Care and the City

Care and the City is a cross-disciplinary collection of chapters examining urban social spaces, in which caring and uncaring practices intersect and shape people's everyday lives. While asking how care and uncare are embedded in the urban condition, the book focuses on inequalities in caring relations and the ways they are acknowledged, reproduced, and overcome in various spaces, discourses, and practices.

This book provides a pathway for urban scholars to start engaging with approaches to conceptualize care in the city through a critical-reflexive analysis of processes of urbanization. It pursues a systematic integration of empirical, methodological, theoretical, and ethical approaches to care in urban studies, while overcoming a crisis-centered reading of care and the related ambivalences in care debates, practices, and spaces. These strands are elaborated via a conceptual framework of care and situated within broader theoretical debates on cities, urbanization, and urban development with detailed case studies from Europe, the Americas, and Asia.

By establishing links to various fields of knowledge, this book seeks to systematically introduce debates on care to the interconnecting fields of urban studies, planning theory, and related disciplines for the first time.

PART I: Conceptualizing Care: Encounters, Critique, and Commons 1. Care, Uncare, and the City 2. Critical Reflections on Care 3. Care from the Beginning: Birthing Collective Origins, Interdependent Cities, and New Community Economies PART II: Social Inequalities, Uneven Space, and Care 4. Introduction: Social Inequalities, Uneven Space, and Care 5. Cartographies of Care: Urban Development in Mexico in Response to a Graying America 6. Turning the Key: How the Pink Passkey Has Shaped the Landscape of (Un)Equal Opportunity for LGBT-Friendly Eldercare Provision in the Netherlands 7. 'We Are Here to Care': Gendered Urban Safety in Argentina 8. Healthy and Caring Cities: Accessibility for All and the Role of Urban Spaces in Re-Activating Capabilities 9. Examining Everyday Outdoor Practices in Suburban Public Space: The Case for an Expanded Definition of Care as an Analytical Framework PART III: Everyday Struggles and Contestations Around Care 10. Introduction: Everyday Struggles and Contestations Around Care 11. 'Respect Toward Old People': The Commodification of Ethnicity in Migrant Care Work in Germany 12. Care for the Uncared (for): Slum Redevelopment and the Emerging Challenges of Accessing Care for the Urban Poor in Delhi 13. Public Space and Children: Who Cares and Who Takes Care of? 14. Careful Rearrangements: Experiments with Neglected 'Things' in Architecture 15. Infrastructures from Below: Self-Reproduction and Common Struggle in and Beyond Athens in Crisis PART IV: New Care Arrangements and Civic Innovation 16. Introduction: New Care Arrangements and Civic Innovation 17. Geographies of Aging: Hidden Dimensions of Care in Stockholm, Vienna, and Zurich 18. The Toronto Public Library as a Site of Urban Care, Social Repair, and Maintenance in the Smart City 19. Heritage as a Matter of Care, and Conservation as Caring for the Matter 20. Care as an Act of Inequality? Complex Social Relations Within the Refugee Camp in Brussels' Maximilian Park Throughout 2015 21. Digital Care Spaces: The Particularities of a Digital Home Care Platform