Exploring the Relationship Between the City and Caregiving Practices
From left to right: Ramon Sepulveda, Andrew Binet, Vedette Gavin, and Ronel Remy. From the Conservation Law Foundation's 2017 coverage of the Healthy Neighborhood Study.
How does the urban fabric of a city shape caregiving practices? How does caregiving impact the relationship between cities and public health? And how might planners reimagine cities to better support caregivers and viable caring relations?
These questions are explored in Andrew Binet’s 2021 dissertation, Making the City Livable: Caregiving and Health in Gentrifying Boston. Their dissertation utilizes a a longitudinal Participatory Action Research project examining the relationship between gentrification and community health in nine Boston-area neighborhoods to explore strategies employed to fulfill caregiving goals while centering caregiver experiences in relation to gentrification. Recognizing the “impressive collaboratively designed longitudinal study working with both residents and the Community Advisory Committee” as well as reflecting the importance of lessons central to the field of planning, Binet’s dissertation was named the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning’s (ACSP) 2022 winner of the Barclay Gibbs Jones Award for Best Dissertation in Planning.
The Barclay Gibbs Jones Award for Best Dissertation in Planning recognizes superior scholarship in a doctoral dissertation which is "well written, employs methods elegantly," offers novel ideas for the field of planning, and "provides guidance about how planners or governments should make choices." The selection committee included Emre Tepe (University of Florida), Thomas Campanella (Cornell University), Shakil Kashem (Kansas State University), Liming Wang (Portland State University), and Xinyue Ye (Texas A&M University).
Currently, Binet is a Postdoctoral Fellow at DUSP. Their research explores the intersection of urban planning and public health, focusing on how processes of urban change shape the work of care and social reproduction and how planning for care can advance health equity. Binet is a mixed-methods scholar committed to expanding the practice of community-engaged research in the planning field. For the past eight years, they have been the co-lead of the Healthy Neighborhoods Study. Learn more about Binet and their research, via ACSP’s "A Closer Look."