forms of interpersonal care too –​the care of parents for children, of friends for one another and so forth. It is to affect the capabilities of carers to effectively carry out their emotional as well as practical labours to ensure the flourishing of those they care for. As these labours, as Adam and Groves argue (2007), connect all human beings through space and time, from the very first human parents and friends onwards to our own descendants, to affect the resources and environments of life is to generate ripples of impact through chains of care relations that may never come to an end (also see Hannah Arendt on this sort of idea, Arendt, 1998 [1958]: 233–​4). Recognizing dependency, then, involves accepting that the impacts of human action on resources and environments are not just impacts on the capacity of human beings to depend on the earth in the future but are also 174

Urban Design as Tending Futures

impacts on care relations in potentially infinitely varied ways. The wellbeing of future generations, then, depends not just on the continuity of resources and environments per se but on the ways in which human beings, through their consumption practices, choose to impact their continuity and condition. As Adam and Groves (2007) argue, consequences of technological innovation such as plastics and nuclear energy can continue to circulate for hundreds if not thousands of years, while damage to ecological systems, soils and the atmosphere can hardly be remedied overnight. Recognizing dependency, finally, must lead to an effort to avoid creating these sorts of impacts of innovation, an effort conceptualized by Adam and Groves (2007) as the reconnection of knowledge, action and ethics in the making of futures. Motivated by alarming prospects of resource exhaustion, extinction and irreversible climate change, the designers of both our cases formulated goals to renew and preserve resources through design and development practice. These are efforts not only to avoid creating negative impacts but to enhance both secure relations of dependency on the earth and relations of care that connect present and future generations. They show how at least some architects and urban designers in the twenty-​first century have moved away from the attitudes Rawes describes, now seeking to emphasize the relationalities or interdependencies of humans, other species and the climate, and to carefully consider the potential future ecological impacts of their actions. In the next section, we will look at how a recognition of dependency translates in detail into actual design practices denotative of care for fragile resources. We will explore the ideas of caring practice that they encompass, both in terms of design and the forms of future use and inhabitation that design shapes. We will also consider how these care practices reshape anticipations of the future.

Care as future-​making practice ‘I’ll give you some examples of how things around care work. This house of Mr Balasubramanyan. He is a senior citizen, eighty-​four-​years old. He remembers a well being dug in his house when the house was being built in 1984, and he remembers a man called Arumugam. He knows the name; he remembers the name. Arumugam single-​ handedly dug the well for him … which was forty feet deep, and the well provided some water for two or three years, and then it went dry. Arumugam died … but Mr Balasubramanyam retained the well. Now, there’s an association with Arumugam, there’s an association with the huge energy required to dig the well which a person performed for him, and with the artefact itself, and so he kept it. Later on, he read about the rainwater harvesting system and landed up at my house. He lives close by, and so we both worked together and fitted a filter and 175

THE CARING CITY

revived the well, and now the well provides him all the water that he needs for the whole year. But there’s more. He takes his granddaughter every day to the well, and … when the granddaughter was four or four-​and-​a-​half years old, both of them had a ritual of going to the well at 8:30 in the morning and measuring its water level, and then coming back and recording it. So, the association with Arumugam then transcends to the granddaughter, and then it carries forward as some kind of an idea around water and wells and how it becomes a provider.’ Through this story, Vishwanath explained the nature of the practices of care involved in renewing and preserving water through household well-​digging and maintenance that have been cultivated in the context of the Million Wells initiative. These practices lie at the heart of the project for the reason that, as Biome recognized, the mere proposal and design of a million wells would likely be doomed to failure. This much was suggested by the fact that, though rainwater harvesting became mandatory for homes and commercial establishments in Bengaluru with the passing of the Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Act of 2009, little progress was initially made in terms of the actual installation of harvesting systems across the city. For Vishwanath, practices of care encompass not just the making of policy but the labour of well-​digging and well-​maintenance, and also the associations or social ties formed through these labours, including practices that serve to reinforce emotional bonds such as those between a grandfather and granddaughter. Practices of care, in other words, must be relevant to or rooted within existing cultures, traditions and economic circumstances. Well-​digging is an ancient art in India, but it has also been associated with particular communities and the caste system. In Bengaluru, the Mannu Vaddar community is associated with ground work of different kinds, including constructing roads, quarrying, digging wells and canals and building dams, tracing its history back hundreds of years. Mannu, in fact, literally means ‘soil’ or ‘earth’ while Vaddar refers to the Waddar dialect of the Telugu language spoken across South India. This is a community traditionally considered as low caste that has transferred skills in ground works down through the generations. It was actively engaged in digging wells in the region up to the 1980s. It gradually lost its relevance and livelihood with the extension of piped-​water infrastructures from the Cauvery River and the advent of technology for drilling deep borewells. However, as a result of Mannu Vaddars’ long-​standing capacity to “read” ground conditions, Vishwanath saw this group as capable of filling the gap in terms of water management and provision that the state had not been able to address through its policy. They can also do what extractive technologies have failed to do, which is to replenish as well as provide water through the use of the simple, cost-​effective technology of dug wells and recharge wells (Figure 8.3). 176

Urban Design as Tending Futures

In addition, the Mannu Vaddars will clean wells and bring the many dry wells across the city back to life, such as the one belonging to Mr Balasubramanian and the one depicted in Figure 8.1. Vishwanath relayed how ‘the well diggers will go to every well once a year and ask the household, “Should I de-​silt it? Should I clean it up?” and all that. The householder usually will know these well-​diggers. Old-​timers know them by name, and they say, “No, you come after Ugadi, or Sankranti”, you know, the festivals, “You come after that day, and then we will do it”. So, it’s ritually and culturally linked to cycles [and celebrations of renewal and new beginnings].’ Open wells and recharge wells replenish as well as provide by receiving water when rain or other surface water percolates down into them, whereas, in contrast, borewells only mine water. Recharge wells then channel this water into the aquifer. The Mannu Vaddars understand how deep to excavate the soil to ensure this, knowing from experience that this will vary across the city. They know how to tell when the level of seepage of water means that sufficient depth has been reached. Their knowledge, as Vishwanath put it, “is civilizationally continuous [through] the act of digging the well, identifying the soil type, saying, okay, this water will be sweet, this will be salty, this will have more water, this is not likely to get water, all of that”. It is a very different sort of knowledge to that which high-​technology aquifer mapping, remote sensing and geological identification equipment would provide. Its importance lies not only in the fact that is it far cheaper to acquire but that it stems from a time when dependency on rain was localized, shaping careful decisions about where to settle communities, where and what to farm and how to manage a resource sustainably. It has been acquired through time, passed down through the generations, leading to a detailed understanding of the city’s terrain coupled with an understanding of how geology and ground water can and should shape settlement. As part of the Million Wells initiative, Biome developed a community resource pack for recharge well–​building that could be executed by these traditional well-diggers. It also drew up a list of diggers to help householders keen to dig a well to commission one. According to the pack, holes for wells are to be dug to a depth as deemed suitable for the location by the diggers, based on their expertise. The holes are to be made wide enough to easily accommodate concrete rings of 600 mm diameter. Concrete rings are then to be lowered, one by one, into a well and ‘jelly stones’ used to pack the gaps between the rings. Down pipes from buildings, overflows from sumps and stormwater drains can all be connected to the wells depending on their location in domestic properties, schools, parks and so forth. 177

THE CARING CITY

Figure 8.3: A recharge well being formed by Mannu Vaddars

Source: S. Vishwanath

As part of the Jakkur Lake initiative, Biome, similarly, recognized that the involvement of Jala Poshan and other members of the local community was critical to ensuring continuity of the ecosystem. Vishwanath explained that the revival of the lake was not completed merely by the “constructed” interventions of 2008–​10. Sustained revival relies on how each of the elements of the lake’s system, including water, reeds, soil, sludge, fishermen and cattle rearers, operate together, and on the roles that different elements can play in sustaining and maintaining it over time. Biome’s work thus involved showing, as Vishwanath put it that “the fishermen cultivate fish and provide proteins to the city”; they “earn a livelihood and have a stake in keeping the lake clean from plastics and parasitical plants”. In turn, “cattle rearers remove [water] hyacinth and get feed for their two hundred and fifty cows”. Grazing cattle, indeed, was recognized as key to maintaining the wetland and hence the water quality in the lake, with knock-​ on benefits for fish stocks and the health of people in the surrounding areas reliant on the lake for water. Vishwanath described how “sensitization” of the middle class involving helping them to recognize the importance of including the fishermen and cattle rearers in the development of the solution for the lake and in the monitoring of water quality, was also critical to the project. In Biome’s work, care practice entails the cultivation of livelihoods that are imbricated with the care of the lake and the resources it can provide into the future. By recognizing the importance of the Mannu Vaddars, fishermen and cattle rearers in the economy of resource management, Vishwanath considered that “an attitude of care for people” is developed that addresses the issues of social inequality that are often only deepened by environmental crisis. As he put it, local people “earn a livelihood, you get water in your house, and the city gets water, etc”. Care, according to this model, is not ‘parochial’, not targeted at some rather than others but, rather, concerns the lake as a 178

Urban Design as Tending Futures

Figure 8.4: Lake Jakkur’s constructed wetland

Source: S. Vishwanath

complex system encompassing human and non-​human forms of life that depend upon one another, and also non-living elements including water and oxygen. The success of the project is evidenced by the fact that today (in 2021), the constructed wetlands are highly biodiverse, including small reptiles, mammals, birds and fish (Figure 8.4). The lake, too, now teems with life. The designers of the Parc Hadau project have, in their different context, also developed design strategies that involve care for resources and environments. Two aspects of the design of the project are of particular note. The first is the layout of the thirty-​five homes in view of the goal to harness and generate solar energy to a sufficient level to cover the future community’s electricity needs (including the charging of electric cars). The site is broadly diamond shaped and the housing is set within two terraced blocks that follow its outline. The larger western block is cranked above its centre to create a boomerang building form (Figure 8.2). The smaller eastern block, in contrast, curves gently in response to the lines of the site’s perimeter. Each presents a staggered, saw-​toothed arrangement of mono-​pitched roofs on which photovoltaic (PV) solar-​energy collectors for each house are mounted. The houses themselves are oriented to optimize the solar energy collecting potential of their PV panels. The pitched roofs in the western terraces are angled thirty degrees west of true south, while the others are oriented 30 degrees south-​east. Sero director Andy Sutton explained: “We don’t want 179

THE CARING CITY

to build from the roof down, and by that, I mean, we’re not building a PV farm that people live underneath. We’re building homes which happen to generate power where they can.” However, the beauty of these orientations is that, as the two sets of roofs catch the sun over slightly different periods of the day, the amount of energy that can be generated is greater than if all the PVs were angled in the same direction. The houses all include batteries in which excess solar energy produced during the day can be stored so that it can be used at source during times of greatest demand without residents needing to resort to using energy from the national grid. As Sutton explained, “Without the ability to transfer that generation at noon to the demand between 4 and 8 pm, what we [would] end up with is a grid which is zero carbon at noon and very high carbon at 6 pm”. Housing form and the technology of solar energy collection and storage in Parc Hadau, in other words, are attuned to the interrelated temporalities of the sun’s path across the sky, the rhythms of day, night, the seasons and the routines of everyday domestic life in order to minimize energy wastage and avoid the production of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. As with the Million Wells initiative, Parc Hadau involves localizing all the elements of resource management encompassing the harvesting of solar energy, the generation of power and the consumption of electricity. It also involves the development of an ownership and financing model to enable affordable housing and sustainable design quality to be delivered, the costs of which can be recovered long term through rents and energy production. A second aspect of the project involving care for resources and environments is its landscape strategy, developed by Loyn and Co in association with Farrar Huxley. In common with its surroundings in the valley of the River Tawe, the site combines woodland and meadow ecosystems that thrive in the wet, temperate climate. The housing hugs the site’s perimeter in order to leave as untrammelled as possible the landscape and topography of the site, including its existing plant and animal life and the patterns of its water courses and soil conditions. Access routes for pedestrians, bikes and electric vehicles are positioned right on the edge of the site too. A key goal of the strategy was to avoid pushing nature out but, rather, to improve habitats and safeguard movement corridors for wildlife including reptiles, insects and birds. Design also involved improving the site’s capacity to deal with flooding, a growing feature of climate change impacts in the area. This was done through subtle topographical interventions to create a series of indentations running through the heart of the site. During periods of heavy rainfall, these form seasonal ponds, containing and draining away flood water while providing wetland habitats for frogs, newts, reeds, rushes and so forth. At least in part, the emergence of this strategy reflects the discomfort Sero felt at working on a greenfield site at all, though this was permitted by the planning authority’s local development framework. Its development, 180

Urban Design as Tending Futures

however, allows the project to showcase how development in South Wales in the future could actually be associated with the promotion of biodiversity –​ following an industrial period in which dependence on fossil fuels and the growth of towns signified the destruction of the landscape. As in Biome’ work at Lake Jakkur, the landscape strategy aimed to repair the existing environment and ecological system as found. Developing it initially involved careful, attentive observation of the site’s landscapes which include ‘willow and birch scrub … to the south and west of the site, … tussocky marshy grassland growing in the centre’ and a perimeter of ancient broadleaved woodland. Design-​as-​repair focusses, much as I showed in Chapter 7 through the Leathermarket and Central Hill estate projects, on enhancing the relationships between existing elements in the ecological system and hence trying to help the whole to diversify further and thrive. In so doing, the strategy speaks to feminist ecological arguments regarding the importance of repair, as opposed to production, in the face of the ‘broken worlds’ of environmental decline (Fitz et al, 2019; Crosby and Stein, 2020), offering a vision of landscape rehabilitated and the conditions of life for diverse creatures and plants improved by designed intervention. Though, as Star and Strauss (1999) argue, repair-​focussed labour has often been rendered within society as background or ‘invisible work’ by comparison to other forms of labour, though they may depend on this work, repair is seen as the main type of work required to avert environmental catastrophe by these scholars. This emphasis on repair in the Parc Hadau’s landscape strategy is carried through to the detailed design of the housing, which anticipates repair cycles in the future, reflecting understanding on the part of the design team of the importance of repairability and maintainability for the lasting sustainability of the architecture. The landscape strategy also set out to create a self-​sustaining ecological system. It is not a vision that requires heavy-​handed human labour to maintain –​armies of mowers and insect control, for example. Rather, it anticipates the work that water, seasonal growth, decay and so forth would do themselves to form the landscape over time. Non-​human inhabitants such as lizards, earthworms, woodlice, fish, birds and willow scrub are thus not only considered as a part of the community but as part of a network of actors vital to the care of soil and air quality over time. As such, the strategy reflects recognition in Puig de la Bellacasa’s terms (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2015) that caring for the landscape, as for the soil communities she discusses, ‘involves making a speculative effort towards the acknowledgement that the [human] carer also depends on the soil’s capacity to “take care” of a number of processes’. Against tendencies in design to be concerned with the production of static forms or durable materiality, the strategy also points to how design can be conceived as a fostering of processes –​in this case a fostering of more-​than-​human care relations. 181

THE CARING CITY

Through their different design strategies, then, both cases offer resources for reflecting on what it may mean to care for future generations through urban design. First, both point to repair and renewal through design as important concepts and practices for doing this. Million Wells and Jakkur Lake renew depleted water reserves, clearly, through the concept of ‘recharge’, by integrating return loops and replenishment into the process of collecting rainwater and treating wastewater for the city of Bengaluru in order that groundwater sources might continue to provide for human needs. Parc Hadau promotes repair and renewal through the deployment of technologies enabling use of renewable energy and the principle of excluding carbon emissions from the operation/​living of buildings, as well as through a range of design decisions predicated on minimizing the carbon embodied in the construction of the housing and through its landscape repair strategy. Second, both suggest that caring for future generations entails attending closely to the place of design amid a web of complex care relations. In the Million Wells initiative, understanding of the knowledge and capabilities of traditional well-​diggers in the city formed the basis for developing the technology of recharge wells. A similar approach is revealed by their including fishermen and cattle rearers as stewards of the lake ecosystem, thus connecting their design and implementation to ancient stories and values associated with water and also re-centering a marginalized community within the current urban context of Bangaluru. Similarly, understanding the ritualistic aspect of well-​maintenance or how the practice of well-​maintenance acquires meaning in local society through association with religious festivals and related systems of value, veneration and belief formed the basis for imagining how responsibility for water care could be distributed across millions of citizens as a dimension of a shared culture over time. In these respects, this project reflects the contention of Arjun Appadurai that ‘designers do well to recognise that ordinary people are already involved in planning and design as part of their efforts to achieve dignity and equity in their lives in hard cities like Mumbai [and Bengaluru]’ and to focus their attention on how to support these practices and contribute to the ways in which they ‘can flourish as future-​makers’ (Appadurai, 2013: 267). It points to how design might, similarly, serve to support ordinary people’s capabilities as earth-​carers and the ways in which resources such as water are already a focus of care practice and associated values and futures. In the Parc Hadau project, it is significant that power generation is not hidden away but revealed within the context of the home, where energy is required for daily care practices such as cooking/​feeding and washing/​ cleaning. Residents are not expected to manage their own energy collection and needs but are likely to become knowledgeable about the relationship between solar energy production/​storage and everyday life. Though there is 182

