Infrastructuring Care: Feminist Approaches to Caring Urbanism

About the Lecture: 

Care is fundamental to urban life, yet it remains marginal within dominant approaches to urban governance, planning, and infrastructure. Thinking with care offers an alternative lens for understanding cities as spaces structured by interdependence, social reproduction, and collective responsibility. Against this background, Caring Urbanism is conceptualized as a normative–ethical orientation for understanding and rethinking urban life through care.

Caring urbanism foregrounds everyday needs, interdependence, and social reproduction as central dimensions of urban social organization. It examines how practices of caring with can be understood as part of the city’s social infrastructure. Drawing on critical urban studies and feminist care ethics, particularly Joan Tronto’s relational understanding of care, this framework challenges neoliberal ideals of autonomy and highlights the ethical and political significance of collective responsibility, solidarity, and democratic negotiation over care relations and resources.

This approach further engages debates on social infrastructure, addressing how dominant frameworks often overlook the gendered, racialized, and classed labor of care and social reproduction that sustains urban life. Following Sarah M. Hall, social reproduction itself is conceptualized as a form of social infrastructure, shifting attention toward recognition, valuation, and investment in social reproductive labor, care work and care relations.

Empirically, I draw on research ranging from local care-oriented urban politics to grassroots initiatives including collective cooking and meal sharing in neighborhood centers, care-walks, and informal support structures for precarious migrants in Graz, Austria and Brussels, Belgium. These practices illustrate how encounters between strangers can evolve into caring relationships that generate alternative forms of community, belonging, and urban social infrastructure. While fragile, contested, and shaped by broader inequalities, they nonetheless reveal the transformative potential of collective care for more just and caring cities.

About the Speaker: 

Rivka Saltiel is an urban scholar and social geographer. She works as a post-doctoral researcher in the Urban HEAP research group (Department of Geography and Regional Science, University of Graz). In her dissertation "Spaces of Curated Encounters. When Encounter Turns into Care" (2023) she explored urban geographies of encounters between strangers with a focus on care relations in public, micro-public and private spheres. Her current research focuses on everyday relations, spaces, practices, infrastructures and (local) politics of care, social justice, and urban (formal and informal) arrival infrastructures. Rivka is currently a guest professor at the Department of Geography, Environment and Society at the University of Minnesota.

This event is organized by the Center for Austrian Studies and co-sponsored by the Department of Geography, Environment & Society.