KU LEUVEN HEALTH HUMANITIES LECTURE SERIES:
Health and the Built Environment
'We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us’, or so Winston Churchill once said. For better or for worse, our constructed physical space – the so-called built environment – impacts on our behaviours, our social interactions, and our physical and mental health. The speakers of this year’s LCH² lecture series discuss various examples of the relationship between architectural space and human well-being, from across a range of health humanities, including architecture, literary and colonial history, sociology, and disability studies. In doing so, they will touch on themes as varied as the role of the corridor in hospital architecture, the connections between buildings and disabled bodies in science fiction movies, and the architectural evolution of retirement homes. Join us online and on campus, at KU Leuven, for a series of inspiring health humanities talks about the built environment.
“At least the Belgians built hospitals!”: Myths and Realities of the Belgian 'Medical Model Colony'
"At least the Belgians built hospitals" - Deployed to vindicate Belgium’s colonial history, this may be one of the most heard arguments in current-day public debates on decolonization. Claims about Belgian Congo as a ‘medical model colony’ are certainly not all wrong: the colonial government did effectively build a comparatively impressive network of hospital infrastructure. Nevertheless, this reputation remains rooted in colonial propaganda that sought to legitimize Belgium's colonial rule. Zooming in on the planning, construction and management of colonial hospital architecture, my presentation aims to question these persistent myths of the ‘medical model colony’. It reveals how, in reality, colonial hospitals rarely corresponded with the propagandistic portrayals of highly sanitized, modern, or well-managed healthcare spaces, an imaginary that continues to shape discussions on decolonization today.
Simon De Nys-Ketels
Simon De Nys-Ketels works as postdoctoral researcher at the Université Libre de Bruxelles where he studies the legal frameworks and working realities of the various professions of the Belgian and colonial construction sector. In his PhD at Ghent University, he questioned tenacious myths of Belgian Congo as a 'medical model colony' through healthcare architecture, looking into the messy realities of planning, building, and governing these medical spaces. Apart from his experience in the DRC, he has also participated in and published on a heritage and slum rehabilitation in Nawalgarh and Nagpur, India.