Urban Design as Tending Futures

Figure 8.5: Visualization of the central commons at Parc Hadau

Source: Sero, Loyn and Co. and Farrer Huxley. Visuals by iCreate.

not yet any evidence to show what the impacts of this will be, it at least has the potential to stimulate the development of ethical stances towards energy use and lead to behaviour changes in order to save energy for environmental as well as financial reasons. Further, in the commons at the heart of the project (Figure 8.4), as discussed, the agencies of many actors in the care of the landscape are recognized, and residents will have to learn about living with rather than against nature, bringing to fruition over time the possibility inscribed in the design for more-​than-​human community to form and perform care together over time. This recalls Puig de la Bellacasa’s (2017) contention that care for living matter ‘is a force distributed across a multiplicity of agencies and materials’ in more-​than-​human worlds. In turn, it suggests a vision of design as engaged in facilitating and expanding this multiplicity. A third way in which these case studies offer resources for reflecting on what it means to care for future generations through design is that both cases suggest that caring for future generations involves certain ways of taking responsibility for the trajectories of development impacts. As discussed, the Million Wells project anticipates that the development of a million recharge wells will produce positive impacts on the trajectories of desertification suggested by fearful anticipations of an advancing, perpetual water crisis, and takes responsibility for this through the well-​building manual. The Parc Hadau project addresses potential impact through the many different strands of work by Sero and Loyn and Co to understand the operational and construction-​based carbon costs of the project, and through the durability, performance and recyclability of materials used to form the housing. 183

THE CARING CITY

The designs of both projects were informed by awareness of unfolding and impending trajectories of climate change and crisis, recalling arguments made by Hans Jonas (1984), writing at a time of dawning awareness of the existence and causes of climate change, regarding the nature of responsibility in the face of ‘catastrophe in respect of human ends’. In such a context, he argues that ‘Promethean immodesty … must yield to the modesty of goals that we and nature can afford’. Strategies for reducing the consumption of water and energy and of reducing the carbon footprint of development in both case studies reflect this idea of responsibility, each taking account of the planet’s limits as a closed system. However, both cases also reflect Adam and Groves’s (2007) subtly different conception of responsibility toward the future in terms of care. While fear for one’s children, they argue, given the growing range of crises around the world, clearly can and does motivate caring actions such as seeking to protect them from harm and perhaps even protecting them from fear, caring in this context also usually involves actions geared towards the potential for their future flourishing. After all, care is generally concerned with what the people and things that are the focus of care need in order for their futures to go well –​for healing to be achieved, for growing-​up to happen and for the range of possibilities for flourishing to be expanded. To take responsibility in a caring sense, then, is not to endeavour to avert catastrophe by living within means in Jonas’s terms but, rather, to assume a charge for assuring the means to future flourishing. Though people often assume responsibility for events that have already passed as Adam and Groves (2007) put it, responsibility in a caring sense is responsibility that is taken before the fact, aiming to ensure that what is hoped for and desired actually comes to pass. Through their renewal and repair strategies, both of our cases studies offer ways to conceptualize responsibility in this way in the context of urban design. While both certainly encapsulate a desire to promote modesty and live within means, as discussed, both arguably more meaningfully highlight the potential for design to help people to become effectively embedded in the dynamics of their biomes, more conscious of multi-​species interdependencies and thus more capable of resilience and flourishing. Thus, they suggest an idea of urban design as enacting care for the future by shaping the processes by which the flourishing of generations to come may be achieved. These processes include the management of impacts of development and of inhabitation and resource use as they unfold through time. Finally, both cases suggest that practices of care for future generations through design can and should enable responsiveness such that care, as embodied by design, can unfold and evolve. In this context, of course, responsiveness does not denote the direct response of people in the future to design decisions taken generations before. Rather, it can be conceptualized 184

Urban Design as Tending Futures

as the accumulating and often cyclical responsiveness of ecological systems more broadly to care through time, a care beginning in the present. Seeing responsiveness in the context of care for future generations in this way is necessary not only because anticipated futures are not static but continually evolving, with new knowledge coming to light to ‘tame uncertainty’ (Adam and Groves, 2007), but because the resources that their capabilities and wellbeing will depend on cannot be secured in one go through design but, as suggested by Lake Jakkur’s community management and Parc Hadau landscape management strategy, need to be cared for in an iterative sense through the living and becoming of urban environments.

Care in and against the politics and economics of design and development In each case, these practices of care for future generations can be seen to have important implications for the wider politics of planning, design and development, and particularly for how these practices typically operate in neoliberal capitalist economies. For Biome, the issue of water depletion in Bengaluru is directly connected to narratives of progress rooted in imperatives of economic growth that have characterized planning in the city over recent decades, and which are wider hallmarks of neoliberalism. The position is eloquently set out in a book chapter by Chitra Vishwanath (2019), who reveals Bengaluru’s massive expansion as the very epitome of the Indian model of economic growth and the accompanying sense of pressure to ‘catch up with the rest of the world’ by building as much and as quickly as possible. The wider political background is formed by the liberalization of the country’s economic policies in 1991 in order to stimulate nationwide growth through the attraction of foreign investment –​a classic move by a former colonial nation urged to open up its economy to mobile global capital. In Bengaluru, these policies are reflected in a planning system that has prioritized the creation of stimuli to growth over the control of development, and in the rise of the property developer in the hierarchy of agents influencing expansion patterns and even decisions regarding state investments in infrastructure. As urban form has followed land values, C. Vishwanath writes, ‘marginalised groups and eroded ecological systems’ have paid the price, much as these sorts of fragile urban actors are seen to do in neo-​colonial contexts across the globe. Thus, for Biome, tending to water as a basis for the survival of more-​than-​ human future generations means opposing assumptions about growth and progress at the heart of neoliberal capitalism, given that these notions also lie at the root of ecological devastation and the production of Bengaluru’s bleak future with regard to water. As a result, care, for Biome, is strongly connected to ideas about the potential of economic ‘degrowth’ –​a notion and 185

THE CARING CITY

a movement that seeks to radically reshape the values, priorities and futures of capitalist societies. In place of expansionist and extractive technologies, it places practices of repair, reclamation and renewal at the heart of new urban green economies given that these offer the means to sustain the relations between people and the planet upon which human futures in Bengaluru and beyond depend. For Loyn and Co, the political challenges of delivering inclusive, zero-​ carbon development revolved around another issue of neoliberal capitalism commonly recognized by ecological feminists and care ethics scholars –​that is, how corporate and government decisions are dominated by short-​term considerations. In Wales, the ground-​breaking Future Generations Act endorses long-​term thinking and decision-​making, and in Loyn and Co practice director Victoria Coombs’s view, this is reinforced by how the “Welsh government sets their targets [for environmental design] really high”. However, in practice, Coombs argued, “development always fall[s]‌short and I guess it’s because they don’t have the power to really enforce it”. Developers in Wales still seem “to be able to dictate what they want”, she went on, using viability statements to prove that environmental design is undeliverable given short-​range investment horizons. For Loyn and Co, as well as for Sero Homes, new long-​termist financing and development models are desperately needed to complement the prerogatives of policy, and Parc Hadau is developed to offer one such. The model involves a plan for Sero to hang onto the ownership of the site order to manage both the energy-​production and housing elements in financial and material terms. It involves patient capital invested in the project’s zero-​carbon design and building quality which does not have to be recovered in a short timeframe. Instead, the rents which Sero will collect will provide a gradual but steady return on investment. The model also involves delivering affordability in terms of housing costs, with these costs relating not just to rental values in the market but also to everyday running costs. As a result of zero-​carbon design, costs associated with space heating and hot water were anticipated to be approximately half the average for homes of a similar size, pointing to the broader role that decarbonization stands to play in addressing widespread fuel poverty in deprived communities in post-​industrial Wales. As Sero’s Andy Sutton explained, investment in the project is calculated according to a sixty-​year horizon –​far longer, in other words, than is the norm for UK development. The significance of this is that, as he put it, “as soon as you have a conversation with investors about, “Well, if you’re looking to invest in this for sixty years, in twenty-​nine years’ time, you will have a legal obligation for these properties to be zero-​carbon”; in otherwords, that all long-​term investments in housing are bound to be investments in zero-​carbon development. 186

Urban Design as Tending Futures

Thinking from a care ethics perspective, the project raises numerous questions regarding how qualities of care can be safeguarded in the context of such concepts as rent, loans, capital markets and investment. How, we might ask, can such relationships avoid paternalism? How can they involve the empowerment of the leasees rather than promote inequalities? Where does any profit need to go in order for the model to be caring? Given that capitalism is often portrayed as a defining aspect of the natural/​cultural crises that characterize the Anthropocene, can a private-​sector, profit-​oriented model of decarbonization be considered care at all? While addressing these questions in detail goes beyond the scope of this book, I note Virginia Held’s contention that ‘economics could produce what people really need in ways that contribute to human flourishing’ (Held, 2006: 122). As she suggests, for these social and economic relations to denote caring, commercial gain should not be their raison d’être, which should rather be, as Sutton himself put it, “the moral and ethical” reasons for developing them, such as the multi-​species suffering posed by climate change and the rights of future generations to inherit a habitable earth. Attending to resources in view of these motivations is likely, in his view, to drive short-​term profits down. But contexts of suffering and prospects of flourishing also create numerous opportunities for reinvesting profits over time should decarbonization measures adopted in the short-​term become lucrative. Through what they do as well as through the questions and issues they raise, both projects considered in this chapter demonstrate the vital importance of considering care for future generations in terms of the wider political and economic contexts of design projects as well as in terms of design ideas and localized spatial practices. In place of the complicity of planning and design with the politics and economics of resource extraction, what are needed are situated design practices that, through careful engagement with local issues and specific contexts, offer means to challenge myths of autonomy and values of freedom deeply rooted in the neoliberal capitalist system.

Tending futures In this chapter, I have revealed three key aspects of care for future generations through urban design. First, I have shown it to involve a recognition of the dependency of future generations on resources of air, water and earth, and a related recognition of the problems attending the exploitation of the earth’s resources for future worlds. I have argued that recognizing dependency can influence conceptions of the role of design, no longer viewed as the control or manipulation of natural forces to meet human ends but as the maintenance and sustainment into the future of environment, ecological systems and resources. 187

THE CARING CITY

Second, I have shown care to require the development of strategies that not only try to limit impacts on environments but are also involved in their repair and remediation. In both our case studies, these strategies encompassed physical and material interventions such as zero-​carbon building and the construction of wells. But, crucially, they also encompassed the design of processes to enable repair, renewal and maintenance to be carried out over time. These processes, if continued, will be responsive and adaptive, attuning to the condition and wellbeing of systems progressively. As such, they offer ways to imagine how design can act in a caring way toward future generations’ despite the uncertainty of the future (Groves, 2014). Geared to the continuation and flourishing of resources and environments, they promise not only the transfer of positive legacies to the future but the transfer of knowledge of how to care for the earth. Third, I have shown care for future generations to involve intervening in the wider political and economic systems which lie at the root of resource depletion, habitat loss and climate change in the Anthropocene. Both case studies involved innovative forms of governance and financing to realize sustainable development. However, of course vital resources such as water, environments and planetary systems cannot in the end be safeguarded by isolated showcase or ‘alternative’ projects. They require far more radical transformation encompassing, as Chitra Vishwanath suggested, the overthrow of many of the core values of liberalism, the economic logics of urban growth, the profit motives of capitalist development and tackling the complex forces driving social inequality worldwide. Recognizing care as vital to the future and developing the political and economic instruments to care for the future must become habitual and mainstream if the future planet is to be habitable to all or even at all.

188

Conclusion Throughout this book, I have shown that urban design offers a valuable lens for understanding how societies place and organize care. But I have also shown how urban design is key to addressing issues of care in contemporary cities worldwide, issues that span the changing place of care in contemporary society, the impacts of urban change on wellbeing and flourishing and the degradation of environments in the Anthropocene. To briefly recap, across the book’s substantive chapters, I have focussed on the potential for urban design to perform care through the placing and staging of care relations, the making of accessible urban places, the shaping of atmospheres both affective and aerographic, strategies enabling ongoing attunement through materiality to the changing contexts and contingencies of caringscapes, the cultivation of positive place-​attachments and through care for the resources of a common world shared across the generations. Between them, these chapters and themes embrace all the dimensions of urban design that Carmona (2021) identifies, from the social to the perceptual, morphological, functional and temporal. These dimensions, though not always picked out explicitly, weave through all the chapters. The case study analyses have also explored the significance of design governance for care relations and practices. Each of the chapters has, hence, opened up a new and distinct perspective on the role of urban design, both as built form/​place and as practice, in relation to care. As we have moved through the book, however, each chapter has also built on earlier ones, advancing an understanding of the scope of urban design regarding practices and relations of care both in the present and the future. Throughout the book, we have moved gradually from what might be thought of as a humanistic exploration of the potential of urban design to shape care practices that pertain to particular social groups to explorations of its potential to shape more complex webs of relations and interdependencies encompassing human and non-​human actors. These relations include place-​ based attachments and inescapable dependencies of human life on the earth’s physical resources and environments in order to meet basic needs, perform care effectively and build positive legacies for future generations. In a related 189

THE CARING CITY

way, we have moved from understandings of care in terms of the sort of interpersonal, face-​to face relations that were a focus of early theorizations of care in the context of care ethics to understandings of care in a broader sense, encompassing relations and activities of care between people who may be remote from one another in space and time. Of course, as I have argued, considering design as care must always involve an understanding of care in the latter sense. Designers and users are often not connected in an interpersonal sense. It is the outcomes of design that convey care between people through time in the context of urban forms and places. Nonetheless, it has been important to recognize that designing elements of form, place or infrastructure to foster interpersonal relations and designing to them as means to endeavour to secure wellbeing in a more distant future are different challenges, both conceptually and practically. These two conceptual moves should, however, not be read as progressions in the book’s narrative that end up leaving behind the earlier themes and conceptualizations. Nor should the set of themes covered by the chapters simply be aggregated as a formula or ‘toolbox’ of neat principles and prescriptions for how to perform caring urban design. Rather, these moves throughout the book’s narrative structure are employed as mechanisms to build up complexity. My contention is that various identified crises of care have implications for urban design and should concern urban designers, from those connected to transformations in the place of social care in the context of the rollback of the welfare state in advanced capitalist societies, to those which pertain to looming environmental catastrophe and precarious planetary futures. Becoming concerned with the production of precarity for future generations and the destabilization of the more-​than-​human environment should not lead us to be less concerned with loneliness, with mental health or with the ageing society, or vice versa. Care concerns all these things, and in any case, through various value systems, these issues of care are all connected. Caring urban design, hence, concerns all of the ways in which people do and can extend themselves into wider worlds with care. The book’s structure has also helped to gradually build up an understanding of the potential meanings of care ethics in the context of urban design. This has been achieved substantially through the use of case studies in each of the chapters, which have provided examples of urban design confronting issues of care and/​or seeking to shape care practices and relations within specific contexts. They have provided the means to explore how place-​ shaping strategies come to reflect and embody particular ideas of care and endeavour to shape caring practices and relations. But they have also enabled us to develop a sense of what care ethics, in a more general sense, means in the context of urban design –​what sorts of concerns and dispositions it corresponds to, what sorts of approaches to design it suggests and what sorts of relations of care it fosters. Building theory through situated practices in 190

Conclusion

this sort of way is not novel among feminist scholars such as Ann Marie Mol (2010) and Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2015, 2017), both of whom demonstrate the importance of detailed, empirical case study research for the development of nuanced, bottom-​up understandings of ‘good care’. However, it is in contexts of architecture and urban design that, as Alberto Perez Gomez (2007) argues, design theory is most often boiled down to generic principles and design treated as a species of applied science. One of the major dangers of this, as he suggests, is that, in the application of such principles, a sense of ethics associated with design and place is often lost. Thus, in addition to developing understandings of different care issues that touch urban design, I have also been building up an understanding of the significance and features of an ethics of care in the context of urban design.

