- Email: [email protected]
The possibility of care-full cities
Cities 98 (2020) 102591
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The possibility of care-full cities
T
Miriam J. Williams Department of Geography and Planning, Macquarie University, 6 First Walk, Macquarie University, NSW 2109, Australia
1. Introduction There is nothing necessarily remarkable about the practice of care nor its presence in our everyday urban lives (Samanani, 2017). Care is defined as both an "orientation and embodied practice" that "holds the possibility, in other words, of facilitating new ways of being together" (Conradson, 2011, p. 454). The practice of care itself can be both liberating and oppressive (Puig De La Bellacasa, 2017). Caring can be hard work: it can be messy, dirty, exhausting, burdensome and boring (Puig De La Bellacasa, 2017, p. 5). At the same, caring can be joyful, bountiful and beautiful. We are dependent upon care for "our individual and collective survival" (Lawson, 2007, p. 5), yet our collective capacity to care exceeds what we are individually able to practice. We are limited by our bodily capacity to care, which through illness, exhaustion and trauma can be dramatically curtailed. We feel the absence of care in a very embodied way. We feel it as varying degrees of neglect. Each day practices of care are carried out for human and often non-human others who can become "both givers and receivers of care all the time, though their capacities and needs shift for each person throughout life" (Tronto, 2017, p. 31). Care becomes the very fabric of city life, woven through moments where life is maintained, continued and repaired (Tronto, 1993). The very ubiquity of caring practice is part of the reason why it "often remains forgotten, marginalized or excluded" (Yeandle et al., 2017, p. 8) from our analysis, our political focus, and the broader valuing of care and carers in our societies (Barnes et al., 2015b; Conradson, 2011; Lawson, 2007; Yeandle et al., 2017). Caring practice and who does the work of care in our worlds remains deeply political, as it is gendered, classed and often racialised (Barnes et al., 2015a; Tronto, 1993). At this present political moment, after periods of intense deinstitutionalisation that has undermined care provisioning by governments (Gleeson & Kearns, 2001), we are seeing diverse experiences of further divestment from care provisioning and the increasing commodification of care in countries suffering under austerity and other unjust neoliberal policies (Morse & Munro, 2018; Power & Hall, 2018). How care is planned for, enabled, facilitated, constituted, performed, funded and practiced is political, as is our collective neglect of care in an age of neoliberalisms. Care work is unequally born due to the
dominance of neoliberal ideologies shaping our collective understandings of responsibility for and to care. Neoliberal ideologies perpetuate three problematic assumptions about responsibilities for care: firstly care is cast as a ‘personal responsibility’, secondly as a ‘market problem’, and thirdly as having to take place within families (Tronto, 2017). This forms what Power & Bergen, 2019 see in their study of housing in Australia, as a neoliberal ethics of care. Through the logics of a neoliberal ethics of care, care continues to be problematically cast as an individual responsibility in worlds of autonomous rational individuals who are (in) adequately serviced by a market economy (Power & Bergen, 2019; Tronto, 2017). A neoliberal ethics of care has not facilitated our collective flourishing, on the contrary it has continued to erode our collective sense of responsibility to care for each other and our worlds as interconnected and inter-dependent beings. Due to our collective dependence upon care for our survival, it is not possible to give up on care (Lawson, 2007) rather we need to ‘stay with the trouble’ (Puig De La Bellacasa, 2017 drawing on Haraway) of care in order to rework our collective understanding of care responsibility. A feminist ethics of care can potentially assist us in this task. A feminist ethics of care is grounded in a relational social ontology that recognises our collective inter-dependence and responsibility to care for and sustain life (Barnes, 2006, p. 149; Lawson, 2007, pp. 3–4). The most well-cited definition of a feminist ethics of care1 was developed by Tronto, drawing on her work with Bernice Fisher, (1993, p. 113) who define it as. a “species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible”. That world includes ur bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, lifesustaining web. Following Lawson (2009, p. 211) and other advocates of a feminist ethics of care, I call for the valuing and ‘centralising’ of care to our understanding and analysis of our (urban) worlds. Moreover, I call for a re-working of how care work and the responsibility to care is allocated through a renewed understanding of care '‘as the substantive work of democratic life’ (Tronto, 2017, p. 38).
