Monica Sousa

The concept of Smart Healthy Age-Friendly Environments (SHAFE) emphasises the comprehensive person-centred experience as essential to promoting living environments. SHAFE takes an interdisciplinary approach, conceptualising complete and multidisciplinary solutions for an inclusive society. From this approach, we promote participation, health, and well-being experiences by finding the best possible combinations of social, physical, and digital solutions in the community. This initiative emerged bottom-up in Europe from the dream and conviction that innovation can improve health equity, foster caring communities, and sustainable development. Smart, adaptable, and inclusive solutions can promote and support independence and autonomy throughout the lifespan, regardless of age, gender, disabilities, cultural differences, and personal choices, as well as promote happier and fairer living places. The New European Bauhaus initiative gathers “beautiful, sustainable, and inclusive projects and ideas” to inspire a positive transformation around us. The New European Bauhaus 2024 Festival took place between 9-13 April. “Designing the perfect New European Bauhaus neighbourhood: New European Bauhaus meets SHAFE” was a Satellite Event of the Festival, held as an online workshop, organised by the SHAFE Foundation on April 9th, 2024. At the event, a group of 50 participants with a multidisciplinary background discussed how to meet the challenges of the European Garcia family to enable them to live in a perfect neighbourhood. The White Paper presents the findings of the participants with the New European Bauhaus inspiring projects and ideas to house the European Garcia family in their neighbourhood. The White Paper recommends developers, designers, planners, and policymakers to include person-centred design of social and physical environments and technologies. Although awareness of person-centred design is growing, many initiatives still hamper the inclusion of citizens or end-users throughout the development of products and services.

This chapter looks at Emma Geen’s novel The Many Selves of Katherine North (2016) and considers the novel’s depiction and treatment of technologically engineered animal bodies called ResExtendas. The novel’s protagonist, Kit, works as a “phenomenaut” where she inhabits the bodies of lab-grown NHAs, known as ResExtendas, for research purposes. While retaining their own consciousness/higher brain functions, the phenomenauts share the cerebellum of the ResExtenda. Kit is faced with an ethical dilemma when ShenCorp, the company she works for, wants to create ResExtendas for “body tourism”—jumping into these animal bodies for entertainment purposes, rather than keeping the practice exclusively for research. This chapter looks at how Geen’s novel allows us to practice empathy toward animals and acknowledge that, in order to do so, we must be attentive to the way we are treating technologically engineered animals. In arguing for this empathy, this chapter contrasts the attitudes of ShenCorp and the body tourists with Kit’s beliefs regarding animal communications and various bodily identities.