Mapping Regions: How Are Regions Produced As Places of Care?

• In Event: Assembling Caring Geographies: How do Regions Care?

Abstract

Regions are being (re)discovered as places for organizing services, scaling up, as well as down state policies and the capacity to respond to emerging local needs, while strengthening their competitive position in attracting resources, recognition and wealth. Regions are usually imagined as tools of governing in a very practical sense, overlooking how they, as socio-technical assemblages of knowing and doing, are made to care, and are being cared for in return. In this paper, we connect STS (especially notions of place and place-making (e.g. Gieryn 2000; Ivanova et al. 2016)) to insights from human geography and particularly literature on the conceptual, symbolic and institutional wealth of organically moulded regional societies (MacLeod and Jones 2001) as regions are not only ‘established’ but emerge from multiple (and often contested) regional constituencies. Furthermore, regional boundaries may be fluid or overlap as multiple ‘regions’ are at stake in the same geographical area. Drawing on a research project on the regionalization of elderly care in the Netherlands, in which we ‘map’ regions as places of care - where we seek to articulate and visualize assemblages of organizing elderly care in 12 geographical areas defined as administrative healthcare regions – this paper aims to further conceptualize how regions manifest themselves as caring places and the various valuation registers (e.g. financial, cultural, geographical, professional) that underpin them.

Authors

• Iris Wallenburg, institute for Health Policy and Management

• Dara Ivanova, Erasmus School of Health Policy and Management

• Roland Bal, Erasmus University Rotterdam