Lecture Pleuntje Jellema: The Roles of Cancer Care Facilities in Users’ Well-being: Foregrounding the Built Environment and Learning Lessons for Design
KU Leuven organises Health Humanities lecture series
KU Leuven Health Humanities Lecture Series 2024-2025: Health and the Built Environment
‘We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us’, or so Winston Churchill once said. For better or for worse, our constructed physical space – the so-called built environment – impacts on our behaviours, our social interactions, and our physical and mental health. The speakers of this year’s LCH² lecture series discuss various examples of the relationship between architectural space and human well-being, from across a range of health humanities, including architecture, literary and colonial history, sociology, and disability studies. In doing so, they will touch on themes as varied as the role of the corridor in hospital architecture, the connections between buildings and disabled bodies in science fiction movies, and the architectural evolution of retirement homes. Join online or on campus, at KU Leuven, for a series of inspiring health humanities talks about the built environment.
Programme
- 13 February 2025 – Pleuntje Jellema: The Roles of Cancer Care Facilities in Users’ Well-being: Foregrounding the Built Environment and Learning Lessons for Design
- 27 February 2025 – Roger Luckhurst: A History of the Hospital Corridor: Madness and Civilisation
- 27 March 2025 – Simon De Nys-Ketels: “At least the Belgians built hospitals!”: Myths and Realities of the Belgian ‘Medical Model Colony’
- 24 April 2025 – Alyson Patsavas: Sites of Intervention: Disability and the (Built) Environment in Imagined Futures
- 8 May 2025 – Cleo Valentine: Architectural Neuroimmunology: Examining the Impact of Architectural Form on Neurophysiological Activity
- 22 May 2025 – Karin Bijsterveld: The ‘Return’ of the Retirement Home: Anthropology, Architecture and Policy Analysis in the Historiography of Postwar Housing for Older People in the Netherlands
The Roles of Cancer Care Facilities in Users’ Well-being: Foregrounding the Built Environment and Learning Lessons for Design
Every day, many people receive a cancer diagnosis, impacting them and their loved ones. Consultations and treatments lead to stress and uncertainty, and the built environment plays a role in this, affecting well-being. This talk explores how the experiences of those affected by cancer can inform the design of cancer care environments. Various methods are used to understand the built environment’s role in patients’ everyday lives and to guide architects and clients in designing these facilities. Findings show that patients experience a dispersed landscape of care that consists of various locations and buildings, including their homes. This research further identifies spaces of transition as being at risk of receiving deficient attention in design processes for (cancer) care. If design processes are to take into account spatial aspects of people’s experiences, this requires making these aspects explicit and disentangling patients’ priorities from those of care professionals. I therefore illustrate how, with this type of research, clients and designers are supported in design processes, with examples from the broader care sector.
For more information about the programme or how to register, visit this website.
