Placing Health: Understanding the social contexts and embodied experiences of therapeutic spaces

This paper reports on the early stages of a research project that seeks to understand the social contexts of buildings and spaces designed to have therapeutic effects. Drawing on interview data from visitors to the buildings of a cancer charity, the paper will locate its findings within previous insights from literature on the design of healthcare spaces from the fields of medical sociology, health geography and architectural theory.

In particular, it will focus on questions of how the built environment has an influence on the embodied experience of health and illness.
Theoretically, this paper offers an initial attempt at translating Henri Lefebvre’s arguments about the role of the body within contemporary urban practices into debates with the field of medical sociology.