People are connected to places and to other people in places in which they create or strive to create shared meaning. In a sense, this is so obvious as to have escaped out attention in bioethics. Yet the moral effects of this truism are profound. Lisa Eckenwiler describes our connection to place and people as our ‘ecological being’ where “… we should resist a reductive, decontextualized view of individuals as the units of (moral and political) concern, for we cannot properly be conceived apart from our embeddedness in social relations and geographically, atmospherically identifiable locations in which we become and endure” (2021). The places we live not only help build our sense of meaning and identity, but they are also the location of the politics of health, e.g. the choices municipalities make to increase or decrease funding for public transport and bicycle paths; the policing of playgrounds and parks during infectious disease outbreaks; the creation of third spaces to prevent and mitigate loneliness and social isolation, etc. This panel will explore the various ways people are connected to places and to each other in place, what this means for health and, in turn, what this means for the practice of public health.