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Care Ethics and the Built Environment (Part One): A New Lens for Road Safety

Hours Posted on Hours Updated on

By:

Emily McCullogh, Ph.D.

Abstract

This article introduces care ethics as a lens through which to examine and discuss the built environment in relation to road safety. Connections between the built environment and people’s safety while travelling are well established and the language of care ethics has the potential to elevate our understanding of how the built environment influences the health and wellness of road users. This article will summarize care ethics and identify key links between the needs involved in caring and how they relate to the built environment. It will conclude by arguing that the design of the built environment is a matter of care that is of particular importance to road safety practitioners and researchers.

Introduction

The aim of this article is to introduce the language of care ethics as a useful tool for examining the built environment in relation to road safety. Doing so offers a new perspective on the role the built environment plays in our daily health and mobility by acknowledging and bringing to the forefront our collective human interdependence, vulnerability, and need (1). As stated in the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion, “health is created by caring for oneself and others, by being able to take decisions and have control over one’s life circumstances, and by ensuring that the society one lives in creates conditions that allow for the attainment of health by all its members” (2 p4). The built environment is certainly considered part of the “conditions” that influence our health and utilizing the language of care ethics offers a novel understanding of exactly how the built environment is inextricably linked to our ability to care for ourselves and others. 

Broadly, care ethics focuses on “how people take proactive interest in others, assume responsibility for their needs, and take practical action to support their well-being” (3 p1). While the built environment cannot be personified into a human capable of taking interest in others and responding to their needs (in the conventional sense), the built environment is crafted by humans in particular ways to support daily activities and travel. When we orient our thinking to imagine the built environment as an entity that has the potential to care and respond to the needs of its users the utility of care ethics, and its conceptual tools, provide valuable insight into the inadequacies of current built environments in relations to people’s own care. Further, it illuminates how some built environment designs contribute greatly to the health and wellness of its users, which is of particular importance to road safety. As stated by Biglieri and Dean, “wellbeing is not just related to individual attributes, but also to one’s residential community environments” (4 p1). 

A Need for a New Lens

The built environment can be defined as “the human-made surroundings that provide the setting for all human activity, including those places where people live, work, learn, rest, and play. These spaces range from rural streets to bustling downtowns and all the places in between” (5 p1). The links between the built environment and people’s health are well established (6-8), with researchers focusing on its role in active travel (9,10), access to green spaces (11,12), and traffic collisions (13,14), to name a few. Road traffic collisions are a leading cause of injury in Canada, with transport incidents costing $3.6 billion in 2018 (15). Further, there were 1,768 fatalities and 8,185 serious injuries resulting from traffic collisions in 2021 (16), demonstrating that the design of our communities and our cities has a significant impact on our health. 

These concerns are exacerbated when we consider the health and safety of vulnerable road users (VRUs): “pedestrians, motorcyclists, and bicyclists are considered to be vulnerable road users since they do not have the protective shell of a vehicle in case of a collision” (17 paragraph 1). However, it is important to note that researchers working in the realm of road safety have shifted the language of VRUs, drawing attention to the fact that road users are not inherently vulnerable but instead are made vulnerable by the built environments on which they travel (18). When we acknowledge that the design of the built environment directly impacts road users’ safety, it becomes clearer that this is a matter of care. 

What is Care Ethics? 

So, how can the language of care ethics elevate our understanding of how the built environment influences the safety of road users? Broadly, and as noted above, care ethics is a theory that views care as a relationship, where one acknowledges and responds to the needs of another (19). In a more practical sense,

Caring [can] be viewed as a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, ourselves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web. (20 p40)

This expanded definition more clearly highlights the relational dimensions of care in the context of our everyday lives. While care ethics traditionally focused on relationships between persons, the theory can also be applied to our relationships with things and ideas (19) and how organizations are capable of caring for their membership, or not (21). This is of particular importance for the current conceptual exercise, which involves imagining the built environment as an entity capable of caring and responding to the needs of its users. 

To better understand care ethics, it is important to consider the relationship between three key concepts: care, agency, and fundamental needs. As noted above, caring can be thought of as a “species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible” (20 p40). The concept and practice of care has been addressed by many theorists over the years and another important definition of caring is “the process of responding to another’s needs by understanding their self-determined ends, adopting those ends as one’s own, and advancing them in an effort to cultivate, maintain or restore their agency” (1 p79). This definition introduces the concept of agency, which is critical because it highlights the effects of good and poor care. Agency is defined as “the ability to achieve some manner of results in the world, to affect change in accordance with one’s volition, and to maintain the ability to carry out projects (often self-determined) in a surrounding environment” (1 p24). In other words, in order to function and thrive in the world, we need to be supported in ways that allow us to make decisions, take initiative, and contribute to our “life sustaining web” (20 p40) in particular ways. Lastly, needs are integral to care; specifically, fundamental needs, which are defined as needs “that must be met and cared for in order to establish, sustain, or restore agency” (1 p11). Returning to the links between care and our collective interdependence and vulnerability, “all humans experience fundamental needs, and therefore require another person’s attention and response in order to meet these needs (establishing, maintaining, or restoring their agency in the process)” (1 pp52-53). It is these fundamental needs involved in caring that are useful for examining the built environment and considering how it may care (or not) for its users. 

Fundamental Needs Involved in Caring 

There are eleven fundamental needs involved in caring (Table 1), all of which are linked to personal agency. Recall the definition above; agency refers to one’s ability to “maintain the ability to carry out projects (often self-determined) in a surrounding environment” (1 p24), which requires a degree of health and safety in order to achieve. Given that the built environment significantly impacts people’s health and safety, it is clear to see how care ethics is useful for enhancing our understanding of precisely how.

