The Body as the Affective Materiality of Ageing in a Future City (original) (raw)

Affective Urbanism: Towards Inclusive Design Praxis (Open Access)

URBAN DESIGN International, 2020

This paper conceptualizes affective urbanism as both research framework and praxis, engaging professionals and concerned publics alike in the insurgent making of cities. With its focus on affect and bodily encounters, it taps into the rich knowledge of practices of improvising and inventing in everyday life, which tend to fall outside the realm of discursive and visual representations. An analysis of spatial practices of the collective Plataforma de Afectados Por La Hipoteca in Barcelona illustrates how a mobilization of affects fosters not only individual, but first and foremost a collective capacity to negotiate belonging, appropriate space and contest alienated conditions of everyday life. The argument rests on the hypothesis that affect implicates the ethical engagement with people at places of everyday life, thus producing a medium and means for transgressing socio-spatial divides and challenging practices of exclusion, othering and dispossession. The value of this kind of work does not necessarily lie in the quality of conceived or materialized design, but rather in enacting an inclusive and empathic design praxis which connects to people’s multiple lived spaces and cultivates lived space of deep and caring social relations.

Affective Bodies: Intimate Design Practices to Reinvent the Everyday

Temes de Disseny

This article investigates some of the implications of intimate design practices by presenting two academic projects carried out within the context of an uncertain present. It argues that design practices have the capacity to foster intimacy and affect through the lens of the politics of care. Drawing on the notion of affective bodies, the authors claim that design can explore new paths to reinvent the everyday, focusing on recent crisis-ridden contexts. The article examines how intimate practices that reformulate everyday politics can reclaim temporality, active citizenship and radical affectivity as infrastructural needs in contemporary urban habitats. The two case studies date from March 2020 through December 2021 under the climate of crisis brought about by the sudden outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in Western Europe and the ongoing Mediterranean refugee crisis. Given the escalation of the blurring between the private and public spheres, the personal and the political, it is e...

Encountering the ageing body in modernity: fear, vulnerability and " contamination "

This paper attempts to understand the exclusion of ageing people within contemporary society through developing a model around the notion of the “encounter with the ageing body”. It is divided into three parts. In the first, I develop a model of the encounter through combining Sara Ahmed’s notion of “affective economies” with Shildrick’s theory of the encounter with the “vulnerable self”. I argue that the fear of ageing becomes embodied within the encounter with the ageing body. Specifically, the fear is vulnerability: within the encounter, the youthful self is forced into the recognition of his/her own vulnerability. Modernity requires that this be disavowed, with the ageing body banished to the margins through sequestration to foreclose the possibility of a repeat. In the second section, I discuss the nature of vulnerability within modernity. I explore two approaches to this: in the first, the vulnerability is to the threat of death, which has become particularly problematic within modernity; in the second, the vulnerability is the loss of subjectivity resulting from the ageing body’s failure to correspond to constructions of the ideal body within contemporary capitalism. In the final section, I evaluate whether recent social shifts promise a brighter future for ageing people, arguing that although the situation is not black and white, there is, nevertheless, unfortunately currently relatively limited potential for real change for older people.

Science Studies 2/2010 60 Bodies and everyday practices in designed urban environments

The urban in Science and Technology Studies Walking down the high-street to get a sandwich in our lunch break, we notice a change in the floor texture and glance down: a new pavement design has been recently introduced. Waiting for friends by the benches near McDonalds, we are aware of, but do not listen to, the repetitive jingles from the shopping mall's PA system. Taking the children with us while we are shopping, we take a look at a pair of red shoes in a shop-window while we keep an eye on our child. These are just some of the mundane things that happen in contemporary urban spaces. In recent years, the centres of many towns and cities have been reshaped by urban design projects, but little attention has been paid to how these transformations are experienced everyday by users of the city. In other words: how do the users of urban centers, such as shoppers, cleaners, or workers, perceive these changes, as embodied subjects in specific material environments? This paper analyse...

