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With the deinstitutionalisation of mental health care, individuals experiencing mental ill-health are increasingly expected to live as integrated members of the community. Yet, little is known about how they experience their everyday living environments. Situated within the post-deinstitutional paradigm, this article explores how individuals with mental ill-health navigate and make sense of their socio-spatial contexts in relation to ‘doing’ wellbeing. A Photovoice study was conducted with 12 participants (aged 26–66), recruited from three member-based Fountain Houses in Sweden. The study draws on a relational space perspective on wellbeing. Findings reveal that experiences of space and place are deeply relational, embodied, and situated—shaped by events and social interactions. These experiences cut across four categories of place: (i) enabling, (ii) troublesome, (iii) ambiguous, and (iv) places entangled with memories. We discuss how varying degrees of agency influence the emergence of wellbeing, particularly in the face of structural constraints such as poverty and regulation. Participants’ accounts also suggest that their environments resemble an “inverted city” rather than the prevailing urban planning ideal of a dense, vibrant, and inclusive city life. We conclude by emphasising the need to recognise how people, places, and policies are entangled in the practice of ‘doing’ wellbeing. to equally acknowledge how individuals’ realisation of a ‘livable life’ is supported by these spatial, material, social, and affective relations. Finally, we urge professionals in social and spatial fields to apply spatio-temporal insights in the pursuit of social inclusion - or wellbeing as a commons - not only for the group discussed here but for society as a whole.

Area-based initiatives are local interventions in targeted neighborhoods, typically situated within broader urban development frameworks aimed at addressing segregation. This article examines area-based initiatives as forms of social infrastructure. It draws on two cases of area-based initiatives in Nordic urban residential neighborhoods, using the concept of social infra-structuring combined with a policy arrangement framework. The study shows how a segregation discourse enrolls municipalities, housing compa-nies and civil society associations in specific ways within these arrangements. Agreements are used to formalize and enable collaboration for social issues between organizations around specific places, as a tool which interlinks space, organizations, and activities whilst providing stability albeit within a given temporality. Furthermore, the article shows civil society associations as key driving forces in enabling social infrastructuring. We argue that the requirements and expectations expressed through formal agreements of the area-based initiatives indicate an on-going professionalization of civil society. We conclude that contemporary strategies for addressing segregation through urban area development, entail a (re)configuration of the conditions for civil society associations. This suggests that social infrastructuring is not only a relational process which mobilizes civil society associations, but also one that (re)shapes their position and capacity within urban area development.

This introduction to the Routledge Handbook on Spaces of Mental Health and Wellbeing positions the chapters to come within the disciplinary context of human geography. A brief overview of the emergence of mental health geography as a subfield of research is provided before considering how recent work in this subfield is influenced by theoretical developments in health geography. The ways in which these theoretical developments prompt a re-thinking of mental health and wellbeing as concepts is also discussed before presenting some highlights from the handbook’s main sections - (1) green/blue spaces, (2) lived and embodied spaces, (3) creative spaces, (4) spaces of work and home, and (5) institutional and post-institutional spaces.

Mental health care provisions belong to a history of treatment, care, support and service tightly connected to institutional and post-institutional spaces. This section brings together contributors from across the fields of organisation studies, geography, sociology, psychology, history, creative writing and architecture to draw attention to the significance of these spaces for processes of care, control and recovery of mental ill-health. Chapters range in focus from contemporary in-patient clinics (‘healing architecture’ and ‘carceral riskscapes’), islands and communities as institutionalised sites, spatial and organisational visions of the old asylums, contemporary experiential, creative encounters with archival material, and the discussion of abolition - as in should there really be a mental health system at all? Chapters taken together thus reveal the complexity and contradictions of mental health care spaces in the past, present and most likely also the future.