Table 1. Fundamental needs involved in caring.

Fundamental Need Definition
1. Nutrition and Water All agents will require adequate nutrition and clean water to develop, survive, and thrive.
2. Rest All agents need some amount of rest, though required amounts will differ.
3. Shelter No matter their geographical location, all agents will require protection from the elements. This includes clothing as an everyday form of shelter.
4. Healthy Environment Agents require a hygienic, non-toxic environment to maintain agency.
5. Bodily Integrity Freedom from physical and sexual assault and abuse (in all its forms, including child abuse, domestic violence, rape, physical intimidation, etc.) is a requirement of agency. Agents must be able to determine matters affecting their own bodies, including medical and reproductive issues. Bodily integrity also may include some form of healthy sexual activity and determination of the nature of that activity.
6. Healing Many (if not all) agents need some form of medical attention or healing that they are not themselves able to perform. 
7. Education This category includes various means and modes of learning. Agents require access to knowledge and skills to help them function in the world.
8. Attachments Positive emotional attachments to others create the possibility of agency in the first place. It is also that which helps to sustain and replenish agency. Without attachments to others, agency often withers. Agents need to express emotions and to receive the emotional expression of others.
9. Social Inclusion, Participation, and Recognition Agents need to feel included, participate in their environment, and be recognized by others. All three relate to forming and maintaining some sense of personal identity necessary for sustaining agency.
10. Play The cultivation and maintenance of agency requires play – pleasurable recreational experiences during which humor and creativity flourish. 
11. Security Freedom from coercive, threatening environments – physical, psychological, and emotional – is required. Agency cannot fully develop or be sustained in environments of extreme anxiety and fear.

*Adapted from Miller (1 pp41-42).

These fundamental needs involved in caring can all be applied to the built environment. They help us more fully understand how the built environment influences our ability to care for ourselves and others. For example, in most cases, acquiring nutrition requires travel to locations where food is available. Thus, unsafe travel routes can potentially compromise road users’ care by threatening their ability to feed themselves and their families. Similarly, rest and shelter are influenced by the design of the built environment, such as the availability of bus shelters and frequent shade for pedestrian and cyclist routes. 

A healthy environment and bodily integrity are closely linked to the built environment. As noted above, “one must be surrounded by an environment that is sustaining rather than injurious” (1 p41); unfortunately, given the number of road traffic injuries and deaths, it is clear that the built environment, in many cases, fails to provide care (15,16). Further, built environments lacking adequate lighting contribute to unsafe travel routes, particularly for women and children, thus violating the fundamental need for security. Healing may seem disconnected from the built environment as a fundamental need; however, travel is required to reach hospitals and clinics, as well as to access self-administered medicine and first aid resources. Similarly, education is another fundamental need that, in most cases, requires travel to and from school or education centres.

Attachments, social inclusion, participation, and recognition, and play may initially less related to the built environment and its impact on our care; however, the built environment includes “those places where people live, work, learn, rest, and play” (5 p1), such as green spaces and parks. These spaces are sites for social gatherings and connections, offering opportunities for people to feel included and recognized, thereby enhancing, sustaining, or repairing our agency.  

The Built Environment: A Matter of Care

We can now begin to see how the design of the built environment is a matter of care that affects people’s physical and psychological health (5). As noted above, when we view the connection between the built environment and its users as a caring relation, it is evident how the design of the built environment caters to the needs of some road users more than others. In other words, employing a relational care lens “can help organize and situate care relations in a multi-scalar fashion that recognizes the interconnectedness and fluidity between humans, more-than-human others, built environments, policies, programs, and broader socio-cultural political structures through time” (4 p2). As such, we can more precisely examine and articulate the shortcomings of many built environments and the need for change.

One problem with many built environments is that they are a concrete (pun intended) manifestation of individualism and independence, which are prioritized over responsibilities towards others (3). From this view, care is a personal responsibility, “a private affair” (22 p3), that does not require the support of others. These concerns have been addressed in research examining the inadequate design of cities. For example, “the composition of cities has been shaped by ideas that are often insensitive to human and non-human diversity and wellbeing, and therefore work against the ethos of caring” (23 pp2-3). This is evident when considering how the built environment falls short in caring for VRUs, such as people living with disabilities (4), a topic that will be more thoroughly discussed in Part Two of this article (SNN 2024 Winter Issue). 

Final Thoughts

The purpose of this article was to introduce the language and concepts of care ethics as a lens for understanding how the built environment influences health and wellbeing. By imagining the built environment as an entity capable of care, we expand our understanding of how its design impacts our daily lives. As stated by Bates and colleagues, “there is much to be done to improve the quality of the built environment and people’s experiences of it, including supporting practitioners in understanding how to respond to the many needs of those that inhabit the places that they design” (24 pxiii). This article is step towards that improvement, aiming to inspire practitioners and policymakers to consider how the built environment influences care, particularly in the context of road safety.

Bio: Emily McCullogh, Ph.D.

Emily is a qualitative researcher at York University in the Faculty of Health Science working under the direction of Dr. Alison Macpherson. Her doctoral work was conducted in the fields of sociology and philosophical ethics and examined care and caring within coach-athlete relationships in youth competitive sport; however, her research scope has expanded to include road safety, injury prevention, and the built environment. Upon completing her Ph.D., she joined a pan-Canadian research team dedicated to reducing road-related injuries and deaths, as well as promoting active transportation. Her ongoing work focuses on accessibility, equity, and the built environment, as well as system-based approaches to safe and sustainable mobility in Canada.

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