Chapter One
Designing with Care and Caring with Design

Rob Imrie and Kim Kullman

1.1 Introduction

Research in anthropology, human geography, sociology and related areas is exploring, increasingly, the caring labour that goes into shaping and supporting the precarious attachments between bodies, materials and spaces that compose built environments (see Gregson et al. 2009; Till 2012; Denis and Pontille 2014; Mol et al. 2010; Schillmeier and Domènech 2010). While the notion of care has been present in past thinking about the design of objects and spaces, it still remains understated and unexplored in design discourse and practice.1 It is our belief that now, more than ever, a rethinking and reappraisal is required about the connection between design and care, as issues such as sustainability, inclusivity and ageing populations ask for design that conveys certain relational values, along with a renewed engagement with politics and ethics.

We consider the resurgence of ideas about care particularly relevant to the design of built environments, and an objective of this volume is to document the ways in which concepts of care are shaping present modes of design, with a focus on urban settings. The contributors to the book bring concepts and practices of care and design into a dialogue to explore the production of everyday environments. Representing different areas of enquiry, from human geography, sociology and art practice to gerontology, architecture and science and technology studies, the authors guide the reader through interdisciplinary debates on care, further enriching these through theoretical and empirical elaborations on a range of case studies on design projects and practices, including the construction of lifelong kitchens and care centres, the planning of public parks, as well as urban curating and post-disaster recovery. The diversity of perspectives and themes demonstrates that cities are essential sites for testing the possibilities of an urbanised world to deal with recent demographic, economic, natural and social changes - a challenge to which strengthening the relationships between design and care seems to offer a timely response.

The primary purpose of this book is to stage an encounter between design and care so as to advance relationally aware, as well as politically and ethically responsive, forms of crafting urban environments. We are especially interested in stimulating an exchange of ideas and inspirations between design and care by engaging with the ways in which the skills and sensibilities of caring can be expressed through design practice in order to enhance the conviviality and wellbeing among those who inhabit, and depend upon, cities. We are not seeking to develop normative ideas or theories of care, design or their interconnections, but rather to detect and amplify the variegated ways in which the two are, and could be, brought together in the shaping of urban objects and spaces. The contributors to this book adopt different approaches to 'care' and 'design', giving the notions a variety of characteristics. What unites these diverse understandings is not so much an endeavour to fix care and design or discover their essence, but a willingness to forge new connections between them.

In this introductory chapter, we provide conceptual and empirical orientation for the rest of the book by exploring how practices of caring and designing have been held apart or brought together at different junctures, and how the recent upsurge in academic work on care can offer critical methodological and pedagogical ideas for those involved in the shaping of the built environment. We begin by discussing recent work on care in the social sciences to clarify its underpinnings and demonstrate how the notion might be deployed in support of design skills and sensibilities that are responsive to the fragile interdependencies of the world. We then turn to explore 'good urban form,' which we consider a fundamental part of the attempt to study and theorise the design and use of civic spaces and the political and ethical relations that they facilitate. While there are countless definitions of good urban form by academics and practitioners alike, we suggest that, historically, the composition of cities has been shaped by ideas that are often insensitive to human and nonhuman diversity and wellbeing, and therefore work against the ethos of caring. We conclude by introducing the chapters in this volume, highlighting relevant themes and how they contribute to debates around design, care and urban environments.

1.2 Care as a concept and practice

We will now examine the notion of care in more detail, with a particular focus on the current proliferation of writings within the social sciences. Researchers in social policy (Bowlby et al. 2010), human geography (Amin 2012), sociology (Sayer 2011) and science and technology studies (Mol et al. 2010), among others, have turned to earlier feminist theorisations on the ethics of care, which, against universal and individualist notions of morality, rethink existence through the idea of interdependence to bring out the fragility of the world and the need to care for it (Tronto 1993; Noddings 2003). As the concept of care has begun to circulate across disciplinary boundaries, it has left several, sometimes contradictory, definitions in its wake, which have clarified and obscured the notion in equal measure. However, while care, as Phillips (2007: 1) argues, is a 'nebulous and ambiguous concept', its open-ended character is an incentive to refrain from simplistic, potentially constraining, definitions and approach the notion obliquely by considering the shifting environments and embodied encounters that enable practices of care in the first place.

Although there are differences over the exact definition of care, most academic work shares the idea that care is less about predetermined behaviours than a situated, embodied way of responding to interdependence as it shifts across the lifecourse (see Tronto 1993; Noddings 2003; Phillips 2007; Bowlby et al. 2010). Care involves acknowledging the transforming character of the social and material environment and our capabilities to act as part of it by cultivating sensitivity to 'the attachments that support people' (Winance 2010: 110). As a reaction to approaches to moral action that embed ethics in general principles, care proposes an alternative orientation by suggesting that these rarely suffice in mundane situations, where people need to develop solutions to problems emerging amidst the unpredictabilities of life (Mol et al. 2010: 13). Rather than referring to external ideas about morality, care asks for skills and sensibilities that attune people to the fragile relations making up daily settings and enable them to judge the qualities of those relations so that they can be appropriately supported.

Despite eschewing general principles by maintaining the grounded character of ethical action, care is a habitual practice that can be refined over time. Seeing care as a practice is essential in order to distinguish between 'good' and 'bad' care as well as to avoid 'over-idealizing care', not least as care may often serve to 'reinforce patterns of subordination' (Tronto 1993: 116) in the society through, for example, the unequal treatment of carers or the abuse of caring relations by those in positions of power (see Phillips 2007: 140-154). The practice view on care is therefore an attempt to outline features of good care in everyday environments by attending to the 'full context of caring'. As Tronto (1993: 118) suggests: 'we must consider the concerns of the care-receiver as well as the skills of the care-giver, and the role of those who are taking care of' (Tronto 1993: 118).

To further expand on the practice view, Tronto (1993: 127) has outlined 'four ethical elements of care': 'attentiveness, responsibility, competence and responsiveness', which refer to dispositions that sensitise people to the needs of those around them and invite recognition of their involvement in a wider infrastructure of care. The four elements are not intended as moral principles, but rather as potential skills and sensibilities that might be considered as conducive to good care - others have enriched this list with 'empathy', 'compassion', 'generosity', 'imagination', 'kindness' and related qualities (see Noddings 2003; Hamington 2004; Phillips 2007; Bowlby et al. 2010). Common to such efforts to define the characteristics of caring is the readiness to overcome the Euro-American tendency to demote care to privatised, often gendered, spaces, and instead create public debate over how 'caring is intertwined with virtually all aspects of life' (Tronto 1993: 119).

The practice approach also suggests a pedagogy that takes bodily engagement as a starting point for stimulating habits of caring (see Shilling 2011). Hamington (2004: 45) notes that 'the knowledge necessary for care is more than a collection of discrete, articulated data; it includes a web of entangled feelings and subtle perceptions understood through the body'. Here, the ethics of care could be seen as a form of generosity, occurring 'at the level of corporeality [.] that constitutes the self as affective and being affected' (Diprose 2002: 5). Although care theorists view bodily...