E-mail address: [email protected]. I draw on this definition of a feminist ethics of care to distinguish it from other ethics of care that may have differing ideological foundations (see Power & Bergen, 2018 for how neoliberalism may shape a particular form of care ethics). 1
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2019.102591 Received 11 April 2019; Received in revised form 7 November 2019; Accepted 26 December 2019 0264-2751/ © 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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markets and through universal human rights (Carmalt, 2010; Conradson, 2011; Cox, 2010; Milligan & Wiles, 2010; Popke, 2006; Smith, 2005). A feminist ethics of care has four principles or ‘dispositions’ that are seen to facilitate the practicing of care is a way that is contextuallysensitive and genuinely caring: attentiveness, responsibility, competence and responsiveness (Imrie & Kullman, 2017; Peace, 2017; Tronto, 1993). These principles are connected to what Tronto (1993, p. 127) refers to as the four values of an ethics of care:
In this paper I care-fully make visible the key contributions of an urban research approach drawing on a feminist ethics of care and reflect upon the ways in which a feminist ethics of care can be already seen in work that maintains, continues, repairs and transforms our urban worlds. Firstly, I begin by discussing the key elements of a feminist ethics of care and how it has been defined and applied in human geography and urban theory. Due to the importance of situating any work on an ethics of care, I secondly follow this theoretical reflection by revisiting a case study example from my PhD research where I completed approximately 13 months of researcher volunteering and conducted seven interviews with volunteers at The Women's Library, Newtown (between 2009 and 2010). I acknowledge that the traditional owners of the land on which the library is situated, the Cadigal tribe of the Eora people, and the land on which this paper is written, the Darug people.2 I acknowledge that they have cared for and continue to care for this country since the dreamtime despite the ongoing violence of colonialism. I discuss how a feminist ethics of care is a grounded and relational ethics that maintains, continues and repairs our worlds ‘as well as possible’ (Puig De La Bellacasa, 2017). I reflect on care-full practices and make visible the work of care in growing more care-fully just cities in the here and now (Williams, 2017a). The case study illustrates how care can be woven into the very fabric of our everyday urban lives within, beyond and through a physical site in the city. Finally, I conclude by proposing ways we might continue to pay attention to/with care in our cities. A feminist ethics of care assists us in making visible worlds in need of care and those places that are becoming more care-full at particular moments that we may be able to learn from, foster and grow.
caring about [attentiveness], noticing the need to care in the first place; taking care of [responsibility], assuming responsibility for care; care-giving [competence], the actual work of care that needs to be done; and care-receiving [responsiveness], the response of that which is cared for to the care. More recently, Tronto (2013) has further extended her initial conceptualisation of these values to include that of caring with, which reveals the ways care can be practiced through acts of mutual aid and solidarity that challenge the problematic power dynamics of care giver and care receiver. A feminist ethics of care is founded on a relational social ontology (Barnes, 2006, p. 149; Lawson, 2007, pp. 3–4), an understanding that to be in the world, is to be dependent on others at some point in the course of our lifetime (Barnes, 2006; Cox, 2010; Held, 2006; Lawson, 2007; Philips, 2007; Tronto, 2013). A relational social ontology reinforces our collective responsibility for other and self, both human and non-human. A feminist ethics of care therefore has similarities with other ontologies that live and practice the values of reciprocity, inter-dependence, interconnection and kinship between all beings and the non-human worlds. Ontologies that understand the relationship between humans and more-than-humans as kin have been practiced for many thousands of years in Indigenous Australian ontologies such as those formed with Bawaka Country whereby "the ontologies of Bawaka, then, co-become through intra-action “Barad, 2008” and bring with them relationally proscribed ethics and responsibilities" (Wright et al., 2016, p. 26). For example, Ngurra et al. (2019) discuss the responsibility of human and non-humans to care for and be cared for by and through country and reveal how "everything is reciprocal; interconnected; multidirectional". Recognising our collective inter-dependence and position as care-receivers can play a role in refashioning a culture whereby the responsibility for care is more equitable shared (Tronto, 2013). As urban theory engages with a feminist ethics of care and other ontologies that highlight our collective inter-dependence, the neoliberal market logics of competition, unlimited growth and individualism may be resisted and challenged. A feminist ethics of care asks us to collectively share the burden of care work and grow ‘as well as possible’ (Puig De La Bellacasa, 2017) worlds. Recently, urban theory has begun developing an urban notion of caring through a more tentative engagement with a feminist ethics of care. This work explores the possibility of a ‘politics of togetherness’ (Amin, 2012) in contexts of division, how