Networks, resources and agencies: On the character and production of enabling places
Introduction
Place is a fundamental feature of human experience, deeply implicated in the development of identity and belonging and central to the conduct of everyday life. Far from affording a passive backdrop to the manifold activity of life, place is an active and constitutive presence, shaping habits and interactions and situating or grounding all experience (Thrift, 1999). The role places inevitably play in everyday experience has important implications for the study of health and human development. Just as places may risk or diminish health, they may also promote health and wellbeing in certain therapeutic instances (Williams, 2007). While the analysis of place and the incidence of health inequalities is well advanced, research into the health promoting qualities of place has been slower to emerge (Andrews and Kearns, 2005). Studies of place and health promotion have sought to describe the principal characteristics of ‘healthy’ places and the various processes and phenomena that might explain their therapeutic effects (Hartig and Staats, 2003). This research has emphasised particular features of the natural and built environment, as well as the compositional and contextual character of place (MacIntyre et al., 2002, Cummins et al., 2007, Williams, 2007).
The exploration of “therapeutic landscapes” (Williams, 2007), “restorative places” (Milligan and Bingley, 2007) and “enabling environments” (Steinfeld and Danford, 1999) – what might collectively be referred to as enabling places – has revealed much of the relationship between place and health promotion. The conflation of these literatures may neglect certain of their theoretical and empirical specificities, yet it is arguable that each is primarily concerned with the enabling character of place. Each seeks to ascertain the role specific places play in generating or enabling the conditions necessary for the experience of health and wellbeing (Williams, 2007). These conditions describe the discrete therapeutic qualities or “stress-buffering mechanisms”, which facilitate health and wellbeing and mitigate health inequalities (Stockdale et al., 2007: 1870). Research suggests that such qualities include the moderation of stress and anxiety (Korpela et al., 2008); increased belonging and purpose (Williams, 2002); “mood regulation” and enhanced wellbeing (Korpela et al., 2008); physical activity and increased leisure opportunities (Baum, 2002); social interaction and the promotion of social capital (Carpiano, 2006); as well as various ecological interventions to support healthy behaviours (Tawil et al., 1995). These benefits might just as usefully be described as enabling as therapeutic or restorative, given their diverse character. For each captures a particular quality of experience – an accretion of feelings, capacities, opportunities and interactions – even as it designates a particular moment of enhanced health or wellbeing. Emphasising the enabling character of place thus offers a way of conceptually broadening the analysis of place and health promotion to include both conventional indicators of health and wellbeing, as well as more holistic and innovative measures. Greater consideration of these enabling qualities should also advance discussions of health and place beyond the experience of healing and recovery to include the substantive benefits places confer in enabling health and human development (Duff, 2009; Conradson, 2005).
This paper takes up these themes in the development of a conceptual logic of enabling places grounded in the analysis of enabling resources. The purpose of this analysis is twofold: first, I am concerned to develop a robust theoretical account of the material, social, affective and relational dimensions of enabling places, highlighting the ways such places are made or created in practice and interaction (Duff, 2010). My second aim is to provide a richer and more comprehensive account of the myriad resources and benefits associated with enabling places. Bruno Latour’s work provides important sources for the elaboration of these themes. It will be argued that enabling places are composed in diverse actor-networks, facilitating access to assorted resources and supporting the development of novel agencies or capacities. This facilitation of the development or acquisition of agency is the principal characteristic of all enabling places. Latour furnishes an elegant set of tools for describing this process and its spatial and relational determinants. More importantly, Latour provides a way of rethinking the relationship between health and place, suggesting that healthy places, enabling places, are made or created in a series of enabling encounters, networks and associations. Each of these elements is enabling to the extent that it generates resources or benefits that promote health.
The notion of enabling resources thus seeks to distinguish the particular resources places make available to support health and human development and the manifold ways these resources are generated and utilised. Three classes of enabling resources will be examined: social, affective and material resources. These resources define place as much as they are the product of it, just as they support the myriad therapeutic processes that shape everyday experience. Social resources include relations of trust and reciprocity associated with social capital (Portes, 1998), as well as the diverse relational and affective sensitivities that support intimate relationships and wider social contacts (Payton et al., 2000: 184). Affective resources permit individuals and groups to manipulate their affective states, understood as discrete feeling states and as dispositional orientations or action-potential (Thrift 2004: 59–64; Deleuze, 1988). Material resources include access to goods, services and information in exchange relations, as well as the very materiality of place (Latour, 2005, Gibson, 1979). Close attention to the generation and distribution of enabling resources ought to provide a basis for identifying enabling places and for describing their production and development. Before turning to the exposition of these resources, the nature of enabling places and their characteristic features requires some assessment.
Section snippets
Enabling places: insights and problems
The idea of enabling or health promoting places appears in much contemporary social science research (Smyth, 2005). This work seeks to clarify the relationship between place and health promotion, highlighting the various social, material and psychological benefits available in particular sites (Williams, 2007). The identification and analysis of what Gesler (1992) has called “therapeutic landscapes” has done much to elucidate the character and distribution of these benefits. The study of
Places, agencies and resources
That place ought to be regarded as a relational achievement has become something of a mainstay in contemporary studies of human geography, society and culture (Thrift, 1999). This approach eschews the substantialist claim that place might be considered solely in its material dimensions, without regard for the cultural experience of “dwelling” in place (Ingold, 1995: 75). To ignore the significance of place-making is neither ontologically intelligible nor meaningful and yet this logic persists
Conclusion: toward an ecology of enabling places
Places are rarely settled and their coordinates are never fixed. They are forever mobilised, transformed and reproduced in the dynamic force of inhabiting place. To conceive of an ecology of enabling places is to emphasise this material and relational production of place. It is to reject all notions of a fixed and static space in favour of a relational logic of dwelling-in-place. This “dwelling perspective” (Ingold, 1995: 75–77) suggests, moreover, that enabling places are made rather than
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank David Conradson, Lenore Manderson, Andrea Eckersley, Warren Michelow and Narelle Warren who provided critical insights at various points in the drafting of this paper. I must also thank the anonymous referees who provided uncommonly rich and productive advice for the revision of this work.
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