Cities of care: A platform for urban geographical care research

Many initial forays into urban care analysis have investigated how care is practiced in and through particular spaces, including drop-in centres (Conradson, 2003b; Evans, 2012; Johnsen, Cloke, & May, 2005a; Williams, 2017), households (Dyck, Kontos, Angus, & McKeever, 2005; Imrie, 2004; Mee, 2009; Smith, Easterlow, & Munro, 2004), food cooperatives (Williams, 2016), parks (Laws, 2009), libraries, and museums (Munro, 2013). Following Conradson (2003b), we categorise this work as concerned with spaces of care. Urban spaces of care research uncovers the ways that care is dynamically emergent in identified urban locations.

In his early development of the concept, Conradson (2003b, p. 508) defines spaces of care as

... a socio-spatial field disclosed through the practices of care that take place between individuals. Given the inextricably relational nature of care, the emergence and endurance of such spaces depends upon the willingness of some individuals to move towards others and, amongst those being engaged in this way, upon a receptivity to such initiatives.

Spaces of care are "organisational spaces" that disclose care and facilitate practices of caring for, about and with others, both human and non-human (Mee, 2009, p. 845). They typically operate within defined spatial settings such as homes and drop-in centres, including in fixed and transient sites of urban care (Conradson, 2003a; Johnsen, Cloke, & May, 2005b), and are created through the caring labour and intentions of users, including staff, residents, and visitors in conjunction with the material environment within which they are located.

Existing research emphasises the caring work of people that inhabit and use spaces of care. This work pays attention to the emplaced nature of caring work and to how spaces and the material environments they disclose create a feeling of care or being cared for (Conradson, 2003b; Milligan, 2003). For example, Darling (2011) explores how Talking Shop, an asylum-seeker drop-in centre in the United Kingdom, becomes a space of care and generosity at particular moments. The care being practiced in and through Talking Shop is far from uncomplicated. Like in the broader corpus of spaces of care research, questions of belonging, power, spatiality, ethics, and politics are featured in Darling's work as users negotiate everyday spaces, such as the kitchen, which can become sites of care negotiation. Spaces of care research also emphasises the relational nature of care and the multiple ways care is performed into being through practice in place, in both intentional and emergent ways (Darling, 2011; Johnsen et al., 2005a). Attending to the practices and politics of care in spaces of care generates new understandings of the complexities and possibilities of care in context (Darling, 2011).

More recently, there has been a shift to conceptualising care as a sociomaterial practice that takes place in conjunction with things in the city such as pavements (Kullman, 2014), strollers (Clement & Waitt, 2017, 2018), cars (Waitt & Harada, 2016), housing (Power, 2019; Power & Mee, 2019), and buildings (Bates, Imrie, & Kullman, 2017). We classify materialities of care research as a research that examines how objects, bodies, buildings, or materials are enrolled and how they shape the nature and possibility of care. While overlapping with spaces of care research, which also brings attention to the material dimensions of care practice (e.g., Conradson 2003b identifies the significance of the material layout of spaces of care including interior layout and the positioning of chairs and tables, while the kitchen location and the social practices disclosed in that space are significant within Darling's (2011) Talking Shop), we differentiate this body of research through its conceptual engagement with the more-than-human agencies that co-constitute care relations. This is an ontologically different approach that engages with the more-than-human turn in geography. For example, Kullman (2014, p. 2871) explores how "diverse nonhuman bodies of pavements, including old trees, empty bottles, and dogs" are engaged in the practice of urban care with children walking to school in Helsinki, Finland. Children traversing the city on pavements become attuned to the need for care. At the same time, more-than-human actors reciprocate care, further shaping the possibility that care may be practiced during the journey (Kullman, 2014; and we return to this emergent theme of mobile care in our later provocations).