Critical scholarship on ‘asylum and post-asylum geographies’ has been ongoing since at least the early-1980s, but rarely has it attended directly to the problematic of whether the mental health system itself should exist or, conversely, be abolished. There are few studies which have asked the ultimately searching question of whether the very object that it studies - in all its different configurations and organisations - should ideally disappear. Our chapter explores this question, recognising that answers to it necessarily acquire complexity and nuance due to the vulnerable and indeed often suffering character of people accessing mental healthcare provisions. Our conclusion is that mental health geography has tended to work - but also probably should work ‘in the cracks’ between abolition and reform, precisely because of what psychiatric ‘user-survivors’ often value about places to which they feel belonging even when those places have compromised origins, histories and functions.

I samhällsplaneringen efterfrågas tillvägagångssätt och instrument för att bemöta, förebygga och förhindra problem såsom otrygghet, segregation, och för att uppnå mål om social hållbarhet. Begreppet social infrastruktur har, framför allt i ett anglosaxiskt sammanhang, vuxit fram som en strategi för att integrera sociala mål med samhällsplanering och därigenom ett konkret sätt att arbeta med social hållbarhet. Social infrastruktur definieras här som nätverk av platser, anläggningar, institutioner, organisationer och grupper som skapar möjligheter för människor att mötas, bygga upp sociala relationer och i förlängningen ökad gemenskap. Flera städer i till exempel Storbritannien har utvecklat policyer för social infrastruktur som en del av den övergripande samhällsplaneringen.

I den här rapporten undersöker vi vilka aspekter som bör ingå i en policy för social infrastruktur för att främja social hållbarhet på stadsdelsnivå. Genom en kombination av platsbesök, GIS-analyser, dokumentstudier och semistrukturerade intervjuer har förutsättningar för social infrastruktur i Helsingborgs två stadsdelar, Planteringen och Fredriksdal, kartlagts och undersökts. Med utgångspunkt i ett analytiskt ramverk om policyarrangemang visar vi vilket organisatoriskt sammanhang som möjliggör utveckling av social infrastruktur. I studien konstaterar vi att mötesplatserna utvecklas utifrån lokala målsättningar om trygghet, gemenskap, hälsa och demokrati, samt ett stärkt föreningsliv. Mötesplatserna möjliggörs av å ena sidan åtskilda förvaltningsövergripande utvecklingsprocesser, och å andra sidan av föreningar som etablerar sig i stadsdelarna. Det förekommer även strategiska samverkansinitiativ där exempelvis kommunen i partnerskap med det kommunala bostadsbolaget och lokala föreningar driver mötesplatser. Etableringen av nya mötesplatser såväl som befintliga mötesplatser och dess verksamheter regleras av olika avtal, lagar, regler och riktlinjer där Barnkonventionen är ett exempel och partnerskapsavtal, s.k. IOP-avtal, är ett annat. För att mötesplatserna ska möjliggöras och drivas har olika rumsliga, finansiella och mänskliga resurser, exempelvis tillgång till mark och lokaler, bidrag och personligt engagemang, pekats ut som avgörande.

De övergripande slutsatserna som rapporten drar handlar alla om vikten av ett sammanhållet arbete för social infrastruktur på stadsdelsnivå om målet är att främja social hållbarhet genom samhällsplanering. Ett sådant arbete torde förutsätta andra och nya sätt att bedriva kommunalt utvecklings-, och planeringsarbete vilket ställer krav på ökad koordinering mellan förvaltningar såväl som aktiv samverkan med föreningslivet:

1) Behov av en övergripande och samlad strategi om sociala mål. En strategi som syftar till att sociala mål som rättvisa, trygghet, hälsa, delaktighet och gemenskap kan implementeras genom mötesplatser i områdesutvecklingsprocesser generellt. Föreningar, en viktig aktör i dessa processer, bör integreras i samhällsplaneringen. 

2) Stärk kommunernas organisatoriska kapacitet för långsiktig samverkan med föreningslivet och för att identifiera, förstå och stimulera civilsamhällets drivkrafter att engagera sig i ideellt arbete. Detta mot bakgrund av en övergripande förändring och ansvarsförskjutning inom välfärdssamhället, där civilsamhällets välfärdsuppdrag tilltagit det senaste decenniet, vilket anses bidragit till en professionalisering av föreningslivets organisation och kultur. Något som i sin tur kan bidra till minskat ideellt engagemang. 

