Care and Design : Bodies, Buildings, Cities

Care and Design: Bodies, Buildings, Cities connects the study of design with care, and explores how concepts of care may have relevance for the ways in which urban environments are designed. It explores how practices and spaces of care are sustained specifically in urban settings, thereby throwing light on an important arena of care that current work has rarely discussed in detail.

Rob Imrie is Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has international expertise in urban governance, architecture and community development in cities, the impact and implications of urban policy in British and international cities, the geographies of disability and the built environment, and the body, embodiment and urban design. He is author of the books Disability and the City (Sage Pubs, 1996), Accessible Housing (Routledge, 2006), and co-author of Inclusive Design (Routledge, 2001) and Architectural Design and Regulation (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). His most recent book is the edited volume, Sustainable London? The Future of a Global City (Policy Press, 2014). He was formerly Professor of Geography at King’s College London and Royal Holloway University of London.

Charlotte Bates is a Researcher in the Sociology Department at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work touches on the body and materiality, everyday life, and sense of place. She is currently exploring the relationship between bodies, belonging and space through the European Research Council funded project ‘Universalism, universal design and equitable access to the designed environment’. Her work has been published in Sociological Research Online and Visual Studies, and her first book, an edited volume entitled Video Methods: Social Science Research in Motion (Routledge, 2014), was published in 2014.

Kim Kullman is a Researcher on the European Research Council project Universalism, Universal Design and Equitable Access to the Designed Environment at Goldsmiths, University of London. His previous research has explored everyday practices of mobility, concentrating on how these are learned, sustained and transformed across the life course. He has published on childhood, qualitative methods and geographies of care in journals such as Social and Cultural Geography, Children’s Geographies and Geography Compass. He has also co-edited a volume on children’s geographies in Finland, Lapsuuden muuttuvat tilat (Vastapaino, 2012), which, among other topics, engages with different arenas of care, from nurseries to urban spaces.