Materialities of urban care research identify how things facilitate, foster, mediate, and co-constitute caring relations and may also be enrolled in the practice of caring for human and non-human others in the city (Brownlie & Spandler, 2018, p. 267). It attends to how "... the very materiality of environments necessarily mediates caring relationships and comes to shape what it means to care" (Bates et al., 2017, p. 96). Materialities of care research extends existing sites that are considered to be spaces of care. For example, Power (2019) and Power and Mee (2019) identify how the more-than-human agency of housing can intervene in care at home, variously provoking and inhibiting the caring capacity of domestic homes. Materialities of care research identifies how both human and non-human others are affected by their situated co-presence. In Australia, Ngurra et al. (2019) highlight how, by being present and affectively attuned to particular places, we are able to heal and be healed by country, through acts such as cultural burns and the telling of stories at culture camps. They emphasise the importance of recognising that "places also care" (Ngurra et al., 2019, p. 12) and that being present in particular places has the potential to transform and alter ways of being and knowing worlds. In this case, uncoded urban worlds become both care givers and care receivers, pointing to the diverse subjects of urban care research.

In this third section, we ask, who are the subjects of urban geographical care research? Some groups stand out in urban care literature as having a specific need for care and to care. These include homeless and disadvantaged

people (Conradson, 2003b; Johnsen et al., 2005a; Williams, 2017), asylum seekers (Darling, 2011), women's library members and strangers who drop in (Williams, 2018), social housing tenants (Mee, 2009; Power & Bergan, 2018), children (Bartos, 2012; Kullman, 2014), artists and residents of wounded cities (Till, 2012), country (Ngurra et al., 2019), farmers, the environment, and members and fellow food cooperative volunteers and staff (Williams, 2016). These recent interventions build on longstanding recognition of the intersectional inequities shaping urban care responsibility, which see women, and racially and ethnically marginalised groups over-burdened and under-rewarded for their care work (Tronto, 2013). Feminist and urban geographers have been at the forefront of this research, diagnosing the role of urban housing and transport design and imaginaries of home in reinforcing these divisions (Blunt & Dowling, 2006; Bowlby, Gregory, & McKie, 1997; Dowling, 2000), producing domestic care as a privatised and time-consuming labour while spatially "trapping" women in the domestic (Hayden, 1980, 1981, 1986; Madigan, Munro, & Smith, 1990; Watson, 1988).

Urban care literature recognises the multiple ways in which subjects of care receiving are also active within care giving. For example, Kullman (2014) highlights how children, who are often cast as passive recipients of adult care, actively care for cities and pavements as they navigate and negotiate walking in the city. Similarly, Till (2012) explores how residents and artists within cities marked by violent and traumatic histories can care for and be cared for by wounded places. Identifying the subjects of care as active participants in caring relations can reveal complex political relations between care givers and receivers. For example, at Talking Shop, both asylum seekers and volunteers are encouraged to make tea for others. One asylum seeker valued this role, but was at times usurped by volunteers who saw commandeering the kitchen as a way to "give something back" (Darling, 2011). Ultimately, ironically, the volunteers displaced this man and his ownership over the space. The urban care literature challenges a delineation in the literature between care givers and receivers to recognise the multiple ways people occupy subject positions of care giver and receiver.

First, we argue there is value in continuing to broaden conceptualisations of care within urban geographical research to foreground the care needs of all. We are informed by Fisher and Tronto's broad definition of care as

a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our world so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web (Fisher & Tronto, 1990, p. 40).

This definition provokes urban geographers to consider the care needs that sustain all human life and to recognise the necessity of care. As Puig de la Bellacasa (2017, p156) argues,

for humans – and many other beings – to be alive, or endure, something, somebody, must be taking care, somewhere. One might reject care in a situation – but not absolutely, without disappearing.

There is value in continued research into the particular care needs of individuals and groups and the shifting subjectivities of care givers and receivers, as we outlined above. However, there is also a need to expand the scope of urban care thinking to broader questions of human flourishing and well-being. For instance, research might consider the webs of relations that sustain the conditions of life, including access to sufficient quality food, affordable, appropriate accommodation, and the ecological conditions that sustain well-being. These are the relations that make all life—and care—possible and that are increasingly challenged through growing social difference and unprecedented climate change. Such research can extend earlier feminist work that identified the feminised care networks that enabled full-time paid work outside of the home (Blunt & Dowling, 2006; Tronto, 1993). For instance, with care workforces expanding and the care pay-gap persisting, there are important questions about the urban conditions (including housing and food provisioning) that sustain and reproduce care labour. Similarly, Lopes et al., (2018) investigate the domestic, social and material care infrastructures that can sustain life and 'coolth' in warming climates. Such research can ask, what are the conditions that make life and care possible? Tronto's (2013) conceptualisation of how societies might "care with" citizens can provide a valuable frame for this future research.

