An Ethnographic Perspective on Urban Planning in Brazil: Temporality, Diversity and Critical Urban Theory

Children's experiences of care on walking and cycling journeys between home and school in Healthy New Towns: Reframing active school travel

The Healthy New Town programme in England set out to 'put health into place' by supporting the design and construction of healthy places to live, including by creating safe environments for active travel. To explore the impact of this approach, this study examined how children and their families experienced school journeys in two contrasting Healthy New Towns in England, one an affluent new town in the early stages of construction and the other more economically deprived and established. We undertook photo-elicitation and go-along interviews with 24 children aged 7-12 years and semi-structured interviews with 17 caregivers. We found that experiences of care were important for children's school travel. In the 'deprived' town, opportunities for children to care and to be cared for were enjoyed, facilitated by routes with limited traffic, pockets of 'nature', and possibilities to encounter meaningful others. For families living in a town under construction, the need to negotiate unfinished travel infrastructure, and a sense of being 'in limbo', was experienced as an absence of care by planners and developers. Interventions to promote children's active travel should consider the role of care-full planning in facilitating walking and cycling journeys.

'He called me out of the blue': An ethnographic exploration of contrasting temporalities in a social prescribing intervention

Social prescribing, a way of connecting patients to local services, is central to the NHS Personalised Care agenda. This paper employs ethnographic data, generated with 19 participants between November 2018 and July 2020, to explore the socio-temporal relations shaping their experiences of a local social prescribing intervention. Our focus is on the ways in which the intervention synchronised with the multitude of shifting, complex and often contradictory 'timespaces' of our participants. Our focus on the temporal rhythms of everyday practice allows us to trace a tension between the linearity and long horizon of the intervention and the oft contrasting timeframes of participants, sometimes leading to a mismatch that limited the intervention's impact. Further, we observed an interventional 'drift' from continuity towards unsupported signposting and 'out-of-the-blue' contacts which favour the temporality of the intervention. We demonstrate a need for intervention planning to be flexible to multiple, often conflicting, temporalities. We argue that health interventions must account for the temporal relations lived by the people they seek to support.