Care ethics as an ethics of urban design Following from the general aspects of care as practice and ethics set out in Chapter 1, the discussion of urban design in Chapter 2 and the analyses of the various chapters, I finish this book by suggesting that an ethics of care is embodied in a series of approaches to urban design:

Particularistic, situated design When Susan Fainstein (1996) considered the potential of planning to be articulated ‘in a different voice’ (drawing on Gilligan, 1982)), the emphasis placed by care ethics on particularity was something she found difficult to reconcile with the rationalist ethos of planning, despite appreciating the ‘post-​ structuralist thrust toward the rejection of totalizing discourse’ (Fainstein, 1996: 459). If in a less pronounced way than for planning, urban design, too, must continually cater to the many –​the constant flow of different people in a street, or the different sorts of residents in a housing complex, for example. However, as I showed through all the cases in the book, recognizing the general purposes of urban forms and places does not have to correspond to a generic, and hence exclusionary, approach to place or to personhood –​to development that winds up obliterating the distinct characteristics of sites, that ignores the variability of human need and capability or the hybrid experiences and perceptions of ‘embodied persons’ (Held, 2006: 65) or the complex interdependencies that characterize more-than-human worlds. To turn this argument on its head, recognizing difference and complexity, in turn, does not need to involve corralling people into spaces designed tightly around them, as to do so is often to promote segregation and to neglect common aspects of experience, or to create brittleness and inflexibility to change. Urban design needs not, in other words, to fall into the trap of ‘partiality’ which has been much debated by feminist care theorists (Held, 2006: 94–98; Tronto, 1993: 63, 74). 191

THE CARING CITY

In place of these two extremes, design can, as suggested by cases such as Sargfabrik, create difference within the context of shared structure. It can, as suggested by the gender mainstreaming project in Vienna’s Meidling area, develop principles such as accessibility within specific contexts where these acquire situated and often complex meaning, reflecting Puig de la Bellacasa’s (2017) contention that care ‘is not a matter of applying moral principles by a subject to a senseless and seamless “material” universe: ethicality in the making resides in messy, muddled concrete situations in which an obligation to care becomes at stake’. Design can also recognize that the variability of people is constantly dynamic, creating forms of openness to allow needs and care practices to unfold over the lifecourse, as illustrated by the Polgerstraβe 30a project. As with the education policies that Held discusses, such approaches help to ensure that care can unfold between people in the best possible ways (Held, 2006: 65). To reflect an ethic of care then, designers must be able to navigate between different spheres of society –​from the sphere of the individual and the household, to the sphere of the city, to the sphere of the planet –​ recognizing the differences, the overlaps and the hierarchies of different sorts of needs, capabilities and concerns. The caring city is likely to differ substantially from place to place, manifesting as a kaleidoscope of forms and practices rather than as the embodiment of universal design principles through a top-down masterplanning process. And yet, this is likely not a chaotic form of city, as needs for care and patterns of care over time characterize life for all.

Design that fosters recognition and supports independencies between people and across environments As I showed through case studies such as those of the almshouse in London and of Kampung Admiralty in Singapore, urban design can embody ideas related to care practices, including ideas of who might or should care for whom and how care should be organized in society. These ideas are problematic from the perspective of care ethics when they lead to the marginalization of particular forms of dependency on care or particular care practices, enabling some to adopt an attitude of ‘privileged irresponsibility’ and a false sense of autonomy and freedom (Tronto, 1993: 120–​2). An ethics of care is embodied by designs that, one way or another, engage critically with how design and city-​making have functioned historically to express and reinforce ways of stigmatizing dependency or to inscribe racialized and/​or gendered distributions of care labour that have often served to prop up the freedoms of white men or to inculcate a sense of there being a binary distinction between ‘man’ and ‘environment’. Such engagement is demonstrated by projects that create new contact zones between people, fostering an ‘ethic of care for the stranger’ or for someone in a different age group or with a disability. It is revealed by projects such as 192

Conclusion

the Sargfabrik project in Vienna that fosters practices of care shared across the bounds of households and neighbourhoods, creating the means for better support for care as well as actually caring for vulnerable people such as children. It can also be demonstrated through projects that reflect a recognition that, however capable they are, human beings are fundamentally dependent on the earth’s life support system and that human continuity is contingent upon ways of utilizing and maintaining the earth’s fragile, finite resources. All these sorts of projects share an understanding of human goals and ends, whether these relate to attachments or to skills and achievements or to intergenerational legacies as founded in the realities of human interdependency and contingent on care.

Design that reflects and embodies an ethics of care practice Throughout the book, I have drawn on Tronto’s characterization of the moral aspects of care as a practice –​attentiveness, responsibility, competence, responsiveness and care-​with –​which correspond to the series of phases of care which she also identifies. The first moral aspect of caring, attentiveness, has often been associated with ‘being there’, as Sevenhuijsen (2016) puts it, at a time of need. In the context of urban design, it may be associated with spending time on site and becoming immersed in the concerns that are the focus of projects. Designers can directly see and hear those who will either live in new design projects or be impacted by them in other ways in the context of events such as public consultations, focus groups and so forth (depending on how these are conducted, of course). But given that design always anticipates use and not all future users will articulate their needs or be able engage directly with preparations to implement a project, attentiveness in the context of urban design must inevitably encompass ways of understanding needs, vulnerabilities and care relations that cannot be seen or evaluated directly. The documentary photography of Philip Eberling in the almshouse project provides one example of this, demonstrating attentiveness to practices of home-​ making if not, specifically, to the future residents of the project. So too does the Vastu Shilpa Foundation’s careful study of the spatial and social dynamics of informal settlement development in urban India. Others are given through what might be seen as strategies of attentiveness to the possible trajectories of needs or of care practices. Such attentiveness becomes embodied in the design of the two case studies in Chapter 6, Aranya Low Cost Housing and Polgerstraβe 30a, which both reflect forms of alertness on the part of designers to how needs and relations change over the lifecourse and how, potentially, to support flourishing throughout that change. Being attentive to changing needs does not, of course, usually entail remaining involved with a design project over time, though BKK-​3 have done just this through the Sargfabrik housing project, looking to adapt it now as the original population steadily ages. A final 193

THE CARING CITY

example of attentiveness through design is suggested by the Million Wells and Lake Jakkur projects in in Chapter 8. Here, attentiveness can be identified in practices of careful study of the sources of water depletion, in the anticipation of future trajectories of water scarcity and in the cultivation of citizen-​led practices of resource management. ‘Caring about’, in the context of urban design, hence, may involve quite a wide range of strategies for recognizing and identifying with the concerns of others. The second and third moral aspects of caring, responsibility and competence have, like attentiveness, often been associated with interpersonal care relations. In urban design, responsibility is typically considered at one time, the time of design, for the effects and consequences of that labour in a future time, the time of use and experience by occupants. That responsibility, as the case studies reveal, can relate to design’s potential to connect people and to foster forms of informal care. It may may relate to the experiences that people have of urban places and how those can impact health and wellbeing. It can also, however,relate to impacts in the wider sense, on resources and environments that lives and livelihoods will depend on in the future, just as, in their different ways and settings, the Million Wells, Lake Jakkur and Parc Hadau projects showed. A similar observation can be made regarding competence as a feature of care in the context of urban design. While the competencies of designers certainly involve analyzing existing sites and ensuring a good fit of design approaches to sites and occupants’ uses and routines, they also involve imagining how needs may be met differently and better, and/or how care relations and practices may be better supported by new and adjusted built forms and fabrics. Caring in the context of urban design, clearly has an imaginative, propositional dimension that connects what places are to what they could be, and what people are to who they might become in the future. Thus, for example, it connects the routes of children on the way to school with their possible health circumstances in later life, as we saw in the Thrive Zones project, or it can connect the inaccessibility of public space to the greater capacity that older people might have to meet their own needs. Thinking of caring in this way resonates which Maurice Hamington’s notion of the ‘moral imagination’ (Hamington, 2004). According to his analysis, a moral imagination ‘speculates as to the efficacy of potential actions’. Though it is continually challenged by the inevitable uncertainty of the future, it endeavours to anticipate, as well as possible, the impacts of action in order to avoid sowing damage or fostering harm. In turn, this clearly resonates with Adam and Groves’ (2007) notion of ‘tending futures’ in the present, which involves taking decisions in light of careful anticipation of the impacts that may ensue from action and endeavouring to ensure future flourishing to the greatest possible extent. Though he does not use the term ‘moral imagination’ and does not write specifically about care, the architectural theorist Alberto Perez 194

Conclusion

Gomez has also endorsed this sort of process within design, arguing that a lack of imagination –​considered as the capacity to relate to others empathically across lines of difference, culture, belief, gender and generation –​‘may be at the root of our worst moral failures’. Caring in the context of urban design, hence, involves the deployment of a moral imagination through all the visual, creative analytic, synthetic and interdisciplinary skills and activities that are part and parcel of it. The fourth moral aspect of care, responsiveness, has been described as a capacity of the users and inhabitants of design projects to react to and reshape design in a number of different ways throughout the book. Responsiveness is invited by participatory practices such as the ones discussed in relation to the Leathermarket JMB’s Marklake Court project. It is invited in a more open and longer-​term sense through incomplete design, which encompasses strategies that avoid prescribing functions and allows people to customize the circumstances and materialities of care practices, as revealed by the Aranya Low Cost Housing and Polgerstraβe 30a projects. Design may, as suggested by the Thrive Zones project or by the Million Wells project, invite others to take responsibility for issues of urban development material to the production of care needs and issues. Responsiveness in such contexts denotes the taking up of concerns that design has instigated or brought to light and that extend the work of care for place, environment or resource into the future. A different form of responsiveness again, which we have touched on, is the formation of trust in view of the concern and attention of designers to place-​ based attachments, to the ways in which these known, familiar places offer reassurance, shape capacities for independence and so forth. Trust, as the case study of the Central Hill estate showed, is not formed overnight, and is not satisfied by good intentions only. It requires the building of alliances, consistency of support and, in this case, the boldness of designers to resist dominant discourses and modes of production in order to prioritize the needs, interests, feelings and wellbeing of existing residents. Trust, which as Baier (1986: 235) argues, can be easily betrayed also requires maintenance, itself a labour of care, involving the materialities of housing with their susceptibility to decline or obsolescence as well as modes of consistent communication. Care-​receiving in the context of urban design, hence, involves the very many ways in which design is experienced as care at the individual and collective levels. Caring design seeks to foster forms of responsiveness that relate to project goals, and does well to anticipate responsiveness and ensure its compatibility with an experience of care, in Tronto’s terms, as the consideration of ‘the other’s position as that other expresses it’ (Tronto, 1993: 136). The fifth and final moral element of care in Tronto’s framework, care-​ with, has surfaced as key to evaluating urban design at various moments throughout the book. Urban design has been shown to have a strong bearing on the place of care in society. As such, it has often reflected complicity on 195

THE CARING CITY

the part of planners and designers in the political and economic contexts through which unjust practices related to care have occurred, such as the relegation of women to the home, the devaluing of care, the exclusion of vulnerable people from areas of development pressure and environmental exploitation. Caring design that reflects the value of care-​with, in contrast, is design that seeks to promote wellbeing and flourishing on behalf of those cared for and caring alike. Hence, it is design that challenges gendered and racialized divisions of care labour through attention to the issues of access, land use planning and urban adaptability that both express and shape them. Such design would not merely be reactive to changes in the place of care but would seek to address arising issues such as the rise of loneliness among older people deemed not to be in need of institutional care or the difficulties women face in striking a balance between care communities and employment-​based opportunities, as the almshouse project and Sargfrabrik respectively do. Caring design might otherwise seek to develop alternative models of development to those that are capital centric, speculation and investment driven or subordinated to urban growth agendas. These alternatives, as indicated by the Million Wells and Parc Hadau projects, may involve enrolling traditional, sustainable technologies and infrastructures in the care of future generations through the protection of planetary resources and environments. As all the case studies suggest, such models of development may also involve envisioning or at least finding expression for new governance arrangements and/​or new financing strategies related to the care that people and the planet need. These, as suggested, may encompass new models of social housing, new self-​build housing strategies, cooperatives, charitable projects and new public amenities and infrastructures. The key requirement in order for these to be caring is that they genuinely give priority to care needs rather than treating these merely as new market openings and opportunities, and that they cultivate the potential quality of care relations.

Designing for the future As I argued in Chapter 1, care is always future oriented. Even when its focus is on life’s end, its goals are overwhelmingly positive –​to meet needs and ensure wellbeing to the extent that this is possible. And yet, in the context of care, the future is always, as Adam and Groves (2007) argue, in the making. Hence, finally, in a caring city, the flourishing future of care will already be present in innumerable ways and in the making. –​in a given place’s streets and forest schools, in its park benches, in mature trees, drainage systems, social infrastructures, repair cultures and atmospheres. As these characteristics of caring urban design are consistent with understandings of what it means to care well and/or to provide good care, 196

Conclusion

they also provide a set of new conceptualizations of the good city. While I hope I have shown how care can be practised, shaped and patterned through urban design, I hope to have also demonstrated why this is vital. As urban design offers a means to shape care relations, it can address the rising crisis of loneliness and the unmet need for support in cities. As it offers a means to cultivate people’s relationships to a given local place, it can help create different experiences of urban change than those characterized by loss, displacement and discontinuity. As a means to create open and adaptive cities, urban design offers a way to address the dynamism of cities not just as economic hubs but as continuous interweavings of pathways through the lifecourse. It can also, finally, offer a way to foster continuity of care through the earth and air that will connect our present lives and all the things that we make and that matter to us to our planetary futures.

197

Afterword and Acknowledgements The inspiration for this book came many years ago when reading Barbara Adam and Chris Groves’s book Future Matters. This book is centrally concerned with how societies know futures and with the complex ethical issues that arise at the intersections of knowledge of and action towards the future. The final chapter makes a case for care as an ethic to guide all practices in the present that stand to shape the world future generations will inherit from our times and have to inhabit. The arguments struck me as highly relevant for design –​not only as a discipline that is always future oriented, as it anticipates building and use, but one involved in the production of physical forms that often outlive their designers, initial clients and even cultural contexts, carrying impacts through materiality into distant futures. To care for future generations through design is to care through such materiality, which can directly connect our experience with theirs. Several years passed of gathering knowledge of the interdisciplinary literature on care ethics and endeavoring to relate its themes and concerns with relations and practices of care to urban design and architecture. Slowly, apparently discordant threads came together and began to group and settle under particular themes, including but also going beyond care for the future. As this happened, it was apparent that care was surfacing more widely within urban studies and design debates, and the work of Elke Krasny, Charlotte Bates, Rob Imrie, Kim Kullmann, Emma Power among others provided major sources of inspiration and resources to frame my analysis and arguments. Though the book’s outcome was long uncertain, its gestation drawn out, much of it was actually written in 2020 in the run-​up to and then during the COVID-​19 pandemic. This was a time, of course, when questions of care came to the fore, with rising numbers of people requiring care globally, and with struggles to cope exposing the wider care crisis and under-​resourcing of infrastructures of national healthcare in the UK and more widely. The pandemic also exposed the disparities of access to healthcare globally, with the hugely unequal impacts of the disease running down long-​established lines of social and economic inequality. The importance of urban design for healthcare and health has also come to light in both negative and positive ways during this period. For example, COVID-​19 has helped bring to 198

Afterword and Acknowledgements

light issues of high-​density living, highlighting the importance of access to outdoor space, of generous sidewalks and of air circulation and quality. At the same time, it has stimulated debate regarding the future of city centres and traditional divisions between home and work, as well as between neighbourhood andCentral Business District. As lockdown made it difficult to reach more distant friends and relatives, so it focused attention on the importance of local spaces and infrastructures which foster neighborliness and mutual support, from pocket parks to back gardens, balconies and even the pavements on which supermarket queues form. Although this is not a book about COVID-​19, endeavouring to consider urban design care in a broad sense, there is no doubt that this would have been a different book without the pandemic. COVID-​19, of course, also had a huge impact on the making of the book, some of which was also related to my care responsibilities. In common with so many working parents, my work life in 2020 became fused with childcare, and specifically with educating an eight-​year-​old during periods of school closure. Normal routines of work versus family time were blown apart as work happened earlier and later in the day and also over weekends in order to make room for schooling. At the same time, as life changed, my home became an immediate physical place in which to rehearse some of my arguments. As I thought about the theme of openness for Chapter 6, I moved things around the house, reshaping a guest room no longer capable of receiving guests into an office. As I thought about ‘tending futures’, I got around to installing the composter I had been looking at in gardening catalogues for years. My son, my partner and I planted potatoes, artichokes, tomatoes, peas and strawberries in our small garden, and I was conscious of the care in learning and skill-​building, as well as in gardening, involved in doing so. Instead of leaving home to be entertained at venues of different sorts at the weekend, we entertained ourselves more through these ways of making, cultivating and being together. We also used our local amenities more –​the tennis courts in the local park, for ­example –​and found some time to invest in taking care of them, such as by picking up litter. For all that we missed going places, the loss of travel time afforded new time for these valuable activities. Somehow or other, it afforded time for writing a book. The book is not, of course, about my immediate environment, a source of reflection and solace though that was. It depicts lots of different places and contexts. While, as I say, not travelling had many benefits, writing about places far from home, in lockdown, was also enjoyable, and offered its own sort of therapy. As the stories that make up each of the case studies took shape, I maintained connections with people and places far and wide, seeming to defy the realities of spatial constraint. It was comforting to travel in my mind back into the humid days of my visit to Singapore in 2018, for example, or even to the many trips to London, knowing that I could not 199