Caring with signifies a practice of communal solidarity that sees care and care responsibility become public concerns. Societies that "care with" make care possible through public policy, for instance, that is supportive of care and the equitable distribution of care and responsibility. Tronto's work can frame a vision of cities that cares well and provokes urban researchers to attend to the urban assemblages that more equitably distribute care and responsibility. Similarly, research might turn to questions of caring capacity, asking how care, in all its forms, is made possible. Power (2019) develops caring-with as an analytic to inform analyses of caring capacity. Caring-with places care in a temporal, spatial, and sociomaterial frame, prompting urban care researchers to interrogate the "depth of emplaced histories, material and political affiliations that shape the capacity and potential for care" (Power, 2019, p. 1).

Our second provocation is for urban care research that moves beyond human. Puig de la Bellacasa (2017, p. 161) reworks Fisher and Tronto's definition to recognise the caring work of other-than-human actors and to argue the need for a world that is repaired for the flourishing and well-being of all life. Steele Wiesel, and Maller (2019, p. 1) advance this concern, considering the possibility of trans-species care when they ask "what are the ways an empathetic and care-full more-than-human city is already being performed, and where can we find them?" They challenge urban care researchers, asking

What does it mean to live-with non-human species? How do we build care-full relationships that recognize species' difference and interdependence? How can we be friends across naturescultures and the dynamic peculiarities and particularities of kin and kind? (Steele et al., 2019, p. 1).

In cities that are transforming as climates change, these are fruitful questions for future care research. They are relations that resonate within more-than-human worlds, shaping opportunities for human and other-than-human life and flourishing (Jones, 2017) and making visible "...reciprocal relationships of more-than-human care-giving" (Ngurra et al., 2019, p. 3) that expand our understanding of the possibility of urban caring.

Second, we argue for the value of a broadened scale of analysis in urban geographical care research. While there is value in continued attention to the micro-spaces of care, there is a need for research that attends to the ways that urban lives and care are practiced, navigated, and negotiated within the urban. This is to attend to how lives are lived within and across the city and to consider the im/mobilities that characterise city life and the practice of care.

Future research can attend to practices of mobile caring. Such research can cross-fertilise earlier feminist interest in how women's parenting responsibilities are shaped by urban design and transport (Dowling, 2000) with new ways of conceptualising embodied mobilities and materialities. Inspiration might be drawn from Clement and Waitt (2017, 2018), Waitt and Harada (2016), and Kullman (2014) who uncover the sociomaterial relations of mobile urban care. Waitt and Harada (2016), for instance, describe how the culturally privatised space of the family car enables parenting. The car is a multifaceted assemblage that enables care in specific ways: Bodies are immobilised and held in relations of proximity, while the "acoustic qualities, the distance of the journey and coding of the car as an intimate, quasi-private space, the movement, arrangement of car seats and music all contribute" to the way that family caring is practiced (Waitt and Harada, 2016, p. 1094). Clement and Waitt (2017) similarly describe the emergence of a "mother-child-pram assemblage" that enables mobile mothering. Different prams bring different affective and material affordances, offering the potential to keep children safe, carry heavy things, exercise and settle a child, while enabling "mothers to care for themselves through mitigating against future stress" (Clement & Waitt, 2017, p. 1192). Also exploring walking, Kullman (2014) considers pavements as a lively urban infrastructure that are provocative of urban care for the children and dogs that navigate Helsinki. In Blunt and Sheringham's (2018, p. 11) work on home-city geographies, understanding "home and the city as integral and overlapping spheres" can provide a fruitful alternative conceptual pathway for mobile urban care research. Perhaps, train journeys, bus trips, taxi rides, or cycling may be made visible by researchers seeking to explore the ways forms of public, shared, or active transportation become infrastructures of care in the city, caring for human and non-human others, occupying urban worlds, and enabling the possibility of caring practice (see Kullman, 2014, on pavements and Power & Mee, 2019, on infrastructures of care).