care can be enacted through design and foster ‘togetherness’ (Bates et al., 2017), the role of care and repair in creating just public spaces in the city (Iveson & Low, 2016), situated care ethics and responsibilisation (Midgley, 2016), alongside care and everyday justice in the city (Williams, 2016, 2017a, 2017b). The work of Till (2012) in particular explores how people are practicing a place-based ethics of care through creative performances of artistic memory work in contexts of violence, oppression and exclusion manifest in wounded cities. In response, Till (2012, p. 13) emphasises the possibility of a place-based ethics of care to cement understandings of our collective responsibility to each other and our worlds to become care-giver as part of our role as citizens of a city. Furthermore, Till (2012) highlights that an ethics of care may assist more just cities come into being. In work on justice in the city, the calls of feminist philosophers (Clement, 1996; Held, 2006, 1995) and geographers (Milligan & Wiles,
2. Care-full urban worlds A feminist ethics of care has the potential to help us build more caring worlds in the here and now by bringing how care already contributes to making these worlds into view and calling for key changes to present practices and structures (Williams, 2017a). These practices and structures are by no means universal, but are socially, geographically, politically and culturally specific (Raghuram, 2016). Since its conception, a feminist ethics of care has been applied to a wide range of research in human geography and beyond including in areas of ethical consumption (Cox, 2010; Popke, 2006; Silk, 1998, 2004), spaces of care (Cooper, 2007), housing (Mee, 2009; Power & Bergen, 2019; Smith, 2005), landscapes of care (Milligan & Wiles, 2010), diverse and community economies (Diprose, 2017; Healy, 2008), times of austerity (Power & Hall, 2018), intimate geographies (Bartos, 2018) and welfare (Haylett, 2003; Staeheli & Brown, 2003), amongst many others (see Mcewan & Goodman, 2010 for an extended discussion). Each of these contributions highlight that caring takes place in contexts of power and politics that are inherently geographical (Bartos, 2018; Mcewan & Goodman, 2010). A feminist ethics of care is a grounded ethics that focuses on maintaining, continuing and repairing our worlds in the here and now in order to bring more caring worlds into being (Askew, 2009; Lawson, 2007; Smith, 2009; Williams, 2017a). Carol Gilligan in 1982 first made the case for a feminist ethics of care, arguing for a moral theory that was reliant on an understanding of people as relational and interdependent beings, rather than autonomous rational individuals (Barnes et al., 2015c; Tronto, 1993). As a moral theory, a feminist ethics of care has stemmed from an understanding of the propensity of humans to care for those who are proximate (Barnett & Land, 2007, p. 1066; Smith, 1997, p. 30). However it is no longer restricted by this initial framing, as care has been theorised as able to be practised across distance through mediated relations of consumption, through housing 2 In an Australian context we take responsibility to acknowledge First Nations people as an ‘ethical imperative’ (Bawaka Country et al., 2019, p. 683).
2
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2010; Popke, 2006; Staeheli & Brown, 2003; Till, 2012) to equally value a feminist ethics of care alongside an ethics of justice have been expressed through the concept of care-full justice (Williams, 2017a). Whilst often problematically positioned as part of a binary in political philosophy, a feminist ethics of care and justice are complementary and equally important ethics for urban theory (Williams, 2017a). According to Clement (1996, p. 2) the exclusion of care from theorisations of justice and vice versa "has resulted in extreme forms of the two ethics, in uncaring forms of justice and unjust forms of care". An ethics of justice grounded in liberal political philosophy which problematically reinforces understandings of humans as rational, independent individuals (Clement, 1996; Held, 2006; Staeheli & Brown, 2003; Williams, 2017a). In contrast, feminist philosophy challenges this conceptualisation by arguing that humans are relational, connected and situated beings that make decisions in response to relationships (Barnes, 2006; Lawson, 2007). In engaging with the ways justice and care are practiced in the everyday spaces of a drop-in-center, I Williams (2017a) reveal the generative potential of a focus of an ethics of care for work that is seeking to recognise the possibility of what cities could be in the here and now.I argue that care and justice are that care and justice are inter-dependent in practice and need to be approached as contextually-dependent, relational, everyday and mediated. In this paper I acknowledge the inter-dependence of care and justice in practice but focus on specifically amplifying the work of an ethics of care as a performative act. In the section that follows I discuss how care is woven through a space of care (Conradson, 2003), the Women's Library, at particular moments by amplifying particular caring practices that contribute to bringing more just and caring worlds into being in the here and now. The library is not a site of formalised care provisioning, but rather an ordinary space (Morse & Munro, 2018) in the city where through the affective orientation and competence of people involved at the library at particular moments, library volunteers can be enrolled in caring practice alongside non-human others such as books, lounges and artwork.