THE CARING CITY

go there again for the time being. And yet, while memory and transcripts, photos and plans already collected were the resources I had to fall back on, the writing would not have been possible without the communications technologies that became such a major part of so many people’s working lives after March 2020 –​and all the new ways of relating and sustaining relationships that those afforded –​from the interview I conducted with Gehl’s Jeff Risom about Thrive Zones as he cycled around Copenhagen one September morning, to the ways in which the research in India was sustained over WhatsApp, Zoom, Google Drive and email with Tanvi Jain. I am hugely grateful to all the people who gave of their time to participate in this research, in particular: Andy Bates, Ursula Bauer, Wolfgang Betz, Mary Bowman, Chris Brown, Pearl Chee, Vicki Coombs, Martyn Craddock, Balkrishna Doshi, Isabelle Doucet, Beatrix Eichinger, Geraldine Dening, Simon Elmer, Ron Elston, Pete Elliott, Dietmar Feistel, Tim Fry, Martin Green, Limin Hee, Tanvi Jain, Eva Kail, Rajeev Kathpalia, Sabine Knierbein, Serena Khor, Jude Leighton, Hari Phillips, Leo Pollack, Jeff Risom, S. Vishwanath, Harshit Singh, Franz Sumnitsch, Andy Sutton and Stephen Witherford. I have learned a great deal over the whole period of thinking for and writing this book from my involvement in the Future Matters Collective based in Cardiff University and from all its wonderful members, specifically: Barbara Adam, Catherine Butler, Tim Fisher, Chris Groves, Julie Latchem-​Hastings, Seth Oliver, Peter Madden, Emma Renold and Elen Stokes. I have also benefitted from the collegiality of my colleagues at the Welsh School of Architecture, in particular Wesley Aelbrecht, Sam Clarke, Aseem Inam, Tahl Kaminer, Mhairi McVicar, Juliet Odgers and Shibu Raman. I am grateful for the thoughts and wisdom that you shared with me when I presented draft work at our school research seminars and on other occasions. A special thank you indeed is owed to three particular people who had a sustained and significant involvement in the project. Rob Imrie was a mentor throughout the process of producing the book. The book as it now stands owes a great deal to his intellectual generosity and honesty in commenting on draft work, and to the conversations about caring, writing, feminism and design that we had. Tanvi Jain introduced me to Indore, had me to stay at her family home, produced drawings, translated interviews and made the research in Bengaluru for Chapter 8 possible. Leo Hollis, also an honest critic and talented editor, advised at various stages of the project and commented in detail, offering expert guidance on the first full draft of my manuscript. The book would not have happened at all without Jeremy Newsum at Grosvenor and Neil Smith who gave me a unique opportunity –​the funding to develop a project close to my heart. The number-​one condition of this was that it should matter, that it should deal with a significant urban issue –​ no small ask, and yet a great privilege that I have endeavoured to honour. 200

Afterword and Acknowledgements

I have been very impressed with the support I’ve received from Bristol University Press since putting together my book proposal in 2017. Thanks especially to Emily Watt, Freya Trand, Angela Gage, Vaarunika Dharmapala and Annie Rose for your patience, skill, experience and wisdom. The book would also not have happened without the friendships and care relations in my life. Thanks especially to my friends Penny Bernstock, Kate Bosset, Trish Duncan, Gunter Gassner, Fenella Gentleman, Julie Gwilliam, Suzi Hall and Oriel Prizeman, Craig Spencer and to our New Zealand family including Simon Bartlett, Tim Bartlett and Alison Valentine. And though, words fail when it comes to the debt of gratitude I owe to my immediate family, I could likely not have begun or persevered without them. To my parents Jeremy and Trish Davis, my sisters Laura Lonsdale and Jenny Davis, my partner Margy Bartlett and my son Otto: for your love, encouragement, seemingly endless patience with my obsession with this project and for the constant support you have given me, I am immeasurably thankful. It is to this care that I owe everything really.

201

Notes Introduction 1 2

With regard to the latter, see for example, Pickett et al (2013). Care is not thought to be etymologically linked to the Latin word cura, though a connection is made by Heidegger (2000 [1927]), for whom the characteristics and narratives surrounding the personified Roman goddess Cura reflected what he saw as the double meaning of care as concern and as a practice of devotion to someone or something. Neither is care considered to be linked in this sense to the Latin word caritas and the connotations of Christian ‘brotherly love’ that this became associated with through medieval translations of the Bible (Arendt, 1951). Feminist care theorists such as Virginia Held strongly contest the idea that caritas, as the basis for the word ‘charity’, and care are in any way synonymous, highlighting the incompatibility of the concept of charity with the actions performed in looking after a child. However, the two words are commonly linked, both seen as labours involving love (Eva Feder Kittay, 1999) and preparedness to reach beyond the self through acts of giving, sharing and the provision of support for others in need.

Chapter 1 1

There is not time or space here to do it justice, and it is not substantially taken up in the chapters that follow, so suffice it to say there is clear resonance between Tronto’s conceptualization of care as concern and action with how Martin Heidegger theorizes care in a phenomenological sense in Being and Time (Heidegger, 2000 [1927]). According to Heidegger, care (Dasein) springs from the meaning that anything in the world holds for people. A sense of direction and motivation to act flow from that meaning. Care, for Heidegger, is thus at the root of existence –​‘to exist is to care’ –​to be involved in concern-​ful ways with people and things in their being and becoming.

Chapter 2 1

2

3

Jolma Architects has carried out practice-​based research into degrowth, encompassing ideas of community ownership, recycling, urban form and materiality. For more see: https://​ www.jolma.fi/​research.html Part W was founded by Zoe Berman in 2018. As stated in Part W’s manifesto (Part W, 2018) ‘the intergenerational collective is formed by women from diverse backgrounds who are working together to call time on gender inequality, in all its forms, in our built environment’. Further information about the collective and its founder may be found here: https://w ​ ww.studio ​ ber m ​ an.com/w ​ ritin ​ gs and https://w ​ ww.part-w ​ .com/m ​ anifesto Architects for Social Housing (ASH) was founded by Geraldine Dening and Simon Elmer in March 2015. As stated in their manifesto (ASH, 2015), ASH is ‘a Community Interest Company that organises working collectives of architects, urban designers, engineers,

202

Notes

quantity surveyors, planners, film-​makers, photographers, writers and housing campaigners for individual projects’. For more see: https://a​ rch ​ itec​ tsf​orso​cial​hous​ing.co.uk/​2015/​03/​ 26/​4/​. Specific items of their research are cited in Chapter 7.

Chapter 6 1

2

3

Doshi’s practice, Vastu Shilpa (Sanskrit for ‘the art of built environment’) was founded in 1955, and he began the School of Planning and Architecture in Ahmedabad as founding director in 1965. In 2016, he won the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize and he won the RIBA Gold Medal in 2021. There was a desire to do a similar survey of flats and gardens as lived in the Vienna project, and this was lined up to happen in the spring of 2020. However, the COVID-​19 pandemic put paid to that plan and it was therefore necessary to rely more heavily on drawings and other design-​related data. Rangolis are patterns created on the floor, especially during festivals, with coloured powder or flowers.

Chapter 7 1

2

3 4

It was originally an intention to contrast different sorts of places –​perhaps a housing project and a community garden or a set of historic buildings –​from different cities. However, the COVID-​19 lockdown in 2020 put paid to planned research outside the UK. Maintenance issues were widespread in the social housing sector towards the turn of the millennium. A combination of low management allowances combined with a lack of willingness to raise rents and other restrictions on social housing resulted in large repair backlogs. By 1996, this was estimated to stand at some £19 million for England alone. After 1997, when the Labour government under Tony Blair came into power, social housing providers were required to undertake stock condition surveys, and in 2000 the Decent Homes Standard introduced a requirement for all such providers to improve their stock by 2010. However, in many cases, the onerous final demands that this posed led local authorities to seek out options to dispose of their property assets through ‘stock transfer’. Royal Institute of British Architects Architects for Social Housing (2015). Retrieved from: https://​opengardenestates.com/​ open-​garden-​estates-​2015/​

Chapter 8 1 2

3 4

Rainwater Club website: https://​rainwaterclub.org/​design.htm Wellbeing of Future Generations Act 2015: https://​www.futuregenerations.wales/​ a-​globally-​responsible-​wales/​ Loyn and Co website: https://​loyn.co.uk/​ Pontardawe and Swansea Angling Society website: http://​www.pasas.org.uk/​earlyyears. html

203

References Abel, E and M. Nelson (1990) Circles of Care: Work and Identity in Women’s Lives, New York: SUNY Press. Abrams, P. and Bulmer, M. (2008) ‘Policies to promote informal social care: some reflections on voluntary Action, neighbourhood involvement, and neighbourhood care’, Ageing and Society, 5(1): 1–​18. Abramson, D., Park, Y., Stehling-​Ariza, T. and Redlener, I. (2013) ‘Children as bellwethers of recovery: dysfunctional systems and the effects of parents, households, and neighborhoods on serious emotional disturbance in children after Hurricane Katrina’, Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness, 4(S1): S17-​S27. Adam, B. and Groves, C. (2007) Future Matters: Knowledge, Action, Ethics, Leiden: Brill. Adam, B. and Groves, C. (2011) ‘Futures tended: Care and future-​oriented responsibility’, Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society, 31(1): 17–​27. Adey, P. (2013a) ‘Air/​Atmospheres of the megacity’, Theory, Culture and Society, 30 (7–​8): 291–​308. Adey, P. (2013b) ‘Coming up for air: comfort, conflict and the air of the megacity’, in A Brighenti (ed) Urban Interstices: The Aesthetics and the Politics of the In-​between, London: Routledge, pp 103–​19. Alexander C. (1965) ‘A city is not a tree’, Architectural Forum, 122(1): 58–​62. Alexander, C. Ishikawa, S. and Silverstein, M. (1977) A Pattern Language, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Alexander, C. (1979) The Timeless Way of Building, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Architects for Social Housing (ASH) (2015) ‘Manifesto’, ASH, [online] 26 March. Retrieved from: https://​architectsforsocialhousing.co.uk/​2015/​ 03/​26/​4/​ ASH (2016) ‘The ethics of estate regeneration: ASH response to the Royal Institute of British Architects’, ASH, [online] 24 August. Retrieved from: https://​architectsforsocialhousing.co.uk/​2016/​08/​24/​ ethics-​of-​estate-​regeneration-​ash-​response-​to-​the-​r iba-​2/​

204

References

A S H ( 2 0 1 7 ) ‘ T h e g o o d p r a c t i c e g u i d e t o re s i s t i n g e s t a t e demolition: ASH response to the GLA’, ASH, [online] 8 March. Retrieved from: https://​architectsforsocialhousing.co.uk/​2017/​03/​08/​ ash-​good-​practice-​guide-​to-​resisting-​estate-​demolition-​2/​ ASH (2018) ‘Central Hill: A case study in estate regeneration’, ASH, [online] 10 April. Retrieved from: https://​architectsforsocialhousing.co.uk/​2018/​ 04/​10/​central-​hill-​a-​case-​study-​in-​estate-​regeneration/​ ASH (2018) ‘Central Hill: A case study in estate regeneration’, ASH presentation to the Department of Architecture, Braunschweig University of Technology. Retrieved from: https://​architectsforsocialhousing. co.uk/​2018/​05/​01/​central-​hill-​a-​case-​study-​in-​estate-​regeneration-​ash-​ presentation-t​ o-t​ he-d​ epartment-o ​ f-a​ rchitecture-​braunschweig-​university-​ of-​technology/​ Artmann, M., Chen, X., Ioja, C., Hof, A., Onose, D., Poniży, L. et al (2017) ‘The role of urban green spaces in care facilities for elderly people across European cities’, Urban Forestry & Urban Greening, 27: 203–​13. Allen, F., Cain, R. and Meyer, C. (2019) ‘How people with dementia and their carers adapt their homes: A qualitative study’, Dementia, 18(3): 1199–​215.2 Amin, A. (2006) ‘The Good City’, Urban Studies, 43(5–​6): 1009–​23. Amin, A. (2010) ‘Cities and the ethic of care for the stranger’, JRF, [online] 4 March. Retrieved from: https://​www.jrf.org.uk/​report/​ cities-​and-​ethic-​care-​stranger Amin, A. (2014) ‘Lively infrastructure’, Theory, Culture and Society, 31(7–​ 8): 137–​61. Anderson, B. (2009) ‘Affective atmospheres’, Emotion, Space and Society, 2(2): 77–​81. Appadurai, A. (2013) The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition, London: Verso. Arber, S. and Ginn, J. (2008) ‘The meaning of informal care: Gender and the contribution of elderly people’, Ageing and Society, 10(4): 429–​54. Arendt, H. (1998 [1958]) The Human Condition (2nd edn), Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Baier, A. (1986) ‘Trust and antitrust’, Ethics, 96(2): 231–​60. Baier, A. (1995 [1987]) ‘The need for more than justice’, in V. Held (ed) Justice and Care: Essential Readings in Feminist Ethics, Boulder: Westview Press, pp 47–​61. Barnes, C. (2011) ‘Understanding disability and the importance of design for all’, Journal of Accessibility and Design for All, 1(1), 55–​80. Bates, C., Imrie, R. and Kullman, K. (2017) ‘Configuring the caring city: Ownership, healing, openness’, in C. Bates, R. Imrie and K. Kullman (eds) Care and Design: Bodies, Buildings, Cities, Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, pp 95–​114. 205

THE CARING CITY

Bauman, Z. (1993) Postmodern Ethics, Malden, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Blau, E. (2000) The Arc hitecture of Red Vienna, 1919–​1 934, Cambridge: MIT Press. Blume, C., Garbazza, C. and Spitschan, M. (2019) ‘Effects of light on human circadian rhythms, sleep and mood’, Somnology: Sleep Research and Sleep Medicine, 23(3): 147–​56. Böhme, G. (2013) ‘The art of the stage set as a paradigm for an aesthetics of atmospheres’, Ambiences, [online]. Retrieved from: http://​journals. openedition.org/​ambiances/​315 Böhme, G. (2017) Atmospheric Architectures: The Aesthetics of Felt Spaces, London, New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Böhme, G. (2018) ‘Urban atmospheres: Charting new directions for architecture and urban planning’ in C. Borch (ed), Architectural Atmospheres: On the Experience and Politics of Architecture, Basel: Birkhauser Verlag, pp 42–​60. Boughton, J. (2018) Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing, London: Verso. Bowen, J.R. (2011) ‘On the political construction of tradition: Gotong Royong in Indonesia’, The Journal of Asian Studies, 45(3): 545–​61. Bowlby, S. (2012) ‘Recognising the time–​space dimensions of care: Caringscapes and carescapes’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 44(9): 2101–​18. Bowlby, S., McKie, L., Gregory, S. and Macpherson, I. (2010) Interdependency and Care over the Lifecourse, Oxford, New York: Routledge. Boyer, K. (2018) ‘The emotional resonances of breastfeeding in public: The role of strangers in breastfeeding practice’, Emotion, Space and Society, 26: 33–​40. Braidotti, R. (2018) ‘A Theoretical Framework for the Critical Posthumanities’, Theory, Culture and Society, 36(6): 31–​61. Briller, S. and Calkins, M. (2000) ‘Conceptualising care settings as home, resort, or hospital’, Alzheimer’s Care Quarterly, 1(1): 17–​23. Bromley, E. (2012) ‘Building patient-​centeredness: Hospital design as an interpretive act’, Social Science and Medicine, 75(6):1057–​66. Brown, N., Buse, C., Lewis, A., Martin, D. and Nettleton, S. (2020) ‘Air care: An “aerography” of breath, buildings and bugs in the cystic fibrosis clinic’, Sociology of Health and Illness, 42(5): 972–​86. Brownlie, J. and Spandler, H. (2018) ‘Materialities of mundane care and the art of holding one’s own’, in C. Buse, D. Martin and S. Nettleton (eds) Materialities of Care: Encountering Health and Illness through Artefacts and Architecture, London: John Wiley and Sons, pp 14–28. Bubeck, D.E. (1995) Care, Gender, and Justice, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Burton, E. and Mitchell, L. (2006) Inclusive Urban Design: Streets for Life, Oxford: Elsevier. 206

