About
This is the website of a research project: Infrastructures of Caring Citizenship, investigating the politics and spatiality of citizen-led initiatives of care, emerged in the urban contexts of Southern Europe in the wake of a still unfolding common crisis. At present, the project falls into a doctoral thesis at University College London, although it draws on previous works conducted in other academic settings, and it hopes to expand beyond this framework in the future.
The primary aim is to explore experiences of social organisation of provision of care and everyday survival needs on a collective and self-managed basis. The project seeks to analyse the impacts of these bottom-up initiatives in the urban realm (on the ground of the everyday, on the institutional level, and in the collective imaginaries). More broadly, it endeavours to contribute to an already opened space of reflexion and action on new strategies of organising social reproduction from the grassroots, as a challenge to the social and urban enclosures of the “city in crisis”. Ultimately, this research dreams and speculates about a new possible urban paradigm, which will stem from a “collective-caregiver-becoming”, and will transform our current liberal social structures and relations built upon the myths of individual independence and unlimited continuous growth.
For these purposes, this investigation encompasses four distinct but intertwined research strands: urban mapping, anthropologic fieldwork in selected case studies, socio-historical study of the material culture around caring practices in the Mediterranean regions, and the development of fictional visual narratives as speculative tools for urban research. This website gathers material from all of these research strands in different formats and projects, which can be read also independently. From theoretical essays to examined case studies, social cartographies, video-archives and architectural proposals, they will all compose the analytical groundwork of this investigation.
Context
A Crisis of Social Reproduction
In 2008, the outbreak of the international financial system opened up a time of economic recession in Europe, especially severe in its Southern regions. The measures enforced from the European institutions have amplified such crisis in social and political terms. In the name of austerity, a long-term state of emergency has been established to legitimise the imposition of a series of market-led policies. The implementation of the so-called austerity measures has prompted a process of multiple exclusions, which has affected the long-held social structures and forms of relationship, as well as the traditional social safety nets of the Mediterranean European countries. As a result, great numbers of people have been left in risk of social exclusion with almost no means to meet their daily needs.
As a response to the violent attack on people´s livelihoods, huge social mobilizations sprung with extraordinary strength in the so-called European Spring in 2011. From Portugal to Turkey, claims for a radical political overturn laid the groundwork for a new political landscape and the reformulation of the citizen practices. In their exertion of counter-power, many of those citizen movements have become powerful urban experiments from the grassroots, calling attention to “social reproduction” as the central domain of the struggle against the process of neoliberalisation of Europe, which has profoundly eroded the European welfare.
The concept of social reproduction refers widely to the site(s) of the sustaining of life and the social bonds, or in other words, the forms in which societies maintain and regenerate themselves. The current crisis is just an outcome of a long-term systemic trend towards structural unemployment, impoverishment, and dismantling of the welfare structures. It becomes therefore a crisis of social reproduction that evidences the big failures of the contemporary capitalist system, and the specific neoliberal measures implemented in the last years.
The contemporary crisis of social reproduction concentrates principally in the cities. In the early 2000s, many Southern European cities experienced a great economic boost and territorial growth as a result of highly neoliberal political agendas. The model of expansionist urbanism driven by heavily market-led policies and projects, led to the spatial fragmentation of the urban fabric with increasing problems of mobility and pollution, and the polarization of uses and rents in the territory. The persistence of the crisis aggravated those effects, stretching the social inequality, weakening the neighbourhood associative fabrics and triggering a serious housing crisis with a dramatic rise of forced evictions. The “city in crisis” emerges therefore as a city that decides to face such disastrous legacy by setting up a continuous state of emergency, by which new social and spatial enclosures will be created.
Yet, it is also in the city in crisis where a space for contestation and experimentation with alternative forms of organising social reproduction is gaining traction. The emergence of initiatives of social organisation of welfare has gone hand in hand with the creation of common spaces, set up through spatial re-arrangements and re-definitions of the public space. These initiatives use, transform and produce urban space, and conversely, they are shaped by it. The emerging common spaces enable new frameworks of participation and new forms of doing politics, which place care and solidarity at the centre of the debate and action. Thus, a potential emerges for the reconfiguration of the urban as it has been defined (and constrained) under austerity. These urban experiences in Southern Europe expand the horizon of the contemporary urban imagination, opening what David Harvey would call a space of hope.