More‐than‐therapeutic landscapes

Abstract

Funding informationAHRC Midlands 3 Cities Studentship, Grant/Award Number: AH/L50385X/1Building on geography's ongoing interest in therapeutic landscapes (and assemblages), this article contributes a further dimension to thinking about the spaces and places of health and care. Whilst recognising the value of focusing on the variegated ways in which "improvements" in health, wellness, and well-being take shape, it suggests there is also something to be gained by addressing these spaces through de-centring "the therapeutic," and instead adopting a more-than-therapeutic approach in which the question of "what-else happens?" is brought to the fore.Drawing on eight months of ethnographic research within care homes in the UK, it notes that within these spaces many activities and forms of relation can emerge that are not necessarily focused on the maintenance or improvement of health or well-being. In particular the paper highlights: everyday homemaking by residents, friendships and rivalries between staff members, and major political events as exemplars of ordinary life within care homes that occur beyond "therapy" in its conventional sense. That said, it also notes that the therapeutic and more-thantherapeutic are relational, and as such, the paper's conclusion is that a more-thantherapeutic approach to landscapes of care can augment existing approaches through encouraging a more holistic attunement to their workings. K E Y W O R D S assemblages, Birmingham UK, ethnography, everyday life, nursing care homes, therapeutic landscapes | INTRODUCTIONWhen addressing spaces of health and care, it is difficult to think past Gesler's (1992) concept of therapeutic landscapes. Indeed, the idea revolutionised the ways in which geographers approached spaces of health and care and has been used extensively in order to unpack the complex ways in which people seek out, and benefit from, health and care in a variety of forms and places (e.g., Andrews, 2004;Conradson, 2005;Milligan & Wiles, 2010). More recent moves have sought to advance the concept, through wider consideration of what constitutes a therapeutic landscape (and the bodies that comprise it), thinking "through the different relationships at play within spaces of health … creating a more 'inhabited' understanding" (Gorman, 2017, p. 318). Whilst these moves have generated expanded conceptions of the spaces of health and care, I contend here that many analyses remain limited in scope through their insistence on the centrality of the "therapeutic" itself, rather than recognising the plurality of the spaces and places in which these relations occur, including the fact that they are also places in which other forms of relation occur that ostensibly have nothing to do with "the therapeutic" in its traditional sense.This paper, therefore, proposes an approach to spaces of health and care that pays attention to what I crudely term their more-than-therapeutic qualities and relations. Crucially, the paper's argument is not towards the abandonment or even ---

Practices of Care in a Multipavilion Prison: An Exploratory Study on the Role of the Built Environment

“…These practices of care clearly exceed therapeutic care. This aligns with Emmerson's (2019) findings in care homes where ordinary life occurs beyond "therapy" as it also relates to personal, social, and societal acts (respectively through homemaking, friendship, and rivalries, and politics).…”

“…Environments with varying institutional backgrounds, punitive or not, “indicate the intricate nature and complex lived reality at a nexus of care and control” (Disney & Schliehe, 2019). In various contexts from residential care (Repo, 2019) to imprisonment (Cassidy et al, 2020), this nexus transcends therapeutic practices and is enacted through the built environment (Emmerson, 2019).…”

The concept of therapeutic landscape and its research progress in health geography

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Caring through things at a distance: Intimacy and presence in teletherapy assemblages

“…In a similar vein, Bell et al (2018) acknowledge the emergent therapeutic properties of space in the context of material, social, spiritual and symbolic dimensions of healing. Emmerson (2019) combines ideas of assemblage and landscape to consider a wider range of 'more-than-therapeutic' activities that occur in nursing care homes. Trnka (2021) conceives the emplacement of young people's online and offline engagement in mental health support as 'multi-sited therapeutic assemblages'.…”