References

Buse, C., Martin, D. and Nettleton, S. (2018) Materialities of Care: Encountering Health and Illness through Artefacts and Architecture, London: John Wiley and Sons. Caicco, G. (2007) ‘Introduction’, in G. Caicco (ed), Architecture, Ethics and the Personhood of Place, Lebanon: University Press of New England, pp 1–​40. Calderon, C. (2020) ‘Unearthing the political: Differences, conflicts and power in participatory urban design’, Journal of Urban Design, 25(1): 50–​64. Carmona, M. (2014) ‘Investigating urban design’, in M. Carmona (ed) Explorations in Urban Design: An Urban Design Research Primer, Basingstoke: Ashgate Publishing, pp 1–​14. Carmona, M. (2021) Public Places, Urban Spaces: The Dimensions of Urban Design (3rd edn), London: Routledge. Centre for Liveable Cities, Singapore and The Seoul Institute (2019) Age-​Friendly Cities: Lessons from Seoul and Singapore, Singapore: CLC Publications. Retrieved from: https://​www.clc.gov.sg/​docs/​default-​ source/​books/​book-​age-​friendly-​cities.pdf Chatzidakis, A., Hakim, J., Littler, J., Rottenberg, C., and Segal, L. (2020) The Care Manifesto, London: Verso. Cherniack, E.P. and Cherniack, A.R. (2016) ‘The benefit of pets and animal-​ assisted therapy to the health of older individuals’, Current Gerontology and Geriatrics Research, 2014, doi: 10.1155/​2014/​623203. Cherry, G.E. (1988) Cities and Plans: The Shaping of Urban Britain in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, London: Edward Arnold. Chia, J. (2013) Kampong Spirit, Gotong Royong: Life in Potong Pasir, 1955 to 1965, Singapore: Marshall Cavendish Editions. Chiodelli, F. and Baglione, V. (2014) ‘Living together privately: For a cautious reading of cohousing’, Urban Research and Practice, 7(1): 20–​34. Chr istenson, M. (2017) ‘Cr itical dimensions in architectural photography: Contributions to architectural knowledge’, Architecture_​ MPS, 11(2): 1–19. Clark, C., Myron, R., Stansfeld, S. and Candy, B. (2007) ‘A systematic review of the evidence on the effect of the built and physical environment on mental health’, Journal of Public Mental Health, 6(2): 14–​27. Clement, G. (1996) Care, Autonomy and Justice, Boulder: Westview Press. Clement, S. and Waitt, G. (2018) ‘Pram mobilities: affordances and atmospheres that assemble childhood and motherhood on-​the-​move’, Children’s Geographies, 16(3): 252–​65. Code, L. (2013) ‘Manufactured uncertainty: Epistemologies of mastery and the ecological imaginary’, in P. Rawes (ed), Relational Architectural Ecologies: Architecture, Nature and Subjectivity, London: Routledge, pp 73–90. Collier, J. (2006) ‘The Art of Moral Imagination: Ethics in the Practice of Architecture’, Journal of Business Ethics, 66(2): 307–​17.

207

THE CARING CITY

Condeluci, A. (2019 [1991]) Interdependence: The Route to Community (2nd edn), London: Routledge. Cornwell, J., Levenson, R., Sonola, L. and Poteliakhoff, E. (2012) Continuity of Care for Older Hospital Patients: A Call for Action, London: The King’s Fund. Crosby, A. and Adams Stein, J. (2020) ‘Repair’, Environmental Humanities, 12(1): 179–​85. Cross, N. (1997) ‘Descriptive models of creative design: application to an example’, Design Studies, 18(4): 427–​40. Cross, N. (2001) ‘Designerly ways of knowing: design discipline versus design science’, Design Issues, 17(3): 49–​55. Curtis, W.J. (1988) Balkrishna Doshi: An Architecture for India, New York: Rizzoli. Davidson, J. and Henderson, V. (2017) ‘The sensory city: Autism, design and care’, in C. Bates, R. Imrie, and K. Kullman (eds) Care and Design: Bodies, Buildings, Cities, Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, pp 74–​91. Dempsey, N., Brown, C., Raman, S., Porta, S., Jenks, M., Jones, C. and Bramley, G. (2010) ‘Elements of urban form’ in M. Jenks and C. Jones (eds) Dimensions of the Sustainable City, Dordrecht: Springer, pp 21–51. Donovan, J. (2017) Designing the Compassionate City: Creating Places Where People Thrive, London: Routledge. Dorling, D. (2011) So You Think You Know about Britain? London: Constable. Doucet, I. and Janssens, N. (2011) Transdisciplinary Knowledge Production in Architecture and Urbanism: Towards Hybrid Modes of Inquiry, New York: Springer. Dovey, K. (2016) Urban Design Thinking: A Conceptual Toolkit, London: Bloomsbury. Dovey, K. and Fisher, K. (2014) ‘Designing for adaptation: The school as socio-​spatial assemblage’, The Journal of Architecture, 19(1): 43–​63. Dowling, E. (2020) The Care Crisis: What Caused It and How Can We End It? (1st edn), London, New York: Verso. Duff, C. (2013) ‘The ethological city’, in H. Frichot and S. Loo (eds) Deleuze and Architecture, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp 215–​29. Dunleavy, P. (1981) The Politics of Mass Housing in Britain, 1945–​ 75: Study of Corporate Power and Professional Influence in the Welfare State, London: Clarendon Press. Edensor, T. (2011) ‘Entangled agencies, material networks and repair in a building assemblage: The mutable stone of St Ann’s Church, Manchester1’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 36(2): 238–​52. Edensor, T. (2015) ‘Light design and atmosphere’, Visual Communication, 14(3): 331–​50. Edensor, T. and Sumartojo, S. (2015) ‘Designing atmospheres: Introduction to special issue’, Visual Communication, 14(3): 251–​65. Edvardsson, D. (2005) Atmosphere in Care Settings: Towards a Broader Understanding of the Phenomenon, Umeå: Umeå University.

208

References

Edvardsson, D., Sandman, P. and Rasmussen, B. (2005) ‘Sensing an atmosphere of ease: A tentative theory of supportive care settings’, Scandinavian Journal of Caring Sciences, 19(4): 344–​53. Elliot, T.S (1989 [1962])‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ in T.S. Elliot The Complete Poems and Plays, London: Faber and Faber, pp 13–​17. Engster, D. (2005) ‘Rethinking care theory: The practice of caring and the obligation to care’, Hypatia, 20(3): 50–​74. Engster, D. (2007) The Heart of Justice: Care Ethics and Political Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Engster, D. (2015) Justice, Care and the Welfare State, Oxford: Oxford University Press.Evans, G. (2009) ‘Accessibility, urban design and the whole journey environment’, Built Environment (1978-​), 35(3): 366–​85. Fainstein, S. (1996) ‘Planning in a different voice’, in S. Campbell and S. Fainstein (eds) Readings in Planning Theory, Hokoken: Wiley-​Blackwell, pp 456–​60. Fathers, J. (2017) ‘Does design care?’Does Design Care … ? An International Workshop of Design Thought and Action, Imagination, Lancaster University, UK, 12–​13 September. Feder, E.K. (2007) Family Bonds: Genealogies of Race and Gender, New York: Oxford University Press. Fine, M.D. (2006) A Caring Society? Care and the Dilemmas of Human Services in the 21st Century, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Fisher, B. (1990) ‘Alice in the human services: A feminist analysis of women in the caring professions’, in E.K. Abel and M.K. Nelson (eds) Circles of Care: Work and Identity in Women’s Lives, New York: SUNY Press, pp 108–​31. Fisher, B. and Tronto, J. (1990) ‘Toward a feminist theory of caring’, in E. Abel and M. Nelson (eds) Circles of Care: Work and Identity in Women’s Lives, New York: SUNY Press, pp 35–​62. Fitz, A., Krasny, E. and Architektur Zentrum Wien (2019) Critical Care: Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet, Cambridge: MIT Press. Ford, L. (2000) The Spaces between Buildings, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Forsyth, A. (2015) ‘What is a walkable place? The walkability debate in urban design’, Urban Design International, 20(4): 274–​92. Frankfurt, H. (1998) The Importance of What We Care About: Philosophical Essays, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fraser, N. and Gordon, L. (2002) ‘A genealogy of dependency: Tracing a keyword of the US Welfare State’, in E.F. Kittay and E.K. Feder (eds) The Subject of Care: Feminist Perspectives on Dependency, New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers Inc, pp 14–​39.

209

THE CARING CITY

Fried, M. (1963) ‘Grieving for a lost home’, in L.J. Duhl (ed) The Urban Condition: People and Policy in the Metropolis, New York: Simon and Schuster, pp 151–​72. Friedman, M. (1997) ‘Autonomy and social relationships: Rethinking the feminist critique’, in D.T. Meyers (ed) Feminists Rethink the Self, Boulder: Westview, pp 40–​61. Friedman, M. (2003) Autonomy, Gender, Politics, New York: Oxford University Press. Frumkin, H. (2002) ‘Urban sprawl and public health’, Public Health Reports, 117(3): 201–​17. Frug, G. (1999) Citymaking: Building Communities without Building Walls, Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press. Fullilove, M.T. (1996) ‘Psychiatric implications of displacement: Contributions from the psychology of place’, The American Journal of Psychiatry, 153(12): 1516–​23. Fullilove, M.T. (2004) Root Shock: How Tearing up City Neighborhoods Hurts America, and What We Can Do about It, New York: NYU Press. Gage, F. (2018) Designing Social Equality: Architecture, Aesthetics, and the Perception of Democracy, New York: Routledge. Gandy, M. (2017) ‘Urban atmospheres’, Cultural Geographies, 24(3): 353–​74. Gauthier, Y., Fortin, G. and Jéliu, G. (2004) ‘Clinical application of attachment theory in permanency planning for children in foster care: The importance of continuity of care’, Infant Mental Health Journal, 25(4): 379–​96. Gehl, J. and Koch, J. (1987) Life between Buildings: Using Public Space, New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold. Gilligan, C. (1982) In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Givoni, B (1998) Climate Considerations in Building and Urban Design, New York, Chichester: John Wiley and Sons.Graham, S. (2014) ‘Super-​ tall and Ultra-​deep: The Cultural Politics of the Elevator’, Theory, Culture and Society, 31(7–​8): 239–​65. Graham, S. and Thrift, N. (2007) ‘Out of order: Understanding repair and maintenance’, Theory, Culture and Society, 24(3): 1–​25. Greene, D., Tehranifar, P., Hernandez-​Cordero, L. and Fullilove, M. (2011) ‘I used to cry every day: A model of the family process of managing displacement’, Journal of Urban Health, 88(3): 403–​16. Griffero, T. (2013) ‘The atmospheric “skin” of the city’, Ambiances [online], 399. Retrieved from: https://​doi.org/​10.4000/​ambiances.399 Groves, C. (2014) Care, Uncertainty and Intergenerational Ethics, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Gustafson, P. (2001) ‘Roots and routes: Exploring the relationship between place attachment and mobility’, Environment and Behavior, 33(5): 667–​86.

210

References

Habraken, N.J. (1999 [1961]) Supports: An Alternative to Mass Housing, London: Routledge. Hall, P. and Imrie, R. (1999) ‘Architectural practices and disabling design in the built environment’, Environment and Planning B, 26: 409–​25. Hall, S. (2012) City, Street and Citizen: The Measure of the Ordinary, London: Routledge. Hamington, M. (2004) Embodied Care: Jane Addams, Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, and Feminist Ethics, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Hamraie, A. (2013) ‘Designing collective access: A feminist disability theory of universal design’, Disability Studies Quarterly, 33(4), doi: http://​dx.doi. org/​10.18061/​dsq.v33i4.3871. Hamraie, A. (2017) Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability, Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press. Hankey, S. and Marshall, J.D. (2017) ‘Urban form, air pollution, and health’, Current Environmental Health Reports, 4(4), 491–​503. Harrison, S., Pile, S. and Thrift, N. (eds) (2004) Patterned Ground: Entanglements of Nature and Culture, London: Reaktion Books. Hayden, D. (1980) ‘What would a non-​sexist city be like? Speculations on housing, urban design, and human work’, Signs, 5(S3): S170–​S187. Heaton, J. (1999) ‘The gaze and visibility of the carer: A Foucauldian analysis of the discourse of informal care’, Sociology of Health and Illness, 21(6): 759–​77. Heidegger, M. (2000 [1927]) Being and Time, London: John Wiley and Sons. Heidegger, M. (2010 [1971]) ‘Building dwelling thinking’, in D. Krell (ed) Basic Writings, London: Routledge. Held, V. (1993) Feminist Morality. Transforming Culture, Society and Politics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Held, V. (ed) (1995) Justice and Care: Essential Readings in Feminist Ethics, Boulder: Avalon Publishing. Held, V. (2006) The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political and Global, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hill, J. (2003) Actions of Architecture: Architects and Creative Users, London: Psychology Press. Hong, P.K., Yap, M.T. and Gan, G.L. (2019) Ageing in Asia: Contemporary Trends and Policy Issues, Singapore: World Scientific. Hooper, L.G., Young, M.T., Keller, J.P. et al (2018) ‘Ambient air pollution and chronic bronchitis in a cohort of US women’, Environmental Health Perspectives, 126 (2 027005), doi:10.1289/​EHP2199. Imrie, R. (2012) ‘Universalism, Universal Design and equitable access to the built environment’, Disability and Rehabilitation, 34(10), 873–​82.

211

THE CARING CITY

Imrie, R. (2018) ‘The lonely city: Urban infrastructure and the problem of loneliness’, in E.D. Miller and O. Sagan (eds) Narratives of Loneliness: Multidisciplinary Perspectives from the 21st Century, London, New York: Routledge, pp 140–​53. Imrie, R. and Kullman, K. (2017) ‘Designing with care and caring with design’, in C. Bates, R. Imrie and K. Kullman (eds) Care and Design: Bodies, Building, Cities, Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, pp 1–​15. Inam, A. (2013) Designing Urban Transformation (1st edn), London, New York: Routledge. Ingold, T. (2012) ‘The atmosphere’, Chiasmi International, 14: 75–​87. Innes, A., Kelly, F. and Dincarslan, O. (2011) ‘Care home design for people with dementia: What do people with dementia and their family carers value?’, Aging and Mental Health, 15(5): 548–​56. Irschik, E., Kail, E., Klimmer-​Pölleritzer, A., Nuss, A., Puscher, G., Schönfeld, M. and Winkler, A. (eds) (2013) Gender Mainstreaming in Planning and Development, Vienna: Urban Development Vienna. Jackson, S. (2014) ‘Rethinking repair’, in T. Gillespie, P.J. Boczkowski and K.A. Foo (eds) Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality and Society, Cambridge: MIT Press, pp 221–​40. Jacobs, A. (2011) The Good City: Reflections and Imaginations, London: Routledge Jacobs, A. and Appleyard, D. (1987) ‘Toward an Urban Design Manifesto’, Journal of the American Planning Association, 53(1): 112–​20. Jacobs, J. (1992 [1961]) The Death and the Life of Great American Cities, New York: Vintage Books. Jain, T., Sheth, P. and Sheth, A. (2020) Stepwells of Ahmedabad: Water, Gender, Heritage, Madrid: Calmo. Johnson, J., Rolph, S. and Smith, R.R. (2010) Residential Care Transformed: Revisiting the Last Refuge, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Jolanki, O. and Vilkko, A. (2015) ‘The meaning of a “sense of community” in a Finnish senior co-​housing community’, Journal of Housing For the Elderly, 29(1–​2): 111–​25. Jonas, H. (1984) The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age, Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press. Jones, P. (2018) ‘Private finance initiative hospital architecture: Towards a political economy of the Royal Liverpool University Hospital’, in C. Buse, D. Martin and S. Nettleton (eds) Materialities of Care: Encountering Health and Illness Through Artefacts and Architecture, Chichester, Malden: Wiley Blackwell, pp 84–​96. Kadi, J. and Musterd, S. (2015) ‘Housing for the poor in a neo-​liberalising just city: Still affordable, but increasingly inaccessible’, Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie, 106(3): 246–​62.

