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.

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.

A small but potent set of ideas, exercises, and resources that might be used as a starting point for thinking more about space and place. It is for anyone interested in learning more about the places where people live, work,

As part of Your Money or Your Life: Feminist Perspectives on Economy
Edited by Bonnie Fortune and Lise Skou

This series of short essays presents research, ideas, and proposals from four scholars and artists on contemporary life lived in the throes of global capitalism. The four women authors are responsible for creative opinions and approaches as to how we, as a culture, might come to inhabit different economic realities.