| Searching for actually existing justice in the city Locating justice in the city can be a difficult task. Urban theory has focused on exposing injustice and critiquing the multiple occurrences of injustice in cities. But what role could uncovering practices of actually existing justice in the city play in critical theory? How would we begin to look for actually existing justice in the here and now? By adopting a performative ontology and a politics of possibility, I argue that it is possible to expose, propose and amplify (Iveson, 2010) actually existing justice practices in the everyday city. A shift in thinking and research approach may be needed to make theoretical and ontological space for justice. In this paper I discuss research approaches that assist in locating justice in the city. Theorisations of a politics of possibility, performative ontological politics, weak theory and reading for difference are a suite of research practices that make space for the presence of justice. I argue that cities can be sites of actually existing justice practiced as a response to situated injustices or as a way of doing/being/thinking the city differently and demonstrate this with the example of Alfalfa House Organic Food Cooperative, Sydney, Australia. Documenting how justice is expressed in our cities is essential for work that seeks to grow and nurture justice projects. |
| Public spaces as infrastructures of care: mundane doings of/in ordinary places Public spaces support and frame the economic, cultural, ecological and political lives of city dwellers. Much emphasis has been placed on how public spaces can be designed well to generate conviviality, as well as facilitate wellbeing and economic activity. At the same time, exclusion from public space can be ‘built in’ at the level of infrastructure. This article positions public spaces as infrastructures of care. Drawing on a series of vignettes reflecting on experiences of public space during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, we develop an expansive understanding of public space as relational and performed, and as supporting infrastructures of care (or, at times, creating barriers to access care). The paper demonstrates how thinking with and paying attention to care as a mundane doing of – and in – ordinary places, foregrounds the power of such infrastructures as scaffolds to social connection and interaction. We posit that scholarly and policy attention to public space as a care infrastructure is crucial in the face of recent challenges to both universal public access to public space and ongoing struggles to address unevenness in the public distribution of care. |
| Responsibility for care in times of crisis |
| Sustaining care‐full public space This paper develops a multidimensional framework for sustaining care-full public spaces. We open by engaging with key understandings of the affective and relational dimensions of both public spaces and urban care scholarship. We then set out the elements of a framework for conceptualising the possibility of care-full public spaces. Writing from feminist and decolonial standpoints, we review emerging and foundational research to delineate three key components of such an approach: (1) governance, (2) materialities and design, and (3) performing public spaces. We then apply the framework, grounding our analysis of care in public spaces in a case study of caring for and as Country in Sydney, Australia. Throughout the paper we emphasise the generative possibility of care as an evaluative frame and central practice that sustains public spaces. |
| Paper bags to food relief: whither the tuckshop? |
| Commoning in the Anthropocene: exploring the political possibility of caring with in Skouries of Halkidiki, Greece As the planet moves further into the human-induced Anthropocene there is an urgent need to reconsider the values, practices, and politics leading to widespread ecological degradation. The prioritisation of economic growth by the most dominant political institutions encourages limitless expansion while minimizing awareness of the ecological vulnerability of the planet. Commoning presents an alternative political structure based on transformative practices of collective care or caring with. In this paper, we investigate how communities in Skouries of Halkidiki, Greece, are responding to the imposition of large-scale mining through three different commons initiatives. The women's collective, the chamomile commons, and the ten-day festival. These commons provide insights into how instances of caring with performed by human and nonhuman others are the foundations of local place-based politics. We argue that already existing examples of commoning and caring with can make visible a more fitting politics for the Anthropocene that can benefit decision-making at national and international levels. |
| Food relief providers as care infrastructures: Sydney during the pandemic Australia has a hidden but growing problem with household food insecurity, revealing the failure of conventional food infrastructures to support human flourishing. Disruptions to employment and livelihoods due to pandemic lockdowns have exacerbated household food insecurity, evincing the uneven geography of food access in countries globally, including Australia. Increasing demand for food relief had been observed prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and has been met by food relief providers, which we consider as infrastructures of care addressing growing levels of hunger. This paper reveals COVID-19’s many impacts on the food relief sector across Metropolitan Sydney, New South Wales. It analyses both a questionnaire of food relief providers in 2022 and media articles, social media posts, reports, and websites. It provides much-needed insights into the impacts of pandemic lockdowns on the demand for food, interruptions to food provisioning, changes to food supply, and alterations made to suppliers’ ways of operating. Those insights show how infrastructures of care are place-based, responsive, dynamic, and constrained by caring capacities. Such insights are increasingly important for understanding infrastructural failures, documenting the real extent of household food insecurity, and challenging dominant discourses of Australia as a food-secure nation. |