212

References

Kail, E. and Irschik, E. (2016 [2013]) ‘Vienna: Progress towards a fair shared city’, in M. Roberts and I.S. Madariaga (eds.) Fair Shared Cities: The Impact of Gender Planning in Europe, London: Routledge, pp 193–​230. Kanigel, R. (2016) Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs, New York: Vintage. Keddie, J. and Tonkiss, F. (2010) ‘The market and the plan: Housing, urban renewal and socio-​economic change in London’, City, Culture and Society, 1(2): 57–​67. Kehl, K. and Volker, T. (2013) ‘Community and civil society returns of multi-​ generation cohousing in Germany’, Journal of Civil Society, 9(1): 41–​57. Kendall, S. (2000) Residential Open Building, London, New York: E. and F.N. Spon. Kendall, S. (2017) ‘Four decades of open building implementation: Realising individual agency in architectural infrastructures designed to last’, Architectural Design, 87(5): 54–​63. Kendall, S. (2020) ‘Residential Architecture as Infrastructure’, London: Routledge. Kenkmann, A., Poland, F., Burns, D., Hyde, P. and Killett, A. (2017) ‘Negotiating and valuing spaces: The discourse of space and “home” in care homes’, Health Place, 43: 8–​16. Kenner, A. (2019) ‘Emplaced care and atmospheric politics in unbreathable worlds’, Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space39(6): 1113–​28. Kittay, E.F. (2019 [1999]) Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency, Oxford: Routledge. Kittay, E.F. and Feder, E.K. (eds) (2002) The Subject of Care: Feminist Perspectives on Dependency, New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers Inc. Klinenberg, E. (2018) Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization and the Decline and Civic Life, New York: Broadway Books. Koggel, C. and Orme, J. (2010) ‘Care ethics: New theories and applications’, Ethics and Social Welfare, 4(2), 109–​14. Kullman, K. (2014) ‘Children, urban care, and everyday pavements’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 46(12): 2864–​80. Kyttä, M., Oliver, M., Ikeda, E., Ahmadi, E., Omiya, I. and Laatikainen, T. (2018) ‘Children as urbanites: Mapping the affordances and behavior settings of urban environments for Finnish and Japanese children’, Children’s Geographies, 16(3): 319–​32. Lang, J. (1994) Urban Design: The American Experience, New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Larsen, H.G. (2019) ‘Three phases of Danish cohousing: Tenure and the development of an alternative housing form’, Housing Studies, 34(8): 1349–​71. Lasner, M.G. (2018) ‘Architecture’s progressive imperative: Housing betterment in the 19th and 20th Centuries’, Architectural Design, 88(4): 14–​21. 213

THE CARING CITY

Leathermarket JMB. (2018) Five-​Year Business Plan, London: Leathermarket JMB. Lees, L. and Ferreri, M. (2016) ‘Resisting gentrification on its final frontiers: Learning from the Heygate Estate in London (1974–​2013)’, Cities, 57: 14–​24. Lerner, D. (1990) ‘Groundwater recharge in urban areas’, Atmospheric Environment (part B, ‘Urban Atmosphere’), 24(1): 29–​33. Lewicka, M. ( 2014) ‘In search of roots: Restoring continuity in a mobile world’, in L.C. Manzo and P. Devine-​W right (eds) Place Attachment: Advances in Theory, Methods and Applications (2nd edition), New York, London: Routledge, pp 61–​76. Lopes, A.M., Healy, S., Power, E.R., Gibson, K. and Crabtree, L. (2018) ‘Infrastructures of care: Opening up “home” as commons in a hot city’, Human Ecology Review, 24(2): 41–​59. Low, S.M., and Altman, I. (1992) ‘Place attachment’, in I. Altman and S.M. Low (eds) Place Attachment, Boston: Springer US, pp 1–​12. Luckin, B. (2003) ‘ “The heart and home of horror”: The Great London Fogs of the late nineteenth century’, Social History, 28(1): 31–​48. Lynch, K. (1981) Good City Form, Cambridge: MIT Press. MacFarlane, R. (2012) The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, London: Penguin. MacGregor, S. (2014) Beyond Mothering Earth: Ecological Citizenship and the Politics of Care, Vancouver: UBC Press. Madanipour, A. (2003) Public and Private Spaces of the City, London, New York: Routledge. Madanipour, A. and Hull, A. (2016 [2001]) The Governance of Place: Space and Planning Processes, London: Routledge. Mah, A. (2009) ‘Devastation but also home: Place attachment in areas of industrial decline’, Home Cultures, 6(3): 287–​310. Mangione, G. (2017) ‘Making sense of things: Constructing aesthetic experience in museum gardens and galleries’, Museum and Society, 14(1): 33–​51. Mangione, G. (2018) ‘The art and nature of health: A study of therapeutic practice in museums’, in C. Buse, D. Martin and S. Nettleton (eds) Materialities of Care: Encountering Health and Illness Through Artefacts and Architecture, London: John Wiley & Sons, pp 41–53. Mann, B. (2002) ‘Dependence on place, dependence in place’, in E.F. Kittay and E.K. Feder (eds) The Subject of Care: Femenist Perspectives on Dependency, New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, pp 348–​69. Manzo, L.C. (2014) ‘Exploring the shadow side: Place attachment in the context of stigmas, displacement and social housing’, in L.C. Manzo and P. Devine-​Wright (eds) Place Attachment: Advances in Theory, Methods and Applications, Abingdon: Routledge, pp 178–​91.

214

References

Manzo, L.C. and Devine-​Wright, P. (eds) (2014) Place Attachment: Advances in Theory, Methods and Applications, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Martin, D., Nettleton, S. and Buse, C. (2019) ‘Affecting care: Maggie’s centres and the orchestration of architectural atmospheres’, Social Science and Medicine, 240: 1–​8. Mehta, K.K. (2006) ‘A critical review of Singapore’s policies aimed at supporting families caring for older members’, Journal of Aging and Social Policy, 18(3–​4): 43–​57. Metzger, J. (2014) ‘Spatial planning and/​as caring for more-​than-​human place’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 46(5): 1001–​11. Milligan, C. (2001) Geographies of Care: Space, Place and the Voluntary Sector, Oxfordshire: Routledge. Milligan, C. (2016 [2009]) There’s No Place like Home: Place and Care in an Ageing Society, Abingdon: Routledge. Ministry of Health (2012) Better Health, Better Future for All, Singapore: Ministry of Health Mitchell, L., Burton, E., Raman, S., Blackman, T., Jenks, M. and Williams, K. (2003) ‘Making the outside world dementia-​friendly: Design issues and considerations’, Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 30(4): 605–​32. Mol, A. (2010) ‘Care and its values: Good care in the nursing home’, in A. Mol, I. Moser and J. Pols (eds) Care in Practice: On Tinkering in Clinics, Homes and Farms, Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, pp 215–​35. Mol, A., Pols, J. and Moser, I. (2010) ‘Care: Putting practice into theory’, in A. Mol, J. Pols and I. Moser (eds) Care in Practice: On Tinkering in Clinics, Homes and Farms, Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, pp 7–​26. Moore, R. (2016) ‘Housing estates: If they aren’t broken … ’, The Guardian, [online] 31 January. Retrieved from: https://​www.theguardian.com/​ artanddesign/2​ 016/j​ an/3​ 1/c​ ouncil-e​ states-i​ f-t​ hey-a​ rent-b​ roken-l​ ambeth-​ council-​central-​hill-​estate-​social-​housing-​affordable Morgan, D. (2009) Acquaintances: The Space Between Intimates and Strangers, Maidenhead: The Open University Press. Morris, J. (1997) ‘Care of empowerment? A disability rights perspective’, Social Policy and Administration, 31(1): 54–​60. Muhr, C. and Temel, R. (2006) Delugan Meissl Associated Architects, Cologne: Daab. Mumford, L. (1961) The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations and Its Prospects, New York: Harvest/​HBJ. Munro, E. (2013) ‘People just need to feel important, like someone is listening: Recognising museums’ community engagement programmes as spaces of care’, Geoforum, 48: 54–​62.

215

THE CARING CITY

Nettleton, S., Buse, C. and Martin, D. (2018) ‘Envisioning bodies and architectures of care: Reflections on competition designs for older people’, Journal of Aging Studies, 45: 54–​62. Nichols, J.L. and Adams, E. (2013) ‘The flex-​nest: The accessory dwelling unit as adaptable housing for the life span’, Interiors, 4(1): 31–​52. Noddings, N. (1984) Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education, Berkeley: University of California Press. Nord, C. and E. Högström (2017) Caring Architecture: Institutions and Relational Practices, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Nussbaum, M. (2000) Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Oldenburg, R. (1989) The Great Good Places: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Community Centres, Beauty Parlours, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and How they Get You Through the Day, New York: Paragon House. O’Neill, O. (1992) ‘Justice, gender and international boundaries’, in R. Attfied and B. Wilkins (eds) International Justice and the Third World, Oxford: Routledge, pp 47–​72. Pafka, E. and Dovey, K. (2017) ‘Permeability and interface catchment: Measuring and mapping walkable access’, Journal of Urbanism: International Research on Placemaking and Urban Sustainability, 10(2): 150–​62. Pallasmaa, J. (2009) ‘Space, place, memory and imagination: The temporal dimension of existential space’ in M. Treib (ed) Spatial Recall: Memory in Architecture and Landscape, London: Routledge, pp 25–​38. Pallasmaa, J. (2014) ‘Space, place and atmosphere: Peripheral perception in atmospheric experience’, in C. Borsch (ed) (2014) Architectural Atmospheres: On the Experience and Politics of Architecture, Berlin, Boston: Birkhäuser, pp 18–​42. Park, G. and Evans, G. (2016) ‘Environmental stressors, urban design and planning: Implications for human behaviour and health’, Journal of Urban Design, 21(4): 453–​70. Part W (2018) ‘Manifesto’, Part W [online]. Retrieved from: https://​www. part-​w.com/​manifesto Perez-​Gomez, A. (2007) ‘Ethics and poetics in architectural education’, in G. Caicco (ed) Architecture, Ethics and the Personhood of Place, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, pp 119–​34. Petrescu, D. (2012) ‘Relationscapes: Mapping agencies of relational practice in architecture’, City, Culture and Society, 3(2): 135–​40. Petrescu, D. and Trogal, K. (2017) The Social Production of Architecture: Politics, Values and Actions in Contemporary Practice, London: Routledge. Petterson, T. (2012) ‘Conceptions of care: Altruism, feminism and mature care’, Hypatia, 27(2): 366–​89

216

References

Pickett, S.T.A., Cadenasso, M.L., and McGrath, B. (eds) (2013) Resilience in Ecology and Urban Design: Linking Theory and Practice for Sustainable Cities, Dordrecht: Springer. Pont, K., Wadley, D., Ziviani, J. and Khan, A. (2013) ‘The influence of urban form and family decision making on children’s travel to school’, Journal of Urban Design, 18(3): 363–​82. Power, E. (2019) ‘Assembling the capacity to care: Caring-​with precarious housing’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 44(4), 763–​77. Power, E. and Mee, K. (2020) ‘Housing: An infrastructure of care’, Housing Studies, 35(3): 484–​505. Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2011) ‘Matters of care in technoscience: Assembling neglected things’, Social Studies of Science, 41(1): 85–​106. Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2015) ‘Making time for soil: Technoscientific futurity and the pace of care’, Social Studies of Science, 45(5): 691–​716. Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017) Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds (vol 41), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rawes, P. (ed) (2013) Relational Architectural Ecologies: Architecture, Nature and Subjectivity, Oxford: Routledge. Rawstorne, P. and Hollamby, E. (1965) ‘Lambeth’, RIBA Journal, 7(65): 350–​7. Robinson, F. (2010) ‘After liberalism in world politics? Towards an international political theory of care’, Ethics and Social Welfare, 4(2): 130–​44. Rode, P., Floater, G., Thomopoulos, N., Docherty, J., Schwinger, P., Mahendra, A. and Fang, W. (2017) ‘Accessibility in cities: Transport and urban form’, in G. Meyer and S. Shaheen (eds) Disrupting Mobility: Impacts of Sharing Economy and Innovative Transportation on Cities, Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp 239–​73. Russell, the Rt Hon (2009 [1880]) London Fogs, London: Dodo Press. Sadler, S. (1999) The Situationist City, Cambridge: MIT Press. Scannell, L. and Gifford, R. (2014) ‘Comparing the theories of interpersonal and place attachment’, in L. Manzo and P. Devine-​Wright (eds) Place Attachment: Advances in Theory, Methods and Application, Abingdon: Routledge, pp 45–​60. Schmid, S. (2018) A History of Collective Living: Models of Shared Living, Basel: Birkhauser. Seamon, D. (2014) ‘Place attachment and phenomenology: The synergistic dynamism of place’, in L. Manzo and P. Devine-​Wright (eds) Place Attachment: Advances in Theory, Methods and Applications, Abingdon: Routledge, pp 11–​22. Sennett, R. (2007) ‘The open city’, in R. Burdett and D. Sudjic (eds) The Endless City, London: Phaidon, pp 290–​8. Seuss, Dr (1971) The Lorax, New York: Random House.

217

THE CARING CITY

Sevenhuijsen, S. (2000) ‘Caring in the third way: The relation between obligation, responsibility and care in Third Way discourse’, Critical Social Policy, 20(1): 5–​37. Sevenhuijsen, S. (2003) ‘The place of care: The relevance of the feminist ethic of care for social policy’, Feminist Theory, 4(2): 179–​97. Sevenhuijsen, S. (2016) ‘Care and attention’, South African Journal of Higher Education, 32(6): 19–​30. Shuai, Y., Shuwen, L., Bin, C., Zeming, X. and Jing, P. (2021) ‘Responses of heat stress to temperature and humidity changes due to anthropogenic heating and urban expansion in South and North China’, Frontiers in Earth Science, 9, https://​doi.org/​10.3389/​feart.2021.673943 Shove, E. (2003) ‘Converging conventions of comfort, cleanliness and convenience’, Journal of Consumer Policy, 26(4): 395–​418. Smith, S. (2005) ‘States, markets and an ethic of care’, Political Geography, 24(1): 1–​20. Souter-​Brown, G. (2014) Landscape and Urban Design for Health and Well-​ Being: Using Healing, Sensory and Therapeutic Gardens, London: Routledge. Spodek, H. (1983) ‘Squatter Settlements in Urban India: Self-​Help and Government Policies’, Economic and Political Weekly, 18(36–​7): 1575–​86. Star, S. and Strauss, A. (1999) ‘Layers of silence, arenas of voice: The ecology of visible and invisible work’, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 8(1): 9–​30. Steele, J. (1998) The Complete Architecture Of Balkrishna Doshi: Rethinking Modernism For The Developing World, London: Thames and Hudson Ltd. Steen, M. (2013) ‘Virtues in participatory design: Cooperation, curiosity, creativity, empowerment and reflexivity’, Science and English Ethics, 19: 945–​62. Stefansdottir, H. (2018) ‘The role of urban atmosphere for non-​work activity locations’, Journal of Urban Design, 23(3): 319–​35. Stefansen, K. (2017) ‘Staging a caring atmosphere: Child-​friendliness in barnahus as a multidimensional phenomenon’, in S. Johansson, K. Stefansen, E. Bakketeig and A. Kaldal (eds) Collaborating Against Child Abuse: Exploring the Nordic Barnahus Model, Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp 35–​56. Steinfeld, E. and Maisel, J. (2012) Universal Design: Creating Inclusive Environments, London: Wiley. Stewart, K. (1996) A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an ‘Other’ America, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.Stewart, K. (2010) ‘Worlding refrains’ in M. Gregg and G. Seigworth (eds) The Affect Theory Reader, Durham and London: Duke University Press. Stewart, K. (2011) ‘Atmospheric attunements’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 29(3): 445–​53.

