Assembling Caring Geographies: How do Regions Care?

Abstract

Cities are increasingly postulated as the scene of the bright future: they are smart, fancy and dynamic. Assembling people, technologies and (green) buildings together, they inhabit the synergy to create a new world (Sennett 2018). The countryside, on the other hand, is shrinking: young people leave for the city, while ‘needy’ elderly stay behind in emptying regions, as municipalities hastily seek to maintain regions livable. Is the countryside declining? The famous Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas portrays the countryside as “the future of the world”; ‘empty’ regions being used for large-scale innovative technologies and inhabited by ‘new’ citizens (i.e. refugees, foreign workers) that transform the countryside into geographies of innovation and care.

How to understand these spatial-temporal orders of the countryside and the caring it involves, both for the region and its citizens? What does a caring geography entail? Human geographers and STS scholars alike have put forward the notions of assemblage and ‘carescape’ (Ivanova et al. 2016) to envision how ‘care’ – in its broad meaning of caring for health, society, community, environment and its buildings and animals – and ‘geography’ intertwine, inquiring how public and private services are organized within regions and how this relates to its social, political, economic and physical dynamics (Milligan and Wiles 2010).

In this panel, we seek to explore and conceptualize the countryside as an assemblage, with a particular emphasis to its caring geography. How do carescapes in the countryside change, given demographic and economic developments? How to conceptualize these emerging regional assemblages and their consequences?

Chairs

• Dara Ivanova, Erasmus School of Health Policy and Management

• Roland Bal, Erasmus University Rotterdam

• Iris Wallenburg, institute for Health Policy and Management

Individual Presentations

• Drawing from the ‘Living Well’: Sidewalk Toronto’s Imagination of Healthy Futures - Rebecca Noone, University of Toronto; Karen Dewart McEwen, University of Toronto

• Lifeworlds in Motion: How Shifting Psychiatric Expertise Decenters Mental Health and "The Environment" - Patrick Bieler, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

• Mapping Regions: How Are Regions Produced As Places of Care? - Iris Wallenburg, institute for Health Policy and Management; Dara Ivanova, Erasmus School of Health Policy and Management; Roland Bal, Erasmus University Rotterdam

• Triage As Mediating Technology to Reinvent Infrastructures of Care - Nienke van Pijkeren, Erasmus University (Institute of Health Policy & Management)

Session Organizers

• Dara Ivanova, Erasmus School of Health Policy and Management

• Roland Bal, Erasmus University Rotterdam

• Iris Wallenburg, institute for Health Policy and Management