Public Health as Public Space: Feminist Design for Spaces of Care, Encounter and Collaboration Between State and Citizenship Around Well-Being
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Date
2025
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Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
Abstract
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025.Nowadays, at the San Rafael Family Health Center (Cesfam), territory and Health System converge in two simultaneous interaction spaces. The first are the waiting and stay areas within the building that have incorporated libraries, interior gardens, and free-use spaces for patients, neighbors and officials, favoring the encounter between them. The second is a more intangible space built through the coordinated work between a group of Cesfam workers—called Family Executives—and the Social Leaders of the sector that expand the monitoring capacity of the Cesfam and build a bridge between the socio-health needs of the neighborhood and the Health Center. The description of this case constitutes an inspiration for the form that a feminist design of public health spaces could take that welcome and enhance their role as a moment of coexistence between State and Citizenship, and materialize an accessible space from care, attention and encounter. The case was addressed through a series of field work sessions during 2021 and 2022 that included observation and description of the waiting and transit spaces inside the Health Center, interviews and conversations with workers and patients, and the subsequent analysis and translation of what was observed into design recommendations with a feminist approach. Finally, in addition to the potential of the Cesfam San Rafael as a benchmark for public space that fosters an effective encounter between state and territory, the work opens the space to reflect on the capacity of design as a discipline to materialize political approaches and counter-hegemonic narratives that can be experienced corporally by people to push for a transformation in the way of conceiving and inhabiting these spaces from a feminist perspective.
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Keywords
Feminist design, Primary care, Public health, Public space