In this paper, we analyse the intersections between care and place in mundane spaces not explicitly designed for the provision of care, and where digital technologies are used to mediate ecologies of distress in the city. We locate our analysis alongside studies of how digital technologies impact the experience of care within non-clinical spaces, whilst noting that much research on the use of technologies for care remains haunted by clinical imaginaries.

With the spread of digitalization, the spaces and imaginaries of healthcare are fundamentally changing, due, in part, to an increasing uptake of immersive technologies. Building on previous ethnographic work on the nature of placed care (Ivanova, 2020a; Simonsen, 2020) this paper explores two cases of immersive technology advances in the Netherlands and Denmark to better understand contemporary developments in digital healthcare, the virtual environments they afford, and the immersive experiences they seek to evoke.

In this essay, we posit that the urban living lab is an object, engulfed in a particular kind of ontological mystique. We show how diverse urban initiatives utilize the label of `lab' strategically, in order to position their practices within the logic of scientific authority and in/exclude different audiences, thus configuring urban participation.

Who has access to and who is allowed to imagine and experiment in the city?

This paper critically examines urban lab projects in the city of Rotterdam.

How are cultures of care made meaningful in the context of labor migration?

This paper provides a tangible example of culturally specific dimensions of the relationship between health and place. I contribute the concept ‘care cultures’ as a productive lens to how place, people, ethics and care practices grow, merge and (mis-)align.

What does it mean to be a migrant mother?

This paper is based on longitudinal ethnographic work among Bulgarian migrant women working as live-in caregivers and in Italian households and considers the co-production of place with subjectivities. I propose the term ‘dwelling-in-folds’ in order to make sense of temporary migrants’ experience of place(s) that foregrounds their ability to connect and reconcile fractures and discontinuities, particularly when doing transnational motherhood.

Will place soon disappear? Will we all exist online? How should we think about place in the future? I explore these questions through the fascinating case of the Sensory Reality Pod (Sensiks).

The paper introduces the term post-place, as a first step in developing a vocabulary for thinking future care places productively.. Post-place care, unlike the idea of placeless care or emplaced care, is an inclusive, open and generative concept.

What does a foundling room look like today? Can a place of abandoning infants be a place of care?

The article investigates the case of an illegal baby foundling room in the Netherlands. We conceptualize this place, continuously produced through its care infrastructures, as ‘place-by-proxy’: a place that allows, by virtue of simply being there, for the animation of infrastructures around it.

What does elderly care look like on a faraway island?

In this article we analyse the process of the multiple ways place and care shape each other and are co-produced and co-functioning. The resulting emerging assemblage of this co-constituent process we call a carescape. Focusing on a case study of a nursing home on a Dutch island, we analyse how current changes in healthcare governance interact with mundane practices of care.