Place as patient? Palliative care as a speculative lens for responding to the imminent passing of places

Abstract

This article considers the imminent loss of places to sea level rise, and whether this might be considered as a kind of dying of place. Grief for a place's passing heightens emotional connections to landscapes, and echoes the mourning for a loved one. The resonances between landscapes and people are captured in the concept of personhood, lending to the idea that a place that is suffering may be conceived of as a patient. Palliative care has the capacity to reveal how contradictory positions—such as living and dying concurrently—may be negotiated in constructive ways. In accepting that some patients cannot be physically healed, it turns its attention to helping individuals, and those who love them, to face the end of life on their own terms. We thus explore the potential of palliative care, as an ethos, to engage the complex emotions and losses wrought by global warming. Working with students to employ speculative design as a tool to actively think through these possibilities, we explore how the conceptual frame of palliative care might provide a provocative—even shocking—vision for how to negotiate the passing of places, and the navigation of the emotional consequences of climate change