Experiencing post-socialism: Running and urban space in Sofia, Bulgaria

This article suggests that cities in Central and Eastern Europe should be understood as developing and interacting with their own unique character and challenges on their own terms. In providing an account of embodied and everyday activities, this paper challenges the conception of a decline in public-oriented acts and affordances understood via the notion of post-socialist privatism. In doing so this paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork of recreational running; an underutilised tool for urban analysis. Despite the growing interest in recreational running amongst urban scholars, engaging with the practice has remained largely neglected within research on the post-socialist cities of Central and Eastern Europe. This paper uses a case study of two recreational running clubs from Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, offering a discussion of everyday experience, public life and urban space. This case study combines participant observation and in-depth qualitative interviews with runners and club organisers to complicate the idea of post-socialist cities as places defined by the decline of public sensibilities and a single conception of the post-socialist condition

‘The Feel of the Stones, Sounds of Cars, the Different Smells’:How Incorporating the Senses Can Help Support Equitable Health Promotion

There has been limited consideration to the role of the senses in health promotion regardless of the prominence placed on corporeality in intervention and prevention strategies. Touch as a form of sense-making challenges the representational approaches that characterize health promotion methods to increase participation in physical activity. This paper explores recreational running practices through the sense of touch and is drawn from an in-depth qualitative research project with recreational runners in the Bulgarian capital Sofia. The project examined how recreational running was established and maintained within the city. This paper concludes that there is potential for health promotion to adopt a more open stance towards the study of sensual experiences of the built environment. Insights from approaches attentive to the senses hold promise for agendas and interventions in health promotion practice and intervention

Soccer, Broadcasting, and Narrative:On Televising a Live Soccer Match

Soccer broadcasts have been explored in a number of interesting ways, uncovering racial difference, gendered stereotypes, domestic viewing experiences, nationalistic discourse, and national styles of production. What is lacking, however, is how the viewer comprehends space and time in the live broadcast. Such literatures neglect the hybrid nature of televised soccer as a combination of visual and verbal communication. Understanding and experiencing a televised soccer match is a formulation of visual principles and verbal understanding of temporality within the narrative of a live broadcast. These principles are materialized through the screen and develop an unconscious understanding of movement, spatiality, and temporality differing from a cinematic unconscious through the cutting and sequencing of footage and border moments—screen wipe, frames, cuts—which work in combination with commentary to establish a microgeography of the screen. Viewers of televised soccer, therefore, establish a comprehension of time and space which is distinctive and differs from reportage

Affect and public health – Choreographing atmospheres of movement and participation

Attempts at improving physical activity rates among the population are central to many government, public health, and third sector approaches to encouraging health behaviours. However, to date there has been little attempt by public health to embrace different theoretical-methodological approaches, relying instead upon largely quantitative techniques. This paper argues that through a development of a framework of affect amplification, public health approaches to physical activity should incorporate the choreographing of spaces of movement. Drawing on two case studies, both incorporating ethnographic methodologies, this paper complicates the idea that public health can rely on individual or population level approaches that overlook affective and spatial entanglements. This paper concludes by outlining offer a series of ideas to encourage physical activity participation

Cycling in the post-socialist city: On travelling by bicycle in Sofia, Bulgaria

There are many ways of moving through a city. Cycling is one which has received considerable attention from urban scholars. Yet it has remained largely neglected within the burgeoning literature on the post-socialist urbanisms of Central and Eastern Europe. This paper uses a case study from Sofia, Bulgaria to address this gap in urban research. By exploring the practices and affordances of cycling, we offer a discussion of everyday mobility, public life and urban space in post-socialist Sofia. This case study incorporates ethnography and in-depth interviews with regular cyclists. Through a discussion of bicycling spaces and practices, this paper complicates the notion of post-socialist cities as places defined by the decline of public sensibilities. </jats:p

Health Promotion Interventions:Lessons from the Transfer of Good Practices in CHRODIS-PLUS

Health promotion and disease prevention often take the form of population- and individual-based interventions that aim to reduce the burden of disease and associated risk factors. There is a wealth of programs, policies, and procedures that have been proven to work in a specific context with potential to improve the lives and quality of life for many people. However, the challenge facing health promotion is how to transfer recognized good practices from one context to another. We present findings from the use of the implementation framework developed in the Joint Action project CHRODIS-PLUS to support the transfer of health promotion interventions for children&rsquo;s health and older adults identified previously as good practices. We explore the contextual success factors and barriers in the use of an implementation framework in local contexts and the protocol for supporting the implementation. The paper concludes by discussing the key learning points and the development of the next steps for successful transfer of health promotion interventions

Urban policies and the creation of healthy urban environments: A review of government housing and transport policy documents in the United Kingdom

Urban environments are key health determinants and play a critical role in improving health outcomes and equity. However, urban policies in the United Kingdom (UK) and globally frequently fail to produce healthy towns and cities. Given the highly centralized nature of UK policy, we analyzed national UK policy documents published since 2010 in two key areas of urban policy: housing supply and transport. We found that health is largely absent in narratives shaping urban development and, where health is included, it is as an assumed indirect outcome of delivering other policy agendas. Thus, we recommend that explicit direct and measurable health objectives must be integrated front and center in urban policies, and cross-sector collaboration across national government on health prevention to manage the complex linkages across policy areas. Evidencing the interactive effects between improving health outcomes and dominant urban policy agendas can incentivize shared accountability for health outcomes

Developing shared understanding through online interdisciplinary collaboration: Reflections from a research project on better integration of health outcomes in future urban development practice

Collaborative working has gained widespread recognition in policy and practice. However, there is less research on the process of doing collaborative research in practice than there is on the epistemological, theoretical, and methodological aspects of such work. In this paper, we address this gap by offering reflections on our practical experience of online interdisciplinary collaboration as part of a wider research project on future urban development practice. We sought to develop a shared understanding of the systems of urban development decision-making. We utilise two established frameworks of interdisciplinarity to reflect on our experience and offer practical recommendations that can help facilitate such work carried out remotely by early career researchers from diverse academic backgrounds. In so doing, our paper offers fresh insights on some of the common issues in interdisciplinary collaboration and on developing shared understanding and intellectual coherence through productive online interactions. As research is evolving to tackle complex problems that require a holistic understanding, our paper contributes to developing replicable methods for remotely conducted interdisciplinary work in the early phases of large-scale collaborative projects