Universities are integral to the development and livelihoods of cities. These institutions of higher learning hold an essential position within the urban fabric, yielding professionals who keep cities thriving with their innovation and ingenuity. Unfortunately, in the past decade, a mental health crisis has been spreading across many campuses globally. More students struggle to stay enrolled and graduate as they deal with stress, anxiety and depression. To this end, a study was conducted on a university campus in Philadelphia, with the primary goal being to identify environmental and psychological stressors affecting students to inform the design and construction of full-scale temporary wellness installations in an interior environment on campus. A collaboration between undergraduate interior design and psychology students revealed that the campus could benefit from the addition of several types of space: locations for quiet relaxation, napping, meditation and sensory spaces – all of which were noted as having the ability to reduce stress. In response, design students created full-scale temporary installations constructed from readily available, non-traditional materials (for example, cardboard and bamboo) for students to use for wellness restoration during reading week and gained feedback on which designs were the most beneficial. This article reviews the spaces designed and results of the feedback, with the hopes that other universities might implement the recommended modifications, making their campuses – and, by extension, their cities – healthier and more liveable.
A lack of affordable, adequate housing often brings hidden costs for health. The present study examines the experiences of housing insecurity among federally-qualified health centre patients living with chronic illness in a small minority–majority US city. 459 African American, Latino/a/e, Vietnamese and Russian-speaking immigrants and white American participants completed self-report surveys assessing socio-economic barriers to health. A subsample of 97 participants completed in-depth interviews, home visits and chronic disease diaries. Housing insecurity was common among study participants. Of 459 participants, 13.8% (n = 63) lived with a relative or in someone else’s place, and 6.9% (32) lived in a shelter, emergency housing, halfway house or rented room (hotel or rooming house). Additionally, 10.2% (47) considered themselves to be homeless. People experiencing homelessness and those who lived somewhere other than their own house or apartment were less likely to be able to afford their prescribed medication and more likely to lack transportation to see a provider or visit a pharmacy. Qualitative interviews included frequent narratives of housing instability and homelessness. Housing transitions often followed major or traumatic life events such as illness, dislocation due to a fire or re-entry into community after being incarcerated. Housing transitions triggered multiple, diverse sequelae including changes in family relationships, access to health care and health status. Affordable housing assistance programmes can provide stability and security, but access to them is restricted by eligibility requirements and long waitlists. Participants experienced frequent housing insecurity that affected their access to health care and pharmacy services. For optimum health, liveable cities must offer affordable and secure housing especially for community members with chronic conditions living on low incomes.
Despite the 700 Orange Halls that currently exist across the historic province of Ulster, a search for ‘Orange Hall’ on the Northern Ireland Department for Communities ‘Heritage at Risk’ website yields a mere 4 results. These traditional meeting places for the fraternal religious organisation known as the Orange Order dot the landscape, and while some are proudly proclaimed, the majority are alternatively hidden in plain sight, fortified to the point of impenetrability, or falling into disuse and disrepair. The gradual decline of the Orange Order is symbolic of irreversible advances towards a more inclusive society. Its buildings, to those who maintain and protect them against the flow of secularisation and demographic shifts, are a material expression of the importance of resisting change and preserving heritage. To others, they are symbolic of historic oppression and inequality, and their demise is perhaps welcome. This paper uses images from my current research, I Am Where I Am Not, to explore the buildings photographically and autoethnographically and examine these contested spaces in post-conflict (Northern) Ireland that challenge any definition of heritage as necessarily benign and something to be unquestioningly preserved. Drawing on a visual methodology that incorporates Charlotte Cotton’s concept of the deadpan aesthetic and using the unique example of Newfoundland’s Orange Halls as a counterpoint, this paper examines how these heritage sites are not only emblematic of the past and present, but also of possible futures – should they be deemed a heritage even worthy of preservation.
The article examines the phenomenon of border fortification in the twenty-first century. It proposes that borderwalls are not just physical barriers but symbolic forms that embody and enact a state's political visions and phantasms about national belonging and exclusion. It analyses how the visual apparatus of borders is tied to state power and to the use of electronic surveillance technologies to create a seemingly totalising panoptic regime. Central to the investigation are the tactics of state territorial control that unfold in the 'dark spaces' or 'hidden topographies of power' beyond the visible corporeality of the borderwall, where state violence and migrant deaths often occur unnoticed. When so expunged from public discourse, visual fields, maps and memory, how can these hidden border zones be reimagined? In contrast to the official optics, the article presents the making of counter-visualities through an analysis of border art installations. Such artistic endeavours are analysed as examples of how art can challenge hegemonic narratives and humanise border experiences. The article probes instances of artistic experimentation and visual radicalism (performances, installations, public works) along the US-Mexico border as counter-visual platforms for digital knowledge production, witnessing, political agency and cross-border community collaboration.
This article aims to investigate accounts of the now-demolished Kowloon Walled City (1898-1994) through a Marxist retrospective, approaching the phenomenon of statelessness as represented in its posthumous digitised life through films, video games and other forms of immersive or interactive media, tracing a lineage of postcoloniality through a critique of hauntology and affect. Tracing the question of Walled City's history within debates of statelessness, the article intends to prescribe a dialectical and spatial reading of capitalist neglect, juridic-political abandonment within the aesthetics of gaming, genre film and contemporary exhibitions on site and in greater Hong Kong. It provides a critical retrospective on Derrida's anti-Marxist approach to hauntology and the condition of postmodern capitalist malaise as per Spectres of Marx. Furthermore, it asserts that digitised reconstructions of the historic Walled City remain in the popular 'dystopian' oeuvre through its repeated intimate re-exploration, re-screenings of popular periodic genre films, and the persisting nature of interrogating, macabre curiosity on the part of the consumer class. Derrida's hauntology, while an evocative means for literary, textual or visual analysis, ultimately risks crucial detachment from material and historical contradictions, spiritualising class antagonisms as something of a stand-in for more concrete, structurally-informed Marxist critique, which asserts that the driving force of history is not the ghostly or spectral but, rather, a fetish.
