Urban Hospitals : a Spatial Analysis of Hospitals as Urban Sites

Abstract: During the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, lockdowns havepushed urban planners to think aloud about the future of urbanspace in our cities. The hospital is where we confront ourmortality and give ourselves over to other powers, whether it bethose of medicine and technology or some source of faith. Thisurban space in which we are now immersed daily often remainsunseen and unnoticed within the discipline of urban planning.Images of medical technologies and the movement of patientsthrough the hospital facility distort our visual idea of the hospitalas an urban space as we have become increasingly reliant onmedical professionals to define the experience of the site. In this master’s thesis, the idea of hospitals as urban spaces isrevisited. Looking specifically at ideas of defining urban sites,public health and urban planning, hospital type, and distributionof powers, three hospital sites in Brussels and their relationshipto the city are represented in a series of visual experiments usingmapping as a research tool. It concludes that urban plannerswould do well to look back at such models as hospital designerstry to frame and situate the hospital of the future.