Rethinking care as alternate infrastructure
Introduction
Feminist urban scholars such as Emma Power, Kathy Mee and Miriam Williams have documented the everyday materialities of “infrastructures of care”, which animate diverse affects, things and labours that comprise care ethics and relations in cities (Power, 2019; Power & Mee, 2019; Power & Williams, 2019). Expanding upon Joan Tronto's (1993) care ethics that recognise the generative and redistributive potential of care (Williams, 2016, Williams, 2017), feminist theories of care-relations seek to understand hidden, ordinary, nurturing and just forms of reparative work that weave together the material, ecological and social fabric of cities. Williams (2016) argues that “the situated and relational nature of care can enhance the at times abstract and universal philosophical underpinnings of an ethic of justice as a public ethic” (Williams, 2016: 514). Examples of this type of reparative work include, but are not limited to: community food shops (Williams, 2016), food-based support programmes (Midgley, 2016), caring for urban Country (Ngurra et al., 2019), shelters for the homeless (Lancione, 2014), housing (Lopes, Healy, Power, Crabtree, & Gibson, 2018; Power & Mee, 2019) and social housing (Power & Bergan, 2018). The grounded relationality of care-work in all of its diverse forms are constitutive, they coalesce to form intimate nodes of life-support in cities that are quietly remaking forms of sociality, collaboration, democracy and justice.
There is also a resurgent interest in urban and planning theory to rethink urban infrastructures as socio-technical systems. The demarcation of an “infrastructural turn” (Amin, 2014; Dodson, 2009, Dodson, 2017) denotes a move away from a long history of seeing infrastructure as the “material stuff” of cities – the underlying networks of pipes, roads, wires, switches, cameras, tunnels and control rooms that make urban everyday life possible. Inspired by new materialism and posthumanism these studies highlight the political, performative and relationally-constituted infrastructures (Berlant, 2016; Bissell & Fuller, 2017; Star, 1999). Rethinking infrastructure “not as a dimension of urban technology but a dimension of everyday life” (Graham & McFarlane, 2015: ix) helps to recognise how inequality and unjust social and structural processes in contemporary cities are operationalised through infrastructures, elsewhere termed as forms of “infrastructural violence” (Rodgers & O'Neill, 2012).
This paper brings in the literature of care and infrastructure into proximity in order to think about the possibilities for care as alternate infrastructure. Feminist care ethics inspire us to explore the actually existing care practices in order to understand how these practices both exceed and mobilise publics to potentially generate more inclusive and ethical infrastructural spaces in the city (Williams, 2016). We recognise the valuable role that traditional care organisations play in supporting marginalised and precariously situated groups and individuals in our cities; however, we are also cognisant of the ways in which care circulates in them through privileged institutional circuits as “forms of social control and (sometimes) oppression” (Rodgers & O'Neill, 2012: 402). Our paper proposes a shift from such hegemonic “infrastructural power” (Mann, 1984) to animate more ordinary and intimate notions of care as alternate infrastructure. In doing so, we highlight the value of recognising everyday (non-institutional) care spaces, and the capacities of those who work and collaborate to make them, to re-centre alternate infrastructures – as a necessary step for participatory urban flourishing.
In the sections that follow, we first discuss feminist ethics of care (Held, 2018; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017) as foundational for realising the potential of more democratic and public care. Using key literature on infrastructure and care, such as Berlant's (2016) notion of infrastructure “as a specific form of life” and Tronto's (2013) “caring with” we argue that the everyday care practices around us generate particular infrastructural conditions and outcomes through the interplay and involvement of communities, materials and practices. To illustrate this, we discuss four vignettes from three cities: Dunedin, Khulna and Perth to provide context for rethinking everyday non-institutional care spaces as alternate infrastructure. These everyday non-institutional care spaces represent ways to talk about how different communities manifest particular infrastructural labour, conditions and outcomes in time and place. We develop a conceptual framework of "care collectives" to propose a shift of focus from the sometimes hegemonic notions of infrastructure and care. Finally, we discuss the implications of rethinking care as infrastructure for more radically inclusive and community-driven welfare provisioning of life sustaining activities in cities.
Section snippets
Feminist ethics of relational care
Feminist scholars have highlighted the relational ethics of care (Held, 2018, Held, 2004; Power & Mee, 2019; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017; Williams, 2016) in which care has been conceptualized as a more “grounded everyday ethical practice” (Williams, 2016: 514) to advocate attentiveness to place-specificities. Since the 1990s, much of this work has aligned with Fisher and Tronto (1990) who define care as:
a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our
The relational infrastructure
There has been growing interest in the everyday ‘experiences’ of (urban) infrastructures (see Graham & McFarlane, 2015) over their stereotypical imagery associated with technology and physical forms of pipes, wires, circuits, bricks and mortar. These studies suggest that beyond their material configurations, infrastructures have social, political and symbolic lives. The entanglement of infrastructure with uneven development and the broader processes of marginalisation, abjection and
“Caring with” for alternate infrastructure
In Tronto's earlier conceptualization of the different phases of care – caring about, taking care of, care giving and care receiving (Tronto, 1993, 106–114), the first three phases mostly focus on the care subject – the care giver, their intention, sense of responsibility and the actual action of care perceived or taken. The fourth phase tends to ask questions about equality and democracy in the care context by shifting the attention from the care subject to the object of care – the care
Vignettes
To illustrate our argument for care as alternate infrastructure, we draw on four vignettes based on independent research by the authors. Methods used in the research include: open-ended interviews, participatory photography, participant observations and documentary and historical analyses. The vignettes identify everyday practices of care in these settings that take place through the processes of provisioning, assembling and entangling. In each vignette, particular “socio-technical assemblages”
Discussion and conclusion
In this paper we have called for greater attention to be paid to feminist ethics of care as modes of knowing and doing that is characterised by relational and plural ontologies: individuals can only exist because they are members of various social networks, structures and practices that imbue different degrees of responsibilities – small or big (Gilligan, 1987; Sevenhuijsen, 1998; Tronto, 1993; Williams, 2017). As individuals are situated within unequal power relations with different
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Ashraful Alam: Conceptualization, Methodology, Investigation, Visualization, Writing - original draft. Donna Houston: Supervision, Investigation, Writing - review & editing.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgement
Thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. Special thanks are also due to Ilan Wiesel, Wendy Steele, Libby Porter and the organisers of and participants at the Institute of Australian Geographers Urban Study Group Urban Theory Symposium 'Cities of Care' held at CERES Environmental Park in Melbourne June 14-15, 2018 for their thoughtful feedback and inspiring conversations about care.
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