Parks were regarded as a place for physical activities and active citizenship, and for alleviating health problems related to the rapid industrialisation in the city. Cheetham Park in North Manchester was one of many parks created in the early nineteenth century to address public concerns about rising levels of pollution from the industries in the city. The Welcome Centre gives a synchronic picture of the park under the current management model of public land. Commoning is the guiding thread that sews together the different public spaces, against the backdrop of the Cheetham Hill's streets, a necessary part of Cheetham Commons. The concept of commons is helpful as it illuminates the interface between civic engagement and public authorities; between rights and obligations. The moral economy in the Cheetham area in the early twentieth century is evocatively told through photographs on display at the Jewish Museum.

This chapter discusses how the trajectory of health policy in Ireland enabled the imagining of Universal Health Insurance by Competition (UHI-C). UHI-C represents both an emerging discourse for governing healthcare and a governmental technology-in-development. It also represents a particular moment in Irish health policymaking. The chapter argues that UHI-C was a rationality and technology of advanced liberal governing, masquerading in claims to social solidarity. Without UHI-C implemented in practice, the chapter uses existing policy documents to critique the proposal as an example of the rationality and technology of advanced liberal government developed by Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller. The chapter examines the UHI-C documents in terms of four elements of governing in an advanced liberal state. The four elements include seeking to govern at a distance; placing responsibility on individuals through choice; the management of risk; and the fragmentation of the social sphere into multiple communities.

Placing the history of artificial eardrums against the backdrop of medical consumerism and advertising culture, this chapter reveals how the commericalisation of assistive technologies can blur the boundaries between prosthetics and cures. Unlike assistive aids to hearing, artificial eardrums were initially constructed as a surgical prosthetic, a replacement of a damaged part to become integrated with a user’s body. By the 1880s, however, the device captured the imagination of British and American inventors and new manufacturing firms who distanced the surgical mark of the device while still adhering to standards of its design. As the device was invisible to both the observer and the wearer, their promotion as ‘cure’ rendered deafness as a sigma, a misery that required medico-technological intervention to integrate the deaf person into hearing society.

This chapter explores the coded dimension of large public artworks (sculptures or installations in particular). Public space is dotted with such artworks, many on a monumental scale. The focus of the chapter is on the normative codes that are embedded in both the material structure and the aura of the works. When authorities decide to commission public artworks the brief to artists will often include specifications that pertain not just to the desired visual and expressive effect of the work (the artwork is then supposed to express a particular idea or content) but also to a more normative intention. The artwork is then required to tap into or mobilise an existing set of cultural, social or political codes, or indeed consolidate, propagate or even generate them. An element in the normative coding of public artworks, which this chapter deals with relates to notions of public order that the works are assumed to radiate and project. The chapter shows how the intended codes embedded in the artwork are bound to be subjected to continuous de-coding and re-coding.