Care-Full Municipalisms to Mitigate the Social Reproduction Crisis at the Urban Scale

Abstract

Feminist scholarship defines a “crisis of social reproduction,” where households and communities are less able to provide care work to maintain key social capabilities. Sustaining life biologically, e.g., birthing and raising children, caring for older adults and the physically impaired, and socially, e.g., sustaining connections across and within communities are two facets of the enduring social reproduction crisis (Fraser, 2016; Katz, 2001). As an interdisciplinary perspective on the organization of life-making, social reproduction feminism deals with a question of division of labor regarding who bears the cost as well as the responsibility for sustaining and maintaining life on a daily and generational basis.

As the “urban” is increasingly the site and urbanization is the process through which social reproduction is reorganized, feminist urban theory formulates social reproduction as an urban challenge (Peake et al., 2021). Critical urban studies research explores a wave of counterhegemonic political movement of “new/radical municipalism” to revive citizens’ assembly via politicizing proximity (Russel, 2019; Roth et al., 2023; Davies & Blanco, 2017). On the one hand, new municipalism movement faces electoral failures, shortcomings, and political retreat in establishing alternatives to urban neoliberal agendas of austerity, exclusion, and rising authoritarian tendencies in local politics (Beal at al., 2023; Bua & Davis, 2022). On the other hand, scholars working on care crises normatively propose “care municipalism” (Dowling, 2018; Kussy et al., 2022; The Care Collective, 2020) and “caring planning” (Huang, 2015) as the outstanding viable policy alternative to deepening crisis of care by interventions at the local scale.

This study aims to bring these debates together and develops the “care-full municipalisms” as a conceptual framework to 1) discuss care as a resource from a feminist political ecology perspective and 2) formulate municipalism as an overarching processes of “commoning care,” which is an emerging response to the crisis of care and an active political struggle empowering new forms of public-commons partnerships by drawing on examples of policy interventions in child and elderly care.