Photo 1. No ordinary chair. (Source: Williams, 2018b).
…a lending library, a reference library and an information exchange. The Women's Library will house print and non-print material for and about women, in particular lesbians and feminist women…The Women's Library will be a safe and supportive space where Lesbians and Women can relax, read, study and exchange information. The Women's Library will be a resource particularly for students enrolled in courses addressing the status of lesbians and Women, and research workers… (The Women's Library, 2003). The library holds a unique collection of fiction and non-fiction texts by women authors including rare lesbian and feminist texts that are a vital part of how care is practiced everyday through the library. I spent 13 months volunteering at the Women's Library fortnightly during which time I recorded my observations of everyday practice in a field diary and conducting seven interviews with volunteers. The library is comprised of books, couches, magazines, journals, chairs, brochures, shelves, artwork and other materials that may be enrolled in responsive practices of care. This chair was part of how care was manifest at the library. It was positioned next to a collection of books about survival from abuse, incest, domestic violence and some brochures that have contact information on counselling services and resources on where to access support. Jennifer (a pseudonym) recognised that there was a need for people to have privacy whilst reading the books and resources if they desired it. As a volunteer she cared about the people who may come into the library and their need to access resources to help them heal from trauma. She recognised that the library
3. The Women's Library: care-full everyday urban practices In this section I firstly situate how a feminist ethics of care can be manifest as a relational ethics grounded in practice. Secondly, I discuss how a feminist ethics of care can be seen in the work done to maintain and continue and, finally, repair our worlds. The Women's Library is a community organisation in Newtown, a suburb of Sydney's Inner West. Newtown is a geographically distinctive suburb as it is a key home to Sydney's LBTQIA community and is an area that has been undergoing gentrification for some time (see Fasche, 2006 for example). As part of this research project I sought to tell stories of the city that made visible the sites where people were attempting to respond to injustices and neglect and grow more caring and just worlds in the here and now (see Williams, 2018b). To do so I adopted a politics of possibility (GibsonGraham, 2006): a hopeful politics attuned to progressive worlds and oriented towards the practice of amplifying and making these worlds visible. At the Women's Library collective responsibility to care for other women both known and unknown can be enacted through everyday practices of maintenance and repair. Women's library can be approached as a critically exclusive safe space in the city (Williams, 2018b). The acts of care practiced through and within the library do not remain contained in the physical space of the library, as they can permeate throughout the broader city, re-shaping and re-fashioning the urban as a care-full place.
space is really important… this came from one of the reasons why I set up the little back area with a chair… so people could access stuff that they might not want to sit on the lounge and read… The placement of important phone numbers alongside this chair was intentional and reveals how an ethics of care is practiced in a way that is responsive to the context dependent needs of particular others (Lawson, 2007, p. 3; Williams, 2017a). Not all women would experience or notice the chair as caring as care is diversely experienced and expressed. Yet, in paying attention to this act of care and the intention behind it, we can see how it makes visible the significant issue of gender-based violence in our worlds which make a women's only safe space necessary, the chair necessary, the books and resources necessary and the potential need for privacy necessary due to the problematic nature of silence and shame. As Barnes, et al. (2015a, p. 241) explains, "the face-to-face, everyday experience of giving and receiving care is often the starting point for understanding injustices experienced by those in need of care". As an ‘affective orientation’, ‘material practice’
3.1. Care as a grounded and everyday practice There was a chair that sat at the back of the Women's Library in Newtown pictured in Photo 1. This chair was more than just somewhere to sit and this is no ordinary library. The Women's Library opened in 1992 with, as explained in the constitution, the aim of comprising: 3
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practices of care, making the possibility for repair and transformation.
and movement towards another, care comes into being through these intentional and grounded practices in the everyday sites of the city such as in this library in very context-dependent ways (Conradson, 2011). Care is a grounded practice than maintains and continues life.
