Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to develop a more-than-institutional analysis of contemporary healthcare systems, immersing the roles and responsibilities of caring and healing in a broader urban system done of actants, sites, relations, memories, protocols. The paper results from a collaborative analysis.

Paper long abstract:

This paper aims to develop a more-than-institutional analysis of contemporary healthcare systems, immersing the roles and responsibilities of caring and healing in a broader urban system. This critical analysis of social healthcare systems not only refers to the multiplicity of agencies and roles that participate in the contemporary endeavours of care; but also it attempts to place the responsibility of healing and caring beyond the field of competence, within the complex ecology of urban life.

Following the recent development by Franco Rotelli (2013) of "the city that heals/cares", as ulterior step of Franco Basaglia's critique of institutionalisation of healthcare (since the 1960s), the paper employs different streams of ecological critique, to engage with institutional practices in healthcare: the ecological perception of Henri Lefebvre; the transversal ecological understanding of Felix Guattari; and Susan Leigh Star's ecological institutional approach.

These streams of critique allows us to construct a novel concept, the "ecology of care", and to investigate and expose it through an ethnographic research in concrete sites of Europe. The _territorial medicine_ in Trieste and the _social prescription_ in London will serve to enquire different more-than-social tendencies; between emancipation and abandonment, commoning and individualisation, blossoming and desertification.

These dialogues are constructed through the participatory analysis of practices together with workers, users and activists. This collaborative analysis provides a series of analytical tools to widen our understanding of the responsibility of caring and healing, as a socio-material distributed invention of care in the complex urban environment, today.