| Care-full Food Justice Drawing on literatures on food justice, and geographies of care and the concept of care-full justice, this aim of this paper is to develop the concept of care-full food justice as an analytical framework through which to view the work of community food provisioning initiatives in the meantime. The paper begins by developing the concept of care-full justice, outlining that it is based on three premises: the inter-dependence of care and justice; an understanding of who is taking responsibility for care in the meantime; and an appreciation of the ways in which the five dispositions of an ethics of care might individually or collectively facilitate responses to injustice. Secondly, the paper provides an overview of the research project informing the paper, which documents community food provisioning initiatives in Sydney. Thirdly, drawing on the example of Addison Road Community Centre Organisation Food Pantry, the paper applies a care-full food justice approach to generate insights into how the values of attentiveness, responsibility, competence, responsiveness and caring with flow through responses to injustice enacted by the organisation. The paper emphasises that a care-full food justice approach enables us to attend to the calls for caring justice and just care, to equally value these formative ethics that might guide our analysis and engagement with organisations responding to injustice in the meantime. |
| Diverse infrastructures of care: community food provisioning in Sydney There is burgeoning interest in the role of infrastructures as performative socio-technical systems that shape urban life. In this paper, we make visible an often-hidden and diverse infrastructure of care, the Community Food Provisioning Initiative (CFPI) sector. We discuss CFPIs as often hidden, yet vital infrastructures of care. Drawing on research on the CFPI sector in Sydney, Australia, we attend to the diverse ways in which CFPIs are governed, the materialities that constitute them and the diverse economic practices that support them. Our work makes visible the spatial extensiveness of CFPIs across the city, the ways in which caring practice is made possible by ‘things’, and the diverse enterprises, transactions, labour, property and finance that constitute the diverse economies of CFPIs. We couple our work developing a typology of community food provisioning, GIS mapping and an overview of the diverse economy of CFPIs with empirical examples from three CFPIs. Throughout the paper we highlight how CFPIs are diverse and vital infrastructures of care that contribute to people’s ability to survival well in the city. |
| Planetary food commons and postcapitalist post-COVID food futures The accessibility, availability and consumption of food in food and agriculture systems are key public health and food security concerns. We draw on empirical research from members of the Community Economies Research Network from Australia, New Zealand, India and Finland to reimagine food and agriculture systems as a planetary food commons (PFC). PFCs situate food-futures in relation to a broader post-capitalist commons sociality. |
| The Possibility of Care-full Cities In this paper I explore the possibility of the feminist ethic of care to enhance urban theory by placing emphasis upon our collective interdependence and responsibility to one another. As an ethics, care has the potential to maintain, continue, repair and transform our worlds. As a practice, care is often hidden from view despite the integral role care plays in ensuring survival in our worlds of both human and non-human others. As a performative act attuned to the possibility of care in the city I discuss how care was manifest in this space of care by drawing on research undertaken at The Women’s Library, Newtown which is located in Sydney, Australia. I reflect upon care-full practices that maintain, continue and repair our worlds within and beyond the library. Following this, I propose three ways we might continue to pay attention to/with care in urban theory. I argue that paying attention to/with care may assist us in understanding the role of maintenance and repair in creating more caring and just cities; emphasise our collective inter-dependence and responsibility for one another; and reveal silences, injustices and neglect in a way that provokes action. |
| Urban commons are more-than-property Urban commons are characterised in the literature as collectively shared property in the city shaped by a context of scarce resources, population density, and the interaction of strangers. In the broader commons literature, commons appears as a verb, a noun, and a process made by practices of commoning—albeit still with a focus on property. In this paper, I argue that an understanding of urban commons as more-than-property is needed to recognise how present but elusive urban commons are. I use examples from interviews and observations conducted at a Women's Library to discuss how the access, use, benefit, care, responsibility, and ownership of this urban commons bring it into being through particular practices of commoning. By questioning current ways of defining urban commons, urban scholars gain a grounded understanding of the role of property, and other practices, in maintaining an urban commons over time. |
| Justice and care in the city: uncovering everyday practices through research volunteering In urban theory our knowledge of actually existing justice practices in the city are limited. In contrast, our collective knowledge of the ways an ethic of care is practised is better developed. In this paper I argue for the need to value care in conceptualisations of the just city by mobilising the unification of care-thinking and justice-thinking in a way that accepts that both care and justice may (or may not) be practised as situated responses to injustice and neglect, and as other ways of doing/thinking/being the city. I argue that researcher volunteering can help reveal actually existing justice and care in the city in their situated context. Drawing on a research project that documents everyday practices of care and justice at Alfalfa House Food Cooperative, Sydney, Australia, I use the example of waste to explore the ways actually existing care and justice are practised. My aim is to expose how, within everyday urban community organisations, the transformative and relational expressions of care and justice can be revealed through researcher volunteering. By focusing on the actually existing expressions of care and justice in the city we might begin to see how the just (and caring) city is being made and remade in the here and now. |
| Care-full Justice in the city Feminist theorists in geography and beyond have long been calling for an ethic of care to be considered alongside justice as a normative ideal that can assist us in repairing our world. In urban theory this call has largely remained unheard as an ethic of care remains absent from theorisations of what comprises a just city. In this paper I argue for care to be considered alongside justice as an equally important ethic in our search for justice in the city. I develop the concept of care-full justice, which assists us in negotiating the inherent tension between the normative and situated in the search for the ideals, and actually existing expressions, of justice and care in the city. I demonstrate the generative potential of this concept and argue that it enables us to re-think what cities can be and to reveal times and places where this is the case. |