3.3. Repairing our urban worlds: within and beyond the library Whilst repair is often discussed in terms of repairing and maintaining infrastructures or technology (Denis & Pontille, 2015; Puig De La Bellacasa, 2017), I approach it also as a way that caring practice is enacted as intentional practices of care that redress specific forms of injustice in an attempt to heal worlds. At particular moments, the Women's Library volunteers cared about and for the various women who came into the library in an attempt to offer ways in which they might access the tools needed to repair or access support to begin the journey of acknowledging and healing from experiences of injustice. For example, repair occurred in multiple ways through the library from the provision of an ordinary chair, books and resources, to the provision of a safe space for women of diverse sexualities to be, or to sit and breastfeed or express milk for their babies. It occurred through enabling women access to books written by and for women as Jennifer explained:
3.2. Maintaining and continuing the library Responsibility for others and a recognition of our collective interdependence was manifest in the care of volunteers who maintained and continued the library. At the time of the research in 2009–2010, the library was run by approximately 27 volunteers who diversely practiced caring for, caring about, care-giving and care-receiving in a context that clearly reflected a politics of caring with: a form of democratic caring whereby volunteers collectively care for each other, the library, and other women who may occupy the library (Tronto, 2013). Practices that continue and maintain our worlds are care work: they are the material and social practices that reproduce the library as a space of care (Conradson, 2011). On a day-to-day basis the types of maintenance tasks performed by volunteers did not vary greatly, however they could be responsive to particular needs. These everyday maintenance practices or, ‘implicit activisms’ (Horton & Kraftl, 2009) could be hard work; they could be joyful, boring or mundane. They included sorting mail; cleaning; chatting and listening to members and volunteers; sorting and accessioning books; counting money; printing; organising events; emailing; making tea; and selling second hand books. It is these everyday practices that contributed to the reproduction of the library as a space of care (Williams, 2018b). The library became a space of care or safe haven where people could drop in and be and groups could use in the city (Power & Bartlett, 2018; Tronto, 1993). Whilst not necessarily running the groups, those that meet at the library enable people to build connections and in that sense, grow other spaces of care. Jennifer explains that:
when someone comes in here and say walks up the back and realises that we've got a whole lot of books about child sexual assault, we've got a whole lot of books about sexuality, we've got a whole lot of books by women authors … one of the nice experiences I've had is with a young Arabic woman who volunteered with us for a while and I was telling her that all the books were by women and she said ‘do you know that when I was at uni in Pakistan, I said I wanted to write a book and my teacher said to me ‘women don't write books’, and she said ‘and now I'm standing here and all these books are by women’. Importantly the care enacted here had to be received as caring by those in need of care. The library was not always experienced as caring, the volunteers were not always caring and caring practice was at time inhibited by exhaustion, fatigue and bodily frailty. Care is both resilient and fragile but care has the potential to emerge and come into being through the practices of volunteers at particular moments. The library became a space of care through the affective orientation of other members and volunteers expressed through interpersonal relationships. For example Kim experienced the library as caring when people were supportive of her at a difficult point on her life journey:
There's the Open House, which is a lesbian support group, there's cancer support for lesbians. There have been in the past and probably will be again other types of women's support groups, that meet here and continue to meet. We've run a depression group for women with depression … and we've run writing and art groups which essentially all of those work towards, I suppose increasing women's sense of their own value … which is the core of, for me it's the core of social justice. It's valuing people.
… when I left my husband … I was looking for a connecting point and I was coming out. And I saw the library advertised somewhere and I came along… when I first came here, I was pretty messy and the women were very kind and supportive … And that seems to be a pattern for a lot of the people who've come here.
