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.
1 ONE Policy and places This book is concerned with one of the central questions in social policy: what difference does difference make? My main concern in this respect is the difference that places make to people’s health. The purpose of this chapter is to introduce the book’s framework for exploring this question, set out the policy background, and consider how places matter for health and offer settings for interventions. People’s health in the UK has shown a pattern of steady improvement over several decades. Between 1971 and 2003, life expectancy for males
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.
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
153 SEVEN Material legacies: shaping things and places through heritage Jo Vergunst, Elizabeth Curtis, Oliver Davis, Robert Johnston, Helen Graham and Colin Shepherd Introduction: why do materials matter? Historic research, by its very nature, questions old narratives and develops new ones. Material goods, taken out of circulation perhaps for decades, centuries or millennia, will re-enter society, receive new roles and have effects wildly different from those anticipated by their makers. The site of a former house or castle, once rediscovered, provides the
