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Mouratidis, K. (2020). Neighborhood characteristics, neighborhood satisfaction, and wellbeing: The links with neighborhood deprivation.

Scientific research has shown how exposure to daylight and continual contact with greenery, natural elements and habitats are crucial factors for human well-being. In the wake of these findings, it is highly important to improve access to facilities that enable and promote these effects of increased life quality and well-being among all groups of people in our societies. The paper describes an in-progress project focusing on how to enhance the everyday conditions of elderly people in a care home setting in Denmark, all of which are living with Dementia. The paper presents a vision for a new physical extension to the existing building structure on the care home location that supports everyday life, activities and the overall wellbeing among the residents. The vision can be seen as the first step in the development of a set of generic guidelines for the design and use made to be transferred and tested in other settings in Denmark and internationally. In drafting and designing the conservatory the project group employs principles of Universal Design in combination with newer research findings on the health-promoting potentials of spaces characterized by access to natural light, plant growth and living environments. Furthermore, the work rests on a holistic ambition to create brighter, greener, naturally aligned and healthier conditions for residents, care home workers and visiting relatives alike.

In this paper we present and propose the concept of Emancipatory Design (ED), which is an alternative way of thinking about the human being and the ever intricate relations between people, design, architecture and the built environment. The paper is given the form of a manifesto and has the overall aim to reflect critically on the possibility of design as a practice that potentially carry emancipatory effects in the everyday lives of particular human beings. Defining ED, we draw on notions from philosophy and the history of ideas to challenge the concept of human disability often at play in writings concerned with design and architecture. This approach allows for a provocative, disruptive and experimental attempt to relativize and cancel the notion of disability – and, subsequently, to explore the possibilities inherent to this maneuver in the realm of design thinking. With ED we propose a concept that works as a contribution to the community engaged in Universal Design (UD), as well as a gentle objection and critique of the abstract and intangible element of universality at play within this tradition.

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