London Women and Planning Forum Seminar

Healthy planning and design

Date and time: Wednesday 23rd November 2005, 2-5 pm
Venue: The Women’s Library, Old Castle Street, London, E1
www.thewomenslibrary.ac.uk

Healthy planning and design
This seminar focuses on the role of gender in healthy planning and design in two main contexts: therapeutic environments in hospitals and other therapeutic spaces; and healthy urban planning.

A healthy urban environment involves the design of hospitals and other treatment and therapeutic spaces alongside a wide range of indicators such as access to green space, decent housing, employment and transport. A core theme of the WHO Healthy Cities programme is healthy urban planning. Growing interest in the connections between planning and public health shows that healthy urban planning is set to become a key feature of urban design and urban development. How do these global and regional initiatives affect people and practitioners at local level? Can health be planned in to new and existing developments?

The promotion of ‘healthy’ cities builds on earlier Agenda 21 initiatives aimed at promoting cross-sectoral linkages across health and environment. The WHO qualities of a healthy city are:

• A clean, safe physical environment of a high quality (including housing quality);
• An ecosystem that is stable now and in the long term;
• A high degree of participation in and control by the citizens over decisions affecting their lives, health and well being;
• The meeting of basic needs (food, water, shelter, income, safety and work) for all;
• Access to a wide variety of experiences and resources;
• An optimum level of appropriate public health and sickness care
  

WHO and the UN also recognise the significant role of gender in health care and promotion. How does this apply in 21st century London? Should planning for health be gendered or mainstreamed? A pivotal seminar in the LWPF’s series Capital designs: women and planning in contemporary London, Healthy planning and design raises some particularly challenging issues.

Speakers:
Sarah Curtis: Professor of health geography, QM Geography
Wil Gesler: Queen Mary, University of London
Laura Lee: Maggie’s Cancer Caring Centre
Helen Lynn: Women's Environmental Network
Discussant: Isabel Dyck QM Geography

All welcome but please register to attend by emailing Claire Frew

Speakers
Sarah Curtis Professor of Geography, Queen Mary, University of London
Sarah Curtis is a health geographer with extensive experience in the geography of health and health care, and convenes the Health Research Group in the Department of Geography at QMUL. Sarah’s work focuses on why and how places are important for inequalities in health and wellbeing and access to health care. Her work also includes needs assessment in primary and community health care, and health impact assessment of regeneration schemes. She is currently conducting research funded by Research Councils and NHS agencies on: therapeutic aspects of design in mental health facilities; collaborative research with Wil Gesler and Morag Bell (Loughborough) on current hospital design projects in the UK; the relationship of social and physical environments to variation in health and well-being of adolescents; and variation in the use of mental health services. Sarah’s latest book is Health and Inequality: Geographical Perspectives, published by Sage in 2004.

Wil Gesler Professor of Geography, University of North Carolina, USA, and visiting academic at Queen Mary, University of London
Wil Gesler is a health geographer whose research spans quantitative, spatial analysis and the interaction between health geography and cultural geography. Two recent books include Culture / Place / Health (with Robin Kearns: Routledge, 2001) and Healing Places (Routledge: 2003). The latter book explores the ways in which different environments affect physical, mental, spiritual, social and emotional components of healing. It draws on research on therapeutic landscapes or places that have achieved a lasting reputation for healing (Epidauros in Greece, Bath in England, and Lourdes in France). The last chapter applies the lessons learned from the three healing places to hospital design and leads into current research with Sarah Curtis and Morag Bell (Loughborough University) on current hospital design projects in the UK. This research examines knowledge acquisition, participation and representation, and cross-cultural evaluation related to specific design ideas.

Laura Lee Chief Executive, Maggie’s Cancer Caring Centres
The first Maggie’s Centre opened in Edinburgh in 1996. There are now completed centres in Glasgow, Dundee and Inverness. Maggie’s London, designed by Richard Rogers, has just completed the final phase of planning permission, and will be built on site at the Charing Cross Hospital, London. Maggie’s Centres are for anybody who has, or who has had cancer. They are also for their families, their friends and their carers: ‘The aim of Maggie’s Centres is to help people with cancer to be as healthy in mind and body as possible and enable them to make their own contribution to their medical treatment and recovery.’ The design of the centres is key to their aims and success: ‘Maggie’s programme of help works as well as it does because of the environment it takes place in. We see it as the key ingredient, which allows people to make the most of the ideas we can give them about helping themselves. We have called in the best architects we could find who we felt would respond to the challenge of building small domestic scale buildings which will help change the way people live.’

Helen Lynn Women’s Environmental Network
Women’s Environmental Network was founded in 1988 and is a unique campaigning organisation, which represents women and campaigns on issues that link women, environment and health. It takes a holistic view of health, and is one of the few groups in the UK to make the connection between women, health and the environment. According to WEN, ‘A wealth of research suggests our environment – homes, workplaces, air and food – is contaminated with a cocktail of toxic chemicals. There is enough cause for concern about these chemicals’ potential to harm the environment, wildlife and humans to warrant a precautionary approach to their use. They should be removed from use until we are sure they are safe.’ WEN and UNISON have launched the ‘Big See Challenge,’ calling for tighter controls on cancer causing chemicals. WEN is partner organisation of Women in Europe for a Common Future, and co-facilitates the Working Group on Health and Environment. WEN also has a current campaign called ‘Chemical Reaction,’ which is lobbying MEPs to back strong reform of European law on chemicals.

Discussant
Isabel Dyck Reader in Geography, Queen Mary, University of London
Isabel Dyck is a social and feminist geographer. Her research centres on issues of gender, body and identity in analysing the constitution of everyday life within wider processes of social, economic and political change. Particular areas of research include: gendered experiences of immigration and settlement, including work and health; the organisation of care and caring practices; food practices, food consumption, body and identity; and body, identity and women with chronic illness. Research with chronically ill and disabled women has focused on their employment, their restructuring of home and work environments, and their negotiation of a disabled identity. Recent books include Geographies of Women’s Health (edited with N.D. Lewis and S. McLafferty, Routledge, 2001) and Women, Body, Illness: Space and Identity in the Everyday Lives of Women with Chronic Illness (with P. Moss: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002).

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