Exploring Design Dialogues for Ageing in Place

Anthropology in Action, 2009

Ethnographic work conducted by the Digital Health Group, Intel Ireland, explores the questions of how concepts of health and independence relate to peoples' lives in later life. This paper serves to present artistic approaches to the design of the material culture in elderly homes in Ireland, and aims to highlight and discuss the merits and problems of such approaches. Through writing 'in miniature' about specific experiences and homes, we propose that it is possible to develop explorations of material objects in the home which, rather than presenting material contexts as terminal 'conclusions' to the research process, use them as provoking and questioning resources for engaged dialogical encounters with informants.

From representation to active ageing in a Manchester neighbourhood: Designing the age-friendly city

Age-Friendly Cities and Communities: A Global Perspective, 2018

This chapter explores what it means to use a ‘capability’ approach to designing an age-friendly city and its potential for offering new ways of designing, producing and occupying physical and social environments that respond directly to the lived experiences of older people. Drawing on an interdisciplinary collaborative research/design project that has informed the development of Manchester’s Age-friendly City and Communities (AFCC) programme, it describes a community-engaged, urban design research project conducted in the Old Moat area of the city in 2012. The project’s aim was to explore the applicability of AFCC design guidance within a specific urban neighbourhood. The chapter focuses on the dynamic relationship between the research and design elements of the project. It examines how the process of discovering and sharing information about the lived experience of older residents’ translates into the development and implementation of age-friendly activities and interventions (‘design’) intended to make a neighbourhood more appropriate to the needs and desires of its older residents.

A Design for Life: Urban practices for an age-friendly city

2022

A Design For Life: Urban practices for an age-friendly city is a guide for architects, planners, developers and policy-makers about their role in addressing the changing needs and aspirations of an ageing society. Through essays and case studies, this ebook highlights the opportunities that arise when urban professionals proactively challenge common stereotypes about the ageing process, and work together to develop practices, policies and designs thats value older people as diverse, intersectional citizens. A Design for Life has been developed alongside the Framework for Creating Age-Friendly Homes in Greater Manchester, a three-year strategy produced by GM Ageing Hub at the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA). The framework sets out the ambitions to deliver quality and equality for older people in relation to the homes they live in, recognising the need for leadership and new ways of thinking about older people in urban environments. This ebook form the first part of this mission, aiming to foster a culture shift among those involved in urban design and development. It has been developed by Dr Mark Hammond and Nigel Saunders, both members of the GM Ageing Hub’s Housing, Planning and Ageing group, with contributions from practitioners and academics from across Greater Manchester.

A {Design} {Anthropology} {Critique} of {Active} {Aging} as {Ageism

This paper proposes a design anthropology critique of active aging as ageism in the design of information technologies for seniors. With ageism we refer to narratives coalesced around the label "active aging" in European policies and system design that focus on seniors as a homogeneous group of people in need of help. We discuss the findings of two empirical participatory design projects we have been dealing with: 1) a bottom-up senior organization in a small village in a mountain area and 2) a series of workshops organized with seniors in an urban area. In both cases, the relations between the anthropologist and the people involved, prompted reflexive moments that brought anthropological relocations of the designers' perspective. In conclusion, we stress how such relocations could benefit participatory designs through the concept of design by subtraction and the adoption of a feminist perspective.

Participatory Ageing as Assemblage: Infrastructuring in Practice

2021

Scientification and technification of later life have pushed the very notion of ageing, embracing materiality as one of the co-producers of a continuous process of becoming. In this paper, we want to explore the role of materiality in a mechanism designed to allow older people to develop arguments regarding digitalization to inform public policies. To achieve this aim, we will employ a concept that will unfold the layers with which theories of ageing are configured in practice: infrastructuring. In our particular case study, this will highlight the coordinated effort among different agents needed to identify, negotiate and prove who can be considered a legitimate older citizen. Along this path, we will face three instances where the theory is challenged by practice: 1) the very sense of what an infrastructure is; 2) the theory about what a consensus conference is; and 3) what the definition of older person is. To conclude, we suggest the necessity to switch the very question about w...