Urban Infrastructures of Care: Buses as Resources for Recovery and Mental Wellbeing

Although transport infrastructures are increasingly recognised as determinants of urban wellbeing, their role in trajectories of becoming well and becoming ill has received little empirical and theoretical attention, particularly in serious mental ill-health. This paper examines how bus infrastructures function as everyday resources and obstacles for people living with psychosis. Drawing on qualitative research with young people recovering from early psychosis in Lausanne, Switzerland, we examine the socio-material and affective dimensions of bus mobility through relational geographical perspectives on health and place, mobility studies and work on infrastructures of care. We show how buses can function as affective lifelines, anchors of autonomy and independence and gateways to formal and informal resources for wellbeing, supporting recovery and re-engagement with the city. Buses can also entail sensory overstimulation, proximity to others, perceived surveillance, anxiety and financial constraints. Our analysis highlights how mobility capacities are relationally constituted through encounters with urban infrastructures: buses can cultivate or undermine capacities to engage with the city. We argue that buses should therefore be understood not simply as transport services or conduits to therapeutic resources, but as ordinary infrastructures of care and enabling places through which recovery is enacted in urban life.