URBAN CULTURES OF CARE (CURARE)

URBAN CULTURES OF CARE (CURARE): Everyday care practices as social infrastructure in the neighborhood

Cooperation partner in Graz: Univ.-Prof. Dr. Anke Strüver

Junior Fellow: Vivien Breinbauer, MSc (cand.) BSc

Incoming Senior Fellow: Dr. Yvonne Franz

Incoming Junior Fellow: N.N.

Period: January 2024 - January 2025

Special Issue (abstract due: Sep 15, 2024):

https://www.cogitatiopress.com/urbanplanning/pages/view/nextissues#CaringCommunities

For well over a decade, everyday urban life has been determined by neoliberal austerity policies that affect everyday care practices in both private and institutional contexts. However, care practices are not only part of individual (survival) life, they are also a central element of urban life, of everyday social life in the public sphere. Particularly in times of multiple social crises, the individual and collective quality of life is under pressure. Caring communities and the resulting urban cultures of care are therefore becoming an increasingly important element of social cohesion in diversified urban societies.

The CURARE project is based on current considerations of feminist care ethics (Tronto 2013, 2016, 2017) in order to derive conceptual and practical starting points for a long-term understanding of neighborhoods and urban districts as public spaces of social interaction and innovation - as spaces of caring together. Caring communities respond to unfairly distributed access to resources on the basis of intersectional inequalities by caring for one another in a self-organized way. In this way, new, resilient social relationships can be established, which - if socially innovative - also empower collectively and enable socio-political democratization. However, caring communities not only operate in different spaces, they also produce new public spaces of caring for one another, which thus become part of the city's social infrastructure.