A second provocation attends to caring work at the scale of the city. Urban lives are lived within and across cities. The nature of cities, urban access and restructuring, the politics of immobility/mobility that shape urban lives, the relative locational benefits of some places, and so on (e.g., Bissell, 2009; Duffy-Jones, 2012; Law et al., 2005; Pearce, Witten, & Bartie, 2006; Wiesel, 2013), are avenues for future urban geographical care research. Such research can expand from earlier feminist concerns that examine the implications of post-industrial urban design for women's care responsibilities and paid workforce participation (Hayden, 1986; Madigan et al., 1990; Watson, 1988) to attend to the growing precarity of urban livelihoods. Reviewing labour geographies, Strauss (2018, p. 6) identifies "the broad range of articulations of precarity that cut across, and are shaped by, the market-making activities of the state and the increasingly state-like activities of empowered market actors," shaping labour opportunities, mobilities, geographies of home, and more. These are important concerns for care researchers, for as cities and the relations between them are reworked, so too are the lives that are lived across them. For instance, increasing levels of contract and casual work can fracture standard working hours with implications for domestic care. There are also extant questions about how households navigate the geographical and temporal challenges of mobile and shift work in the context of domestic and community care responsibilities (Gorman-Murray & Bissell, 2018). In addition, there is growing acknowledgement, practice, and visibility of fathers becoming primary care givers or taking on more substantial care responsibilities, which may shape new research into care and the city.

Our third platform further expands the scope of what is conceptualised as care within urban geographical research, taking leads from feminist care thinkers and recent urban care research to propose attention be paid to how care operates and is assembled through urban governance, markets, and materialities (Power & Mee, 2019). We do this to ask questions about the care that flows through cities in the everyday sites and places that constitute the urban. These flows may be material and immaterial, universal and particular, as care becomes through policies, processes, materials, buildings, and interpersonal relationships. Much existing urban care research is focused on practices of interpersonal caring within households and sites of professional care. This work sees cities as locations of interpersonal care. A second focus is on care as it operates through state welfare, social policy, and allied sectors. Our third platform expands these perspectives, arguing that care has the potential to be present in all urban spaces and places

and that care has transformative potential in these settings. New digital landscapes and buildings, for instance, can be designed with care in mind or perceived by urban inhabitants as caring or lacking in care (Imrie & Kullman, 2017).

Our starting point is feminist care research that identifies the work of care within social policy and institutions (Sevenhuijsen, 2000, 2003; White, 2000). Care has emerged with renewed vigour as an analytical concern in urban geographical research in the context of welfare residualisation shaped through neoliberal politics and austerity cuts. State welfare and social policies, alongside allied voluntary and charitable sectors, have been a focus of this work. In this context, some seek to assert the ongoing relevance of care. Askew (2009, p. 657) for instance, argues that care continues to be part of the work of state institutions and that care is an ethic that is as "at home" in these spaces "as it is in the private and personal spaces of people's lives." Other contributions chart the care ethics reworking welfare provisioning, identifying how neoliberal care ethics are reshaping local welfare delivery in austerity contexts. This work identifies the relocation of care responsibility from the state (through welfare) to communities and individuals, powerfully charting the domestication and individualisation of care while highlighting the challenges these shifts bring to individuals and communities (Bowlby, 2019; Clayton, Donovan, & Merchant, 2015; Jupp, 2014, 2016, 2019; Jupp, Bowlby, Franklin, & Hall, 2019; Power & Bartlett, 2018; Power & Hall, 2018). Power and Bartlett (2018, p. 354) for instance show that service cutbacks necessitate that people with learning disabilities and their advocates are active in "self-building safe havens and finding and negotiating welcoming spaces in their local neighbourhoods, albeit nested within wider experiences of exclusion." Jupp (2014, 2019) considers how sites of collective childcare are forced to negotiate a new funding context, with sometimes negative ramifications for the comfort and access of local parents. As evident in these examples, there is value in continued research into the spaces of urban welfare. There is a need, however, for a broadened conceptualisation of where care is located and how it operates within the urban. We offer three pathways for this work.

