In this guest post, Dr. Adriana Hurtado-Tarazona shares insights from a series of seminars focused on women’s urban care practices in Europe and Latin America, supported by a USF Seminar Series Award. The seminars explored how women use the city as a site of resources for caregiving through urban infrastructure and social capital.
Before the Covid-19 pandemic, most studies on care in cities focused primarily on homes (Federici, 1975, 2012). The economic and health crisis triggered by the pandemic has drawn global attention to vulnerabilities in cities and the importance of caregiving practices. While care may take place within the confines of a residence, many things that we do outside of a residence consist in taking care of self, others, and the environment. Our USF Seminar Series Award discussed and conceptualized the urban care practices of women in Europe and Latin America through the lens of social capital in public life, that is, how they use the city as a site of resources for their care practices through urban infrastructure and fluid encounters (Blokland 2017).
We carried out three seminars: the first one online on October 19-20, 2023, the second one in Bogotá, Colombia, from January 29 to February 2, 2024, and the third one in Berlin, Germany, from May 27- 31, 2024. The three encounters aimed to frame the discussion in broader debates on care and the city, as well as urban infrastructures and social capital. The seminars combined open lectures closed workshops towards collective publications, field trips, and workshops for local early career scholars. The core team for the seminars was composed of 12 senior and young scholars from Latin America and Europe.
The first seminar focused on “Care as a key concept on contemporary urban studies”. It started with the public lecture “Operationalising Social Protection: A View from Indian Cities” by Gautam Bhan. On the second day, a closed workshop took place in which the selected participants discussed comparative research methods and work towards a collective publication.
The second seminar focused on “Urban infrastructures and care practices”. In addition to closed working sessions, we visited urban care infrastructures for women in impoverished neighbourhoods in Bogotá, specifically the first Care Block of the city; held the open colloquium “Researching Care and the City: experiences from Europe and Latin America” and the workshop “Let’s talk about care as a key concept for contemporary urban studies” for Early Career Researchers.
The final seminar explored the theme of “Social and symbolic capital in care practices in the city.” We organised several field trips to meet with different care actors in the city, held an open lecture by Mercedes Di Virgilio on “Rental housing: characterization of the tenancy process and tenant households in Argentina,” and carried out working sessions and a workshop for Early Career Researchers.
These online and in-person encounters were exceptional opportunities. They facilitated the exchange of ideas and methodologies among participants from different regions, disciplines, and career stages, broadening the understanding of urban care practices in different contexts. Presentations and field trips to urban care infrastructures provided valuable practical and theoretical insights.
The key academic output of our Seminar Series is a special issue for an academic journal on “Caring Capacities in the City” (currently in revision). The SI explores care from a comparative perspective in cities of the global South and North. Specifically, we examine how the capacity to care (Power 2019) is generated at different scales and in different spheres of urban life. Our focus includes public institutions, grassroot organizations, and individuals who provide, receive, and facilitate care, as well as the conditions that enable them to do so. The articles address key questions such as: Who or what facilitates or hinders care? What are the tensions and synergies between different forms and agents of care? What are the effects of care? How does care relate to other practices and processes, such as welfare policies? Based on post-pandemic studies in diverse contexts, this special issue emphasizes the need to understand what makes care possible in various spheres of urban life. The rich ethnographic case studies explore the challenges and opportunities of caring capacities in cities. The issue thus contributes to academic and public policy discussions on producing more equitable and caring cities.
An unexpected outcome of this series of encounters and exchanges was the formation of the “caring group,” a monthly writing colloquium held online in the second semester of 2024. In this colloquium, we provided feedback on individual papers to help early career researchers in their writing process and discussed our shared concepts and arguments.