3) Arbeta strategiskt med rumsliga resurser. En sådan strategi synliggör skillnader i rumsliga resurser mellan stadsdelar och säkerställer att befintliga lokaler, byggnader och mark för icke kommersiella mötesplatser inte omvandlas i stadsförnyelseprocesser, samt att identifiera rumslig potential för samlokalisering av verksamheter.

Att utveckla social infrastruktur stärker sociala band och tillhörighet, därigenom är det en fråga om och en del av social hållbar stadsutveckling. Rapporten visar att ett integrerat arbete tvärs över kommunala förvaltningar och bolag, goda relationer till föreningslivet, och ett samlat strategiskt grepp om de idéer, aktörer, regler och resurser som tillsammans stödjer social infrastruktur är viktiga komponenter i ett sådant utvecklingsarbete.

This handbook critically examines spaces of mental health and wellbeing across multiple, often intersecting, domains from green and blue spaces to lived and embodied spaces, creative spaces, work and home spaces, and institutional and post-institutional spaces.

The Routledge Handbook on Spaces of Mental Health and Wellbeing features 45 chapters from leading international scholars who collectively interrogate the spatial dimensions of mental health and wellbeing from conceptual and experiential viewpoints. The ways in which these theoretical developments prompt a re-thinking of mental health and wellbeing as concepts is also discussed before presenting some highlights from the handbook’s five main sections – (1) green and blue spaces, (2) lived and embodied spaces, (3) creative spaces, (4) work and home spaces, and (5) institutional and post-institutional spaces. The key benefits of this book include a great appreciation of the complex networks and assemblages of mental health and wellbeing, the value of a geographical/spatial approach to thinking about mental health, and the vast array of spaces and places that are implicated in human and posthuman notions of wellbeing.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars across the social sciences and the humanities as well as researchers and practitioners in the fields of psychology, psychiatry, social work, nursing, health geography, social and cultural geography, anthropology, mental health social studies, cultural theory, and architecture.

Nordic public libraries (PL) are considered ‘houses of democracy’, which have played a key role in ensuring free access to social and cultural capital, and more recently, knowledge capital. In several PL, there has been a shift towards ‘hybrid hubs’, which has not yet been adequately explored, either theoretically or empirically. Firstly, this study reviews existing scientific studies and builds a conceptual framework for exploring the hybridization of PL. Secondly, the study examines links of the National Library Acts and strategies to socio-cultural and knowledge capital in Finland, Norway and Sweden. Thirdly, the study explores the ways in which hybridization is manifested in selected libraries in Helsinki, Oslo and Stockholm, those that are both central and peripheral to the city. The study reveals several factors that mark PL as hybrid places, and it can contribute to the understanding of various dimensions in which hybridization occurs and transforms our cities.

The Swedish Social Services Act (SFS 2001:453) stipulates since 1982 that the municipal Social Committee should become well acquainted with the living conditions in the municipality. They should also participate in urban planning, and in cooperation with other public bodies, organizations, associations and individuals promote good living environments in the municipality. The development, planning and design of good living environments for older people is an endeavour of great complexity that demands collaboration between many actors. Housing and care for older people is an important area in which social servicesand urban planning could benefit from collaboration. Planning for older people has recently been indicated as urgent and necessary, especially in the light of changed demography in which the proportion of older people is increasing. A built environment that accommodates older people’s everyday needs embraces issues such as age-friendliness, care, socio-spatial inequality, inclusion, and innovation. This research program, CollAge, investigates cross-sectoral collaboration in Swedish municipalities between social eldercare, urban planning and Senior Citizens’ Councils as regards housing and care. With diverse qualitative methodologies the multidisciplinary team of scholars in social work, architecture and urban planning  explore how eldercare interventions and services are managed and understood in municipal urban planning and development, and how older people’s preferences can contribute to improved quality of care in social services and housing provision.  The ultimate aim of the programme is to develop a methodological tool – CollAge – to support, facilitate and structure collaboration between the three actors.