A caring Beijing through public fitness equipment

Vermeeren, Laura

Dossiers, no. 2, vol. 8June 9, 2023<June 9, 2023

A caring Beijing through public fitness equipment

Laura Vermeeren

Laura Vermeeren examines the proliferation of state-sponsored outdoor fitness areas in Beijing. Often used by retirees, these “senior playgrounds” embody both Chinese philosophies of wellbeing and neoliberal practices of self-care.

Dossiers, no. 2, vol. 8June 9, 2023<June 9, 2023

Healthy Cities and Bodies: Reflections on New Paradigms of Urban Wellbeing

Vincent Baptist

Drawing on examples from Amsterdam to Venice, Vincent Baptist analyses two emerging urban paradigms — the “smooth city” and the “wellness city” — as models for understanding the reciprocal relations of care between cities and their inhabitants.

Dossiers, no. 2, vol. 8June 8, 2023<June 8, 2023

Finding Care in Korea: Korean Media Consumption as Urban Self-Care

Faye Mercier

Faye Mercier explores how first-time visitors to Seoul use South Korean film and television as sources of “self-care,” and highlights the tensions between the material experience of the city and its mediated imaginaries.

Dossiers, no. 2, vol. 8June 8, 2023<June 8, 2023

Doing Good for Disability in Asian Smart Cities?

Kuansong Victor Zhuang, Tay Sze Hwee Jocelyn, Gerard Goggin, Meng Ee Wong and Chei Sian Lee

Victor Zhuang et al. interrogate the discourse of “doing good” for disabled people through smart city initiatives and digital technology, asking how we might move from “doing good” to “doing good better.”

Dossiers, no. 2, vol. 8June 7, 2023<June 7, 2023

Walking With and Caring For: Attending to the Self and the Other in the Pedestrian City

Pedram Dibazar

Walkable cities are caring cities, argues Pedram Dibazar. Viewing the pedestrian city through the lens of care, Dibazar discusses the importance of walking together as a means to sense the city anew.

Dossiers, no. 2, vol. 8June 7, 2023<June 7, 2023

Sounding Care in Malmö’s Cultural-Industrial Sound Zone

Lucy Cathcart Frödén

How can care become material through sound in the urban environment? Lucy Cathcart Frödén analyses Malmö’s “cultural-industrial sound zone” and challenges us to tune in to care in the city.

Dossiers, no. 2, vol. 8June 6, 2023<June 8, 2023

Sensing Nature: Green Databases and Maintenance as/of Care

Linda Kopitz

Linda Kopitz traces how the vision for Amsterdam’s sustainable future has been digitally mapped by “green” databases in ways that construct ideas of maintenance as care, and care as maintenance. Yet such mediations of urban nature risk fragmenting sustainable practices in the present.

Dossiers, no. 2, vol. 8June 6, 2023<June 7, 2023

Forever Infrastructures: Memorialization and Care in Australia’s Urban Cemeteries

Samuel Holleran

Samuel Holleran discusses urban cemeteries as a kind of “deathcare infrastructure” and considers the questions of capacity, maintenance, and care that surround their presence in Australian cities.

Dossiers, no. 2, vol. 8June 5, 2023<June 5, 2023

Care-by-Algorithm in Tiong Bahru Social Club (2020): Imagining the Technification of Happiness in Singapore

Pei-Sze Chow

Pei-Sze Chow reads the science-fiction film Tiong Bahru Social Club in the context of Singapore’s Smart Nation policies, arguing that its satirical vision of care-by-algorithm offers insights into how individuals might reclaim agency and “hack” the algocratic state.

Dossiers, no. 2, vol. 8June 5, 2023<June 9, 2023

Caring Cities: An Introduction

Linda Kopitz and Pei-Sze Chow

In their introduction to the Caring Cities dossier, Linda Kopitz and Pei-Sze Chow consider how care intersects with the urban, and how care might be “designed," through the lenses of technology, politics, and the senses.