First, feminist political theory in conjunction with our first platform (identifying the universal need for care) offers provocations that can broaden the scope of urban care research beyond spaces of interpersonal care and care through welfare. In particular, alongside Tronto (2013), we note the potential to approach care in spaces of political thinking. Every political theory, Tronto (2013) argues, contains a theory of care, of how the necessary work of care and life maintenance take place. Such analysis broadens the scope of care research to systems of social and political thinking that predominate in cities and the practices that they inform. Urban care researchers might attend to the care ethics practiced through urban governance and planning or that might better support the work of care as Kershaw (2005) does, for instance, at a broader scale. Similarly, urban researchers might attend to the care ethics that shape and inform systems of social organisation, asking how modes of urban governance and organisation might be understood to care. This is a call for research that considers the broader governing practices and modes of organisation that inform care practice and that support the flourishing of all human and non-human life. Smith's (2005) ground-breaking study identifying the care ethics that shape existing housing markets is an early example of this work. Her provocation to researchers,

to imagine how, in the 21^st century, a different set of values – around a caring society underpinned by a welfare philosophy – could be compatible with the workings of the diverse set of institutions and organisations currently labelled "markets" (Smith, 2005, p. 17).

is yet to be fully taken up in urban geographical research.

Second, we are inspired by Puig de la Bellacasa's (2017, p. 121) call to attend to the ways that care, like neglect, circulates "not necessarily morally or intentionally, [but] in an embodied way, or simply embedded in the world, environments, infrastructures that have been marked by that care." Partnered with her observation that "relations foster care for some things rather or more than for others" (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, p. 166), this work offers new conceptual drivers for locating urban care research, challenging urban geographers to identify the multiple, more-than-human ways that care occupies and flows through cities. Power and Mee (2019) bring this thinking to urban housing systems, conceptualising how care flows through housing materialities, markets, and governance to inflect

opportunities for care. They call, for instance, for care-informed analyses of systems of property rights and entitlements alongside an excavation of the interconnection between property rights, housing materialities, and household care. They raise questions about how care translates through "the objects and practices of leases and other contracts and compacts that structure housing relations" and consider the Grenfell Tower disaster as an example of

how a breakdown of care in the spaces of governance and the ethics of markets can translate and flow through the materialities of housing, allowing the circulation of agencies that are deleterious to care and incompatible with life (Power & Mee, 2019, p18).

Urban geographers might turn attention to the care ethics and work of systems of urban governance and planning, food systems, open space planning, and more, considering the care that flows in cities in ways that include but also exceed social and welfare policy. In this framing, cities are potentially replete with care.

Our third provocation and set of conceptual drivers exist in long traditions of work on urban justice. While justice has been seen as an appropriate frame for "guiding moral decisions in the public sphere" (Williams, 2017, p. 821), care has been confined predominately to the domestic. As urban geographers broaden conceptualisations of the location of care, new questions about the care work of cities are advanced. Williams (2017, p. 826, emphasis added), for instance, advances a search for "care-full justice in the city" as part of a "utopian dreaming and ideal for the possibility of the urban as a just and caring place." She highlights the importance of recognising the interdependence of care and justice in everyday practice and the possibility of an ethic of care to assist us in locating sites of actuality existing justice in the city (Williams, 2017). Power and Bergan (2018) similarly consider the care work of social housing providers. Following Tronto (2017), they identify relational care ethics as an alternative political ethic that can resist and challenge the neoliberal logics, transforming social housing. Another example is Smith's (2005) provocation to imagine markets reworked through care. Urban geographers attending to the transformative work of care do important performative work, highlighting the existence, persistence, relevance, and power of care in our cities. These works resonate with our interest in the possibility for care to perform as a transformative ethic in cities and which we pick up next.