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

Buses can function as affective lifelines for young people recovering from early psychosis.

• The qualitative study involved young people recovering from early psychosis in Lausanne, Switzerland.
• The analysis drew on relational geographical perspectives on health and place, mobility studies and work on infrastructures of care.
• Buses were described as supporting recovery and re-engagement with the city.

Buses act as anchors of autonomy and independence for people living with psychosis.

• The authors report that bus mobility supported autonomy and independence as part of recovery.
• This was linked to re-engagement with the city.
• The finding comes from qualitative analysis of socio-material and affective dimensions of bus mobility.

Buses serve as gateways to formal and informal resources for wellbeing.

• Buses were found to provide access to both formal and informal resources that support wellbeing.
• The authors argue buses are not merely conduits to therapeutic resources but are themselves part of care.

Buses can also be obstacles, entailing sensory overstimulation, proximity to others, perceived surveillance, anxiety and financial constraints.

• These negative dimensions were identified alongside the supportive ones.
• They can undermine capacities to engage with the city.
• Financial constraints were identified as a barrier to bus use.

Mobility capacities are relationally constituted through encounters with urban infrastructures, so buses can either cultivate or undermine capacities to engage with the city.

• The authors frame mobility capacity as emerging from interactions between people and infrastructure rather than as an individual trait.
• The same infrastructure can both enable and constrain depending on socio-material and affective encounters.

Buses should be conceptualised as ordinary infrastructures of care and enabling places through which recovery is enacted in urban life.

• The authors argue this goes beyond viewing buses as transport services.
• The role of transport infrastructure in trajectories of becoming well and becoming ill has received little empirical and theoretical attention, particularly in serious mental ill-health.