218

References

Sugihara, S. and Evans, G.W. (2000) ‘Place attachment and social support at continuing care retirement communities’, Environment and Behavior, 32(3): 400–9. Sumartojo, S., Pink, S., Duque, M., and Vaughan, L. (2020) ‘Atmospheres of care in a psychiatric inpatient unit’, Design for Health, 4(1): 24–​42. Talen, E. and Koschinsky, J. (2014) ‘Compact, walkable, diverse neighborhoods: Assessing effects on residents’, Housing Policy Debate, 24: 717–​50. Thomas, C. (2007) Sociologies of Disability and Illness: Contested Ideas in Disability Studies and Medical Sociology, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Thomas, T.M. (1966) ‘Derelict land in South Wales’, The Town Planning Review, 37(2): 125–​141. Thomson, G. and Newman, P. (2018) ‘Cities and the Anthropocene: Urban governance for the new era of regenerative cities’, Urban Studies, 57(7): 1502–​19. Till, J. (2009) Architecture Depends, Cambridge: MIT Press. Till, K.E. (2012) ‘Wounded cities: Memory-​work and a place-​based ethics of care’, Political Geography, 31(1): 3–​14. Titchkosky, T. (2011) The Question of Access: Disability, Space, Meaning, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Travaglio, M., Yu, Y., Popovic, R., Selley, L., Leal, N.S., and Martins, L.M. (2020) ‘Links between air pollution and COVID-​19 in England’, medRxiv, doi: 10.1101/​2020.04.16.20067405 Treadaway, C. and Fennell, J. (2017) ‘How do we create attractive personalised and customised care?’ Does Design Care…? An International Workshop of Design Thought and Action, Imagination, Lancaster University, UK, 12–​13 September. Trogal, K. (2016) ‘Care Of Commons: Exploring questions of care, gifts and reciprocity in making new commons’, in K. Trogal and D. Petrescu (eds) The Social (Re)Production of Architecture. Politics, Values and Actions in Contemporary Practice, London: Routledge, pp 159–​74. Trogal, K. (2018) ‘Resilience as interdependence: Learning from the care ethics of subsistence practices’ in K. Trogal, I. Bauman, R. Lawrence, and D. Petrescu (eds) Architecture and Resilience: A Series of Interdisciplinary Dialogues, London: Routledge, pp 190–​203. Tronto, J. (1993) Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care, New York: Routledge. Tronto, J. (1999) ‘Age segregated housing as a moral problem: An exercise in rethinking ethics’, in M.U. Walker (ed) Mother Time, Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, pp 261–​77. Tronto, J. (2001) ‘An ethic of care’, in M. Holstein and P. Mitzen (eds) Ethics in Community-​Based Elder Care, New York: Springer Publishing Company, pp 60–8. 219

THE CARING CITY

Tronto, J. (2010) ‘Creating caring institutions: Politics, plurality, and purpose’, Ethics and Social Welfare, 4(2): 158–​71. Tronto, J. (2013) Caring Democracy: Markets, Equality and Justice, New York, London: New York University Press. Tronto, J. (2019) ‘Caring architecture’, in E. Kransy and A. Fitz (eds) Critical Care: Architecture for a Broken Planet, Cambridge: MIT Press, pp 26–​32. Tuan, Y.F. (1974) Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes and Values, New York: Columbia University Press. Ujang, N. and Zakariya, K. (2015) ‘Place attachment and the value of place in the life of the users’, Procedia–​Social and Behavioral Sciences, 168: 373–​80. Vale, L.J. (1997) ‘Empathological places: Residents’ ambivalence toward remaining in public housing’, Journal of Planning Education and Research, 16(3): 159–​75. Verbrugge, L.M. and Ang, S. (2018) ‘Family reciprocity of older Singaporeans’, European Journal of Ageing, 15(3): 287–​99. Verkerk, M.A. (2001) ‘The care perspective and autonomy’, Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy, 4(3): 289–​94. Vert, C., Sánchez-​Benavides, G., Martínez, D., Gotsens, X., Gramunt, N., Cirach, M. and Gascon, M. (2017) ‘Effect of long-​term exposure to air pollution on anxiety and depression in adults: A cross-​sectional study’, International Journal of Hygiene and Environmental Health, 220(6): 1074–​80. Vishwanath, C.K. (2019) ‘Degrowth: A perspective from Bengaluru, South India’, in F. Schneider (ed) Housing for Degrowth, London: Routledge, pp 133–​44. Walker, A. (1996) The New Generational Contract: Intergenerational Relations, Old Age, and Welfare, London: University College London Press. Walker, M.U. (2003) Moral Contexts, London, Boulder, New York, Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers Inc. Walker, M.U. (2006) Moral Repair: Reconstructing Moral Relations after Wrongdoing, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ward, P. (2019) ‘Self-​help housing’, in A.M. Orum (ed) The Wiley-​Blackwell Encyclopedia of Urban and Regional Studies (1st edn), Hoboken: Wiley-​ Blackwell, pp 1–​6. Watt, P. (2018) ‘ “This pain of moving, moving, moving”: Evictions, displacement and logics of expulsion in London’, L’Année sociologique, 68(1): 67–​100. Weiner, K. and Will, C. (2018) ‘Thinking with care infrastructures: People, devices and the home in home blood pressure monitoring’, Sociology of Health and Illness, 40(2): 270–​82. Whyte, W.H. (1980) The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, Washington: Conservation Foundation. Williams, J. (2005) ‘Designing neighbourhoods for social interaction: The case of cohousing’, Journal of Urban Design, 10(2): 195–​227. 220

References

Winz, M. (2018) ‘An atmospheric approach to the city-​p sychosis nexus: Perspectives for researching embodied urban experiences of people diagnosed with schizophrenia’, Ambiances [online], doi.org/​10.4000/​ ambiances.1163 Wong, T.H. (2006) ‘Water sensitive urban design: The journey thus far’, Australasian Journal of Water Resources, 10(3): 213–22. Worpole, K. (2009) Modern Hospice Design: The Architecture of Palliative Care, London: Routledge. Worpole, K. (2020) ‘A home at the end of life: Changing definitions of “homeliness” in the hospice movement and end-​of-​life care in the UK’, in B. Pasveer, O. Synnes and I. Moser (eds) Ways of Home Making in Care for Later Life (Health, Technology and Society), London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp 135–​58. Wunderlich, F. (2018) ‘Temporal(ities): A new perspective into the design of time, rhythm, and atmosphere in urban places’, in M. Koch, R. Tribble, Y. Siegmund, A. Rost and Y. Werner (eds) New Urban Professions: A Journey through Practice, Berlin: JOVIS Publishers. Young, I.M. (2003) ‘Autonomy, welfare reform and meaningful work’, in E.F. Kittay and E.K. Feder (eds) The Subject of Care: Feminist Perspectives on Dependency, New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers Inc. Young, M. and Willmott, P. (1957) Family and Kinship in East London, London: Pelican Books. Yuen, B. (2019a) ‘Adapting public housing to age in place in Singapore’, in A. Lane (ed) Urban Environments for Healthy Ageing: A Global Perspective, London: Routledge. Yuen, B., Močnik, Š., Yu, F.C.H., and Yap, W. (2020) ‘State of ageing-​ friendly city in Singapore’, in B. Yuen, Š. Močnik, F.C.H. Yu, and W. Yap (eds), Ageing-​Friendly Neighbourhoods in Singapore, Asia-​Pacific, Europe and North America: An Annotated Bibliography, Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp 1–​23.

221

Index References to endnotes show both the page number and the note number (231n3). A accessibility  9, 25–​6, 83, 87, 189, 192 accessibility code, Singapore  77 accessible design  21, 42 and autonomy  63–​5 and permeability  81 and street design  69 Adam, B.  20, 170, 194, 196 care for futures  14, 21, 184 recognizing dependency  174–​5 Adey, Peter  91, 93 affective atmospheres  89, 95, 103, 104–​9 affordable housing  28, 62, 131, 148, 158, 180, 186 ageing society  75, 77, 87, 190 age-​in-​place  37, 41 agency of users in urban change  117 air and air quality  22, 103, 104, 111 air pollution  91, 97, 100, 103 and atmospheres  90–​4 and children  96–​102 fresh air circulation  81 health conditions  92, 93, 97 Alexander, Christopher  119 almshouses in London  36, 37, 45–​53, 192, 193 alternative technologies  196 amenities  78, 120 America  40–​1, 43, 69, 84, 96, 116, 131 cities in  3, 32, 40, 141 Amin, Ash  7, 56 Amsterdam  42 Ang, S.  80 Anthropocene, the  174, 187 Appadurai, Arjun  182 Aranya Low Cost Housing, Indore  117, 118–​29, 193 design of site  120–​5 Architects for Social Housing (ASH)  31, 153, 155, 158, 163 Arendt, Hannah  16 aromatic plants  107

Arup  159 atmosphere  about  88–​90 affective atmospheres  89, 95, 103, 104–​9 atmospheric attunement  95, 96, 99 atmospheric urban design  9, 110–​11 and care ethics  94–​6 as an issue for care  26, 90–​4, 190–​4 see also air and air quality attentiveness  17, 28, 32, 137, 193 attunement  95, 96, 99 austerity politics  40 autism  95 autonomy  9, 15, 51 and accessibility  63–​5 conception of  84 as a myth  187 relational autonomy  16 Aylesbury estate  146 B babies  93–​4, 108 Bacon, Edmund  23 Baier, Annette  19, 38, 136, 195 Barcelona  96 Barosch, Rajek  131 barriers  133 barrier-​free design  71, 81 Bates, C.  93, 135 Bauer, Ursula  65, 67, 87 Baumann, Zigmunt  44, 58 ‘we-​experience’  44 ‘bedroom tax’  52 Bell Phillips Architects  140, 148 belonging, sense of  27 Bengaluru, India  166, 171 Bermondsey, London  36, 139 history and redevelopment  148–​9 Bernard van Leer Foundation  97 Bethnal Green, London  47 Betz, Wolfgang  70–​1, 75, 86

222

Index

bicycles  70, 133, 136, 180 Biome Environmental Solutions  166, 167, 172, 176, 178 BKK-​3  53, 55, 58, 60, 193 Black Lives Matter  31 blind people  64 Böhme, G.  95 Bowlby, Sophia  112, 113, 114, 138 Bowman, Mary  90, 104, 105, 107 Boyer, Kate  94 breastfeeding  94 Breathe London  97 Bristol  31 Bromley, E.  33 Brown, N.  92 Brownlie, J.  25 Bubeck, Diemut  18, 165 building  Building Act, 1984 (UK)  158 building controls  31 materials  149, 150–​1, 183 security  53 theory  34–​5 Buse, C.  24, 27 C Cameron, David  155 capacity for change  138 see also openness capitalism  31, 139, 164, 185, 187 Cardiff, Wales  167, 169 care  about  4–​7, 11–​12 and accessibility  63–​5, 65–​73, 75–​83, 83–​7 and atmospheres  26, 90–​6, 96–​102, 102–​10 and building theory  34–​5 capabilities perspective  2, 13, 21 ‘care in the community’  39–​40 continuity and attachment  140–​4 and cultural factors  114 and dependency  171–​5 for future generations  19–​21, 165–​7, 184–​8 labour  15, 25, 38, 44, 192 and materiality  113–​16 and needs  12–​14, 126 and openness  112–​13, 116–​18, 137–​8 placing care  36–​43, 43–​53, 61–​2, 195 as process  17–​19 relational care  14–​17 strangers  2, 56 and technology  51 unfolding of care  113–​15, 192 and urban design  24–​9, 29–​34 value of care  86, 195 care ethics  2, 6, 187, 190 and capabilities  13 and locations  37 and morals  14 through design  62

and urban atmospheres  94–​6 of urban design  191–​7 caring city  10, 62, 111, 164, 170, 192, 196 ‘caringscapes’  114, 138 Carmona, Matthew  2, 4, 24 Central Hill, Crystal Palace  140, 153–​63, 195 refurbishment strategy  158–​9 Save Central Hill campaign  155–​8 Chee, Paul  81 children  11, 42, 59, 60, 69 and air pollution  96–​102, 97–​8, 111 childcare  26, 33, 38, 78, 80, 90, 98, 194 and gardens  107, 109 and Hurricane Katrina  141 and play spaces  23 Christenson, Mike  136 cities  3, 7 and atmospheres  91 continual adaptation  117 issues of care in  189 class prejudice  91 Clean Air Act, 1952  100 Clement, S.  93 climate change  12, 31, 91, 170, 175, 180, 184 climate considerations  82, 121 coal  100, 169 Code, Lorraine  173 cohousing  45, 54, 62 collective living  54 colonialism  31, 119, 185 colour and texture  26 community  25, 39, 40, 49, 53, 55, 56, 60, 75, 76, 120, 134, 138, 148, 153, 176 communal spaces  62 community farm  78 concrete buildings  136–​7 ‘concrete jungles’  155 Condeluci, Al  41 Conservative government (UK)  40, 144, 155 construction industry  66 continuity and care  9, 143, 157, 163–​4 and place-​attachments  140 Copenhagen, Denmark  90, 96, 102, 111 cost of living  46, 129 council housing  47, 147 myths of  156 COVID-​19  87, 91, 99, 122, 143, 167 Cressingham Gardens Estate  154 Cross, N.  32, 33 Crystal Palace, London  153 cultural activities, 140  cultural factors and care  114 D day care  37, 38, 41, 110, 131 death and dying  20, 33, 45, 91 air pollution  101 heat stress  91 Decent Homes programme  145–​6, 147, 158

223

THE CARING CITY

deindustrialization  149, 169, 173 deinstitutionalization  41, 61–​2 Delugan Meissl Associated Architects  118, 131 democracy ideals  7, 18 democratization of design  117 Dening, Geraldine  153, 156, 158, 159, 163, 164 Denmark  42, 54, 90, 96, 102, 111 dependency  46, 85, 113, 187 about  6, 16 and care  171–​5 forms of  118, 192 patterns of  26 and vulnerable people  23, 38 depression  91, 93 design  see urban design difference, recognizing  14, 23, 26, 71, 86, 191, 195 and accessibility  64–​5 disabled people  1, 16, 25–​6, 38, 44, 55, 111 and design  85 wheelchair users  26, 69, 82, 135 disabling design  22–3 displacement  46, 139, 140, 141, 153 diverse people  1, 2, 55, 56, 71, 192 Diwali  122, 127 Donovan, Jenny  23 Dorling, D.  40 Doshi, Balkrishna  112, 119, 128, 137 Dovey, Kim  4, 24, 64, 81 Dowling, Emma  87 drinking water  see water Duff, Cameron  134 E Eberling, Philip  49, 193 EBG  129 ecological  31, 55, 167, 173, 175, 181, 185, 187 ecology  2, 11 ecosystems  2, 3, 22, 89, 168, 169, 172, 180 Edensor, T.  95 Edvardsson, D.  26 effective caring  17 Eichinger, Beatrix  60 Einsiedlerpark  68 elderly people  23, 25, 36, 45, 76, 194 in council housing  147 locations of care  41 and loneliness  196 retirement villages  43 and urban living  45–​53 Eliot, T.S.  89, 90 Elliott, Pete  157, 162 Elmer, Simon  153, 156, 157 ‘embodied persons’  191 emotions, the role of, and care ethics  7 empowerment  33, 119, 122, 138

energy costs  133, 158–​9, 170, 182, 184, 186 Engster, Daniel  12, 13, 16, 67, 87, 165 environments, degrading  31, 166, 173, 189, 190 ethics of urban design  10 Europe  40, 91 European air pollution limit  100 European Lung Foundation  98 Evans, Graeme  27, 64 everyday lives  8, 15, 27, 34, 35, 58, 96, 116 of children  98, 101 household clutter  136 F Fainstein, Susan  191 families  developing homes overtime  122 everyday lives  27, 40 family care  20, 76 family homes  37, 40, 54 Farrar Huxley  180 Fathers, James  31 Feder, Ellen  16, 40 Feistel, Daniel  131, 134 feminist position  6, 18 and autonomy  15 feminist care ethics  8, 174 feminist scholars  6, 191 Fennel, J.  32 financial support  61, 76, 87, 119, 180 between generations  81 low-​cost loans  118 state financing  131, 138 Fine, Michael  5 Fisher, Berenice  6, 17–​19 flourishing of generations  184 fogs  98, 100 food  14, 27, 80, 84 Ford, L.  3 fossil fuels  96, 100, 169, 173 Fried, Marc  141 fuel exhaust  91, 94, 97, 101–​2 fuel poverty  170 see also energy costs Fullilove, Mindy  141 future generations  9, 11, 19–​21, 190, 194, 196 and care  21, 165–​7, 174–​5, 196 care through design  184–​8 tending futures  187–​8 and urban designs  23 Future Generations Act, Wales  186 G Gandy, Matthew  89 gardens  26–​7, 42, 51, 56, 60, 81, 85, 93, 133 water in  104, 109 Gehl, Jan  90, 96, 99, 101 Life Between Buildings  96–​7

224

Index

gender  and care  28 gender equity in construction  31 gender mainstreaming strategy  65, 66, 87 gender politics  6 gender roles  15, 18, 38, 40, 67 gentrification  3, 110, 127, 139, 149 Gilligan, Carol  6, 15, 20, 56, 63 In a Different Voice  6 girls  see women global financial crisis  130, 142 ‘goodness’  7 ‘good care’  7, 19, 191 goodness of urban design  10, 28 Google  97, 143 government policy  14, 66, 119, 155 Green, Martin  146 Greene, D.  142 green economies  186 green lung  90, 104, 110 Green Party councillor  157 green spaces  68, 98, 104 Groves, C.  20, 170, 194, 196 care for futures  14, 21, 184 recognizing dependency  174–​5 Guinness Trust  144 Gustafson Porter Bowman  90, 102–​10, 111 H Hayden, Doleres  40, 43 Hammington, Maurice  194 Hamraie, A.  86 Harrison, S.  174 hawker centre  78 Hayden, Dolores  40 Held, V.  7, 13, 60, 197, 202n2 health  22, 141, 143 of the elderly  40–​2, 80 health conditions  23 health inequality  170 healthy living  82 and housing conditions  31 long-​term health  96 mental health  39, 91, 93, 157, 190 patterns of  38, 41 healthcare  access to  46, 84 air and air quality  91, 96–​8 centralised  30 healthcare contexts  24 healthcare settings  26, 27, 93 Heaton, J.  39 heat stress  91 Heidegger, Martin  115 Heimbau  129–​30 Held, Virginia  13, 15, 60, 187, 192 heritage  14 Heygate estate  146 Hill, J.  33

