Where people live matters to their health. Health improvement strategies often target where people live, but do they work? Placing health tackles this question through an examination of England’s Neighbourhood Renewal Strategy and its health targets. It evaluates the evidence base for the strategy, compares experiences from the United States and elsewhere in Europe, and illustrates the relevance of complexity theory to area-based health improvement work.
The book brings together these topical issues with a social science analysis of current programmes based on the methods and concepts of complexity thinking. It concludes by setting out how local action based on these ideas offers a new approach to area-based health improvement work.
Placing health is aimed at researchers, academics and students in the social and health sciences with an interest in area-based health improvement work, as well as practitioners in health services, local government and voluntary agencies working on neighbourhood renewal and health projects.
Rural Places and Planning provides a compact analysis for students and early-career practitioners of the critical connections between place capitals and the broader ideas and practices of planning, seeded within rural communities. It looks across twelve international cases, examining the values that guide the pursuit of the ‘good countryside’.
The book presents rural planning – rooted in imagination and reflecting key values – as being embedded in the life of particular places, dealing with critical challenges across housing, services, economy, natural systems, climate action and community wellbeing in ways that are integrated and recognise broader place-making needs. It introduces the breadth of the discipline, presenting examples of what planning means and what it can achieve in different rural places.
In England, as in countries across the world, shrinking public funding, growing localism, and increased school autonomy make tackling the link between education, disadvantage and place more important than ever. Challenging current thinking, this important book is the first to focus on the role of area-based initiatives in this struggle. It brings together a wide range of evidence to review the effectiveness of past initiatives, identify promising recent developments, and outline innovative ways forward for the future. It shows how local policymakers and practitioners can actively respond to the complexities of place and is aimed at all those actively seeking to tackle disadvantage, including policymakers, practitioners, academics and students, across education and the social sciences.
Giving voice to the lived experiences of people with dementia across the globe, including Australia, Canada, Sweden and the UK, this critical and evidence-based collection engages with the realities of life for people living with dementia at home and within their neighbourhoods.
This insightful text addresses the fundamental social aspects of environment, including place attachment, belonging and connectivity. The chapters reveal the potential and expose the challenges for practitioners and researchers as dementia care shifts to a neighbourhood setting.
The unique ‘neighbourhood-centred’ perspective provides an innovative guide for policy and practice and calls for a new place-based culture of care and support in the neighbourhood.
How well do the places where we live support the wellbeing of older adults?
The Canadian population is growing older and is reshaping the nation’s economic, social and cultural future. However, the built and social environments of many communities, neighbourhoods and cities have not been designed to help Canadians age well.
Bringing together academic research, practitioner reflections and personal narratives from older adults across Canada, this cutting-edge text provides a rare spotlight on the local implications of aging in Canadian cities and communities. It explores employment, housing, transportation, cultural safety, health, planning and more, to provide a wide-ranging and comprehensive discussion of how to build supportive communities for Canadians of all ages.
PART IV Temporalities: Historicizing Space and Place
This chapter examines the long-term emotional connections between individual biography and place identity, and their importance for the building and sustaining of local civil society structures over time. To do this we provide a biographical analysis of two individual cases – Ifor (79 at the time of the interview) from Rhos, and Linda (68 at the time of the interview) from Overton, both of whom present us with narrative accounts of their involvement in the production of local newspapers. Through this biographical analysis, we identify the narrative patterns of
47 Place matters: exploring the distinctiveness of racism in rural Wales TWO Place matters Exploring the distinctiveness of racism in rural Wales Vaughan Robinson and Hannah Gardner Racism: place matters Researchers have, for some time, argued that there is no single racism in the UK, and that different racisms manifest themselves in different ways in different places at different times. In line with the research paradigms of the day, early work tried to demonstrate this statistically, by mining large data-sets. Schaefer (1975) and Robinson (1987) both used
This chapter assesses how and why residents came to value their estates as places to live. It begins by considering their attachment to their dwellings as homes. The importance of place belonging is then analysed at the spatial scale of the estate in relation to neighbourliness and community. This leads on to an examination of the intermediate scale – blocks of flats and rows of houses. The next two sections show how estates have been affected by the Right to Buy policy in relation to place belonging, by considering, first, RTB owners and, second, middle
