Healthcare facilities have always played a significant role in society, seen as a refuge for the sick - and a place for help and healing. This is particularly true of hospitals. While going to hospitals has seldom been seen as an enjoyable experience, they are nonetheless widely recognized as a crucial feature of any modern country. A hospital, though, is much more than just a place to go for medical care. From a sociological perspective, it is where people—patients, families, healthcare workers—spend time. This raises the importance of “place-making,” and notions of space, livability, and “lived experience.” Political scientists view a hospital as a political project that cannot be untethered from its proponents, nor from the latter’s desire for visibility and popularity. An engineer would say a hospital is a piece of physical infrastructure that poses structural and logistical problems, and architects think it’s an object of design. — blog.adb.org/blogs