Hindu society  122, 127, 128 historical buildings  95 Hollamby, Edward  140, 154, 163 homelessness  1, 147 homeowners  138 Hopton Street almshouses  48, 49, 52 housing  42, 131, 148, 158, 180, 186, 195 affordable and safe  28, 62 affordable housing  131, 148, 158, 180 conditions of  31, 47 developing over time  121, 134, 137, 151 high rise developments  77 and insulation  159 intergenerational housing  41 mass housing  116, 144 with shared resources  56 from shipping containers  42 social housing  129, 138, 140, 146, 153, 162, 196 Humanitas project  42 Hunt, Jeremy  40 Hurricane Katrina  141 I Igloo  148, 151 illness  20, 113 Imperial College, London  97 Imrie, R.  7, 26, 32, 85 independent living  38, 46, 47, 52, 80 India  167, 193 economic growth of  185 rivers of  166 water scarcity in  171–​2 individualism, liberal  15, 20 industrial decline, areas of  96, 111, 129, 139, 169, 186 inequalities  18, 172, 187 infectious diseases, and housing conditions  31 infill development  144–​53, 159 informal settlements  119, 193 institutionalized care  39, 41 insulation  159 interdependence  1, 6, 15, 23, 58, 63, 114, 174, 189, 192 intergenerational living  41, 47 intergenerational ties  81 interpersonal relations  14, 19, 190, 194 intimate spaces of homes  25 J Jackson, S.  164 Jacobs, Alan  7 Jacobs, Jane  3, 23, 32, 69, 121, 141 The Death and Life of Great American Cities  116 Jain, Tanvi  118, 122 John Habraken, N., Supports: An Alternative to Mass Housing  116 Jolma Architects, Finland  31

225

THE CARING CITY

Jonas, Hans  184 Jones, Paul  30 K Kail, Eva  66 Kampung Admiralty, Singapore  75–​83, 192 design of site  78–​80 Kantian ethics  15 KarlMarx-Hof  58 Kendall, Stephen  117 Kenkemann, Andrea  41 Kittay, Eva Feder  16 Kleedorfer, Jutta  66 Kullman, K.  7, 25, 32, 71 L Labour government  1 Decent Homes programme  145–​6, 147, 158 Lake Jakkur, Bengaluru  167, 168, 171, 194 Lambeth Borough Council  99, 154, 155, 163 landscape  landscape design  2, 105 ‘landscape of care’  40 landscape strategy  180–​1 land uses and values  23, 45–​6, 126, 166, 185, 196 Leathermarket infill, London  144–​53, 155 estate sites  144–​5 Leathermarket JMB  140, 145–​8, 195 Marklake Court  148–​52 Le Corbusier  28 Lefebvre, Henri  153 liberalism  173, 187 libraries  58, 69 lifecourse  27, 33, 38, 112, 134, 192, 193 and life events  113 lighting  26, 64, 71, 73, 92 light pollution  22 night lighting  93, 95, 105 lived experiences  32, 99 Liverpool hospital  30 local amenities  64 London  36, 37, 45, 90, 96, 97, 196 air and air quality  100 London County Council  154 redevelopment  31, 144, 153 social housing  162, 164 temporary accommodation in  142, 146 see also almshouses in London loneliness  51, 190, 196 long term planning  186 long-​term view of care  112 Lopes, A.M.  91 low caste work  176 low-​income people/​communities  3, 44, 45, 159 Loyn and Co  167, 169, 180, 186 Ludwig, Michael  131 Lynch, John Paul  146 Lynch, Kevin  7, 28, 149

M Madanipour, A.  44 Madhya Pradesh, India  119 Mah, Alice  96 maintenance and repair  127, 147–​8, 155, 163, 187 Maisel, J.  26, 71 Mangione, G.  26 Mann, Bonnie  17, 55, 173, 174 Manzo, Lynne  142, 163 Marklake Court  148 Massey, Doreen  114, 115, 140 materialities of care  8, 19, 24–​7 and unfolding care needs  115 McFarlane, Robert The Old Ways  73 McGregor, S.  174 Mee, K.  45 Mehta, K.K.  76, 80 Meidlinger Hauptsraße, Vienna  65–​73, 83 memory impairments  64 men  192 and family life  40 male breadwinners  16 and moral dilemmas  6 the subordination of women by  15 mental health  22, 39, 91, 93, 157, 190 Metzger, Jonathan  163–​4 migrants  28, 42, 67, 110 see also refugees Miller, Henry  86 Milligan, Christine  37 Million Wells project  167–​9, 171–​2, 176, 195, 196 well digging  175–​7 mindfulness  93 mining industries  96, 169, 173 mobility  25, 42, 69 Modernist design  23, 28, 116, 155 Mol, Ann Marie  19, 86, 191 morals  moral aspects of care  6, 193 moral theory  14, 20, 44, 64–​5, 192, 194 More, Thomas  7 Muhr, Christian  131 multicultural community  68–​9, 110 Mumford, Lewis  40 N National Health Service  41 nature, experiencing  23, 183 needs  1, 8, 12–​14, 21, 196 future needs  165–​6 and location  43 understanding  32, 193 unfolding needs  33, 113 neighbourhoods  2, 110 neighbourhood centre  75, 86 neighbourly relations  60, 82–​3 neoliberalism  38–​9, 84, 114, 185

226

Index

Netherlands  39, 42 New York  69, 97 historic neighbourhoods in  116 Noddings, Nel  19, 165 noise  22, 74, 93 Nussbaum, Martha  13 O O’Neill, Onora  37 openness  open city developments  119 openness and the unfolding of care  112–​13 openness as care  137–​8 openness in urban design  9, 131, 133–​4 ‘open village’  55, 58 oppression  15, 18 orphans  45, 55 ‘other, the’  56, 195 ownership, sense of  119, 138 P Pakka, E.  81 Pallasmaa, Juhani  140 Parc Hadau project, Wales  166–​7, 172–​3, 194 ‘tending futures’ design  169–​71, 179–​81 Paris  94, 96 parks  3, 69, 78, 104, 109 Parque Central, Valencia  102–​10, 110–​11 development masterplan  103–​4 garden atmospheres  105–​9 and new affluence  110 participatory democracy  146 participatory design  55, 62, 117, 140, 151, 161 particularistic focus  13, 17, 64, 191–​2 Part W campaign  31 paternalism  31, 32, 43, 120, 146, 157, 187 pathways  3, 73 pavements  25, 70, 71, 73, 99 pay, poor  18 pedestrians  see walking Penzing , Vienna  53–​4 Perez Gomez, Alberto  191, 194 permeability  81, 82 personal responsibility  84 Petrescu, Doina  84 pets  108 Philadelphia  23 Phillips, Bell  149 place-​attachments  9, 140–​2, 189, 195 place-​based needs  14 place-​based relations  23 and wellbeing  27 placing care practices  9, 25, 37, 38–​43, 43–​53 place-​shaping strategies  190 placing as caring  61–​2 planning  gender specific issues  66

ideology  23 land use  196 and particularity  191 regulations  31 Plato  7 play spaces  23, 58, 69, 98, 99, 107 Polgerstraße 30a project, Vienna  118, 129–​37, 192, 193 ‘openness’ in design  133–​5 site design  129–​34 politics  3 air pollution  101 austerity  40 of care  16, 41, 46, 86 localism in the UK  148 political and economic contexts  185–​7 political ideology  38–​9 short and long term thinking  186–​7 pollution  see air and air quality population growth  171 porous zones  133 Port Sunlight  32 postmodern ethics  44 poverty  28, 47, 91, 118, 119, 156, 170 power, dynamics of  16, 18, 31, 117 Power, Emma  25, 45, 122, 198 prams  26, 94, 108, 133 private ownership  76, 128, 138, 180 see also ‘Right to Buy’ private sector institutions  39 privatization  38–​9 privileged irresponsibility  44, 62 property values  110, 128 PRP Architects  154–​5, 161–​2, 163 public spaces  3, 64, 80 Puig de la Bellacasa, Maria  14, 19, 164, 191, 192 care and the environment  5, 10, 181 care for futures  166 Purleigh, Essex  45 Q quality of life  27, 38 R racism  31 racialized care labour  25, 192, 196 Rainwater Club  167 Rawes, Peg  173 redevelopment  2, 139, 141, 144, 146 refugees  1, 42, 44, 45, 55, 67 see also migrants refurbishment of homes  158 regeneration  see urban regeneration ‘relationscapes’  84 relocation  61–​2, 158 rented housing  129, 131, 148, 154, 159, 180, 187 Renzo Piano Building Workshop  139 repair and renewal  164, 181, 182, 187

227

THE CARING CITY

resident participation  146 resources of the planet  9, 16–​17, 55, 166, 174–​5, 187, 193 respiratory health  91, 97, 98 respite from city life  109 responsibility, sense of  17, 28, 38–​9, 60, 62, 84, 184 responsiveness  157, 195 RIBA Code of Professional Conduct  29 ‘Right to Buy’  144, 146 Risom, Jeff  98 rivers  166, 171, 172 see also water Rode, Philipp  64, 79 Roehampton Estate  154 Rogers, John  139 ‘root shock’  141–​2 routes  69, 98, 111, 155, 180 Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA)  29, 154 Russell, the Rt Hon Francis Albert Rollo  100 S safety  94, 157 in the city  66, 69, 70, 82, 105 of healthcare settings  92 Sargfabrik project, Vienna  37, 53–​61, 192, 193 MISS Sargfabrik  54, 56 shared spaces in  58–​9 schools  1, 27, 194 seating  69, 71, 73, 82, 99, 105 security of tenure  147 segregation  44, 62 self-​build housing  118, 196 self-​determination  15 self-​help  118 self-​sufficiency  9 Sennett, Richard  73, 85, 116, 117 sensory experiences  64, 73–​4, 107, 109, 111 sensory landscapes  93, 95 Sero  169, 172, 186 Sevenhuijsen, Selma  17, 44, 60, 113, 193 place of care  37, 38, 40, 46 welfare policies  14, 165 Shard, the  139, 148, 150 shared spaces  54, 56, 59, 192 shipping containers  42 shops  42, 46, 69, 78 Shove, Elizabeth  94 Singapore  40, 64, 75, 77 Universal Design Code  81 slums  47, 91, 118 social care policy  165 social-​cleansing  146 social exclusion  22, 31 social isolation  23, 44 social relations  14 social responsibility  16

socio-​cultural variations  26 socio-​economically deprived areas  91, 169 soil  14, 166 solar energy  170, 179–​80 Souter Brown, G.  93 South Wales  169, 181 Southwark Borough Council  45, 47, 144, 146 Spain  90, 103 Spandler, H.  25 spatial generosity  131, 135 spatial positioning in cities  24–​5 Star, Susan  181 Startblok  42 state-​run care  39 Steinfeld, E.  26, 71 steps  70, 71 Stewart, Kathleen  74, 95, 96, 105 stigmatisation  142, 163 Stjernstedt, Rosemary  154 Stoick, Christoph  68, 70 Strauss, A.  181 streets  1, 3, 26, 74 as living rooms  73, 86 street level air pollution  97 streetscape project  67, 94 student accommodation  42 Studer, Heide  68, 70 suburbanization  40, 43 Sugihara, S.  27 Sumartojo, S.  95 Sumnitsch, Franz  55, 58, 60 surfaces  64, 70 sustainability  104, 153, 158, 170, 180, 188 Sutton, Andy  172, 186 swimming pool  56 T Temel, Robert  131 temporary accommodation  142, 146, 158 tenant-​managed organization  144 ‘tending futures’  see future generations Thatcher, Margaret  39, 144 thoroughfares  25 Thrive Zones project  90, 110–​11, 194, 195 air and air quality  96–​9 Thunberg, Greta  11 Titchosky, Tania  85 traditions  140 traffic  93, 94, 98, 100, 102 trajectories of care  115 trajectories of place  131 transport  25, 46, 79, 87 Treadaway, C.  32 trees and planting  79, 105, 106 Trogal, Kim  34 Tronto, Joan  6, 12, 13, 14, 32, 146, 195 and attentiveness  147, 193 four stages of care  17–​19, 28

228

Index

and segregated living  43, 44, 61, 62 and universal rights  64 Tuan, Yi-​Fu  95, 164 U unfolding needs  119–​20 unfolding of care  112–​13, 114 United Kingdom  29, 32, 39, 41, 97, 186 ‘bedroom tax’  52 elderly care  36 Green Build Council  171 and social housing  155 women in  87, 94 see also Conservative/​Labour governments; Wales United St Saviours Charity  48, 50 universalizing concepts  22, 26 and accessibility  63–​5 and morality  85–​6 unpaid labour  40 uprooting  143, 146 urban atmospheres  9, 90, 93, 94–​6 urban change  139 urban design  accessibility of  64–​5, 85 and atmospheres  94, 110–​11 and care ethics  191–​7 as a caring process  29–​34 caring urban design  1–​7, 22–​9, 110–​11 developing over time  121, 134, 137, 151 and future generations  165–​7, 184–​5 goodness in  28 openness in  9, 116–​18 participatory  33, 62 urban regeneration  3, 23, 31, 32, 46, 47, 70, 116, 154 V Vale, Larry  142, 149 Valencia, Spain  103, 110 Vastu Shilpa Foundation, India  119, 193 Vauxhall, London  90, 99, 101 Verbrugge, L.M.  80 Vert, C.  91 Vienna  42, 45, 53, 65, 129, 192 gender mainstreaming strategy  66 Virgil’s Aeneid  20 Vishwanath, S.  166, 168, 171, 176, 185 vulnerability  16, 49, 54, 90, 91–​2 vulnerable people  15, 23, 52, 84, 147, 193 and the lifecourse  113 relegation to the home  195

W Waitt, G.  93 Wales  167, 170, 173, 186 Walker, Margaret  20, 164 Walker, Martha Urban  13 walking  23, 69, 70, 79, 82, 105, 180 washing  124, 131, 169 waste, management  16, 166, 169, 182 water  9, 111, 121, 171, 184, 194 groundwater aquifers  22, 104 Lake Jakkur  178–​9 Million Wells project  167–​9 well-​digging  176–​7 Watt, Paul  142 welfare  14, 16, 84 welfare state  41, 87, 190 wellbeing  8, 21, 22, 189, 190, 194, 195 and place attachments  27 wells  Million Wells project  167–​9 well digging  176–​7 WES Landscape Architecture  70, 71, 74, 86 Whyte, William  3 wildlife  179, 180, 181 Wilmott, Peter  47 Witherford Watson Mann  36, 48, 49 Witherford, Stephen  37, 46, 50 WOHA architects  77, 81 women  16, 28, 31, 76, 109, 128, 196 and breastfeeding  94 and caring responsibilities  6, 38, 40, 65–​6, 87 exhibition about women  66 and oppression  15, 18 single mothers  55 young women  68 working-​class  44, 67, 149, 154, 164 and housing  32, 47 invisibility of  34 and The Shard  139 World Bank  118–​19 Worpole, Ken  49 Y Young, Iris Marion  15 Young, Michael  47 Yuen, Belinda  77 Z zero-​carbon  169, 170, 171, 186, 188

229

“In this original and powerful book, a veritable tour de force that sets a new agenda for urban scholarship, Davis explores the interrelationships between urban design and the creation of places predicated on care and attentiveness to the wellbeing of ecologies and environments.” Rob Imrie, Goldsmiths, University of London

“This unique, timely book shows how urban design can change for the better if it recognizes interdependence and dependence as basic to how cities are organized – in short, by becoming care-full.” Christopher Groves, Cardiff University

Juliet Davis is Professor of Architecture and Urbanism at Cardiff University.

In this important contribution to urban studies, Juliet Davis makes the case for a more ethical and humane approach to city development and management. With a range of illustrative case studies, the book challenges the conventional and neoliberal thinking of urban planners and academics, and explores new ways to correct problems of inequality and exclusion. It shows how a philosophy of caring can improve both city environments and communities. This is an original and powerful theory of urban care that can promote the wellbeing of our cities’ many inhabitants.

ISBN 978-1-5292-0121-5

@BrisUniPress BristolUniversityPress bristoluniversitypress.co.uk

@policypress

9 781529 201215