Jennifer sees valuing people as a core way that social justice is practiced and the library provides a location for this type of connection to take place. There are a number of groups run for women connected to the library and beyond (see Fig. 1). For example, Oestrogen Does not Rot Your Keyboard (ODRYK) was a group run by one of the long-term library members who is a skilled IT professional. This group aimed to skill up women in the library community and create a space for colearning and knowledge sharing on computer skills. The practices of volunteers that maintain and continue the library facilitate various
Her involvement enabled Kim to connect with other lesbian women, many of whom provided her with an inclusive support network. Her experience of the practices of care with and through the library, transformed it into a space of care at a particular moment when people
Fig. 1. Groups at the Women's Library in 2009–2010. (Source: The Women's Library, 2009) 4
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neglect visible can be vital to the work of making more just and caring cities. In this section I reflect upon the potential of paying attention to/ with care for those of us interested in facilitating the emergence of carefully just cities in the here and now. To do so I offer three areas of research focus for paying attention to/with care in the urban. Firstly, there is potential in a continued focus on understanding how a feminist ethics of care is or could be practiced through maintenance and repair in the city. Through a focus on maintenance and repair a feminist ethics of care epistemologically offers a way for us to recognise how ‘implicit’ (Horton & Kraftl, 2009) or ‘quiet’ everyday activisms are manifest in everyday practices, and offers the potential to uncover how more caring worlds are being brought into being in the here and now at particular grounded moments. As shown in the example of the Women's Library, paying attention to maintenance and repair can make caring practices visible and reveal the need for care, the important role it plays in our worlds and the ways it is practiced (Puig De La Bellacasa, 2017, p. 11; Tronto, 1993). In the everyday sites of the city we can also develop an understanding of the ways everyday justice activism is manifest through hard, messy, boring, banal and dirty practices of care and justice (Horton & Kraftl, 2009) that respond to the lived experiences and violent expressions of injustice, neglect and oppression (Williams, 2016, 2017a, 2018). The Women's Library example revealed how generative a focus on acts of maintenance and repair can be for understanding the everyday practices that are constituting spaces of care in the city that respond to injustice and neglect. Making visible other ways of doing, being and thinking urban life that are viable alternatives in the here and now can powerfully contribute to this work of understanding how radically caring subjectivities are fostered and grown. Secondly, paying attention to/with care may mean continuing to understand our worlds through a relational social ontology which has implications for our collective sense of responsibility to human and non-human others, planet, animals and materials in the context of a climate changing world. It may mean continuing to value and demonstrate the value an ethics of care as guiding ethics for urban theory as they enable us to emphasise both "collective and individual responsibilities for care" (Barnes et al., 2015c, p. 6). The Women's Library example revealed the ways in which care is emergent towards others known and unknown at particular moments manifesting within and beyond the library. Scholars mobilising a feminist ethics of care can potentially learn from other actually existing relational ontologies beyond the Global North (Raghuram, 2016), such as indigenous ontologies seen as care for country (Ngurra et al., 2019), in order to further inform urban theory and our understanding of the work that needs to be done in the everyday sites of cities to maintain and continue more caring and just worlds. These worlds need to be aware of the role of both the human and non-human in caring so that "… humans remember that places also care, and care-full relationships honour and assert Country's agencies" (Ngurra et al., 2019, p. 12). Care-thinking can learn much from the ways in which care has and continues to be practiced. Thirdly, paying attention to/with care may mean exposing injustices and neglect, proposing solutions and amplifying alternatives that exist and that are realisable in the here and now (Iveson, 2010). The need for a chair situated in a private place in a women's library points to larger systematic issues of power, injustice, inequality and violence that permeate our worlds. Urban theory has a long history of engaging with issues of injustice and inequality (Fincher & Iveson, 2012). Inequalities are often hidden surreptitiously due to their complexity. This work means making visible contextually-dependent emergences of inequalities and injustices in the city that are both enduring and temporal and highlighting how a feminist ethics of care could work through policy and practice to address these issues. As Power & Bergen, 2019 note, care is resilient in the face of diverse neoliberalisms. Neoliberalisms problematically place the responsibility for taking care of others on individuals and families which is an ideology that needs to be transformed in order for governments and corporations to be held responsible to care for people, animals and
cared for each other or were attentive to their needs (Conradson, 2003). These spaces of care could extend beyond the physical bounds of the library. The library became caring when that care was not just contained within its walls, but permeated out and transformed the wider city. The library was a site of many official and spontaneous ongoing conversations about feminism and was a site of feminist and Lesbian activism: it held stalls at International Women's Day and Reclaim the Night, encouraged women artists to exhibit on its walls, held an exhibition in 2009 called ‘Silent no more’ which enabled women to make visible their stories of abuse similar to the #metoo movement to occur 10 years later, and actively preserved the history of the Australian Feminist Movement in the form of posters, books, art and journals. The library is symbolically and materially connected to the feminist movement and some volunteers who care about the feminist or lesbian rights movements saw their roles as volunteers at the library as also actively contributing to growing sites of both implicit everyday activisms and more formal forms of action. Rachel describes how by volunteering at the library, she has: a feeling that I'm actually contributing to, to keeping the library open. And that I'm, in some, though a very small way you know contributing to … the local women … and because it's lesbian, transgender too, all of though sort of groups as well, because it's a safe place. So yeah, that's basically what I feel that I get out of it. But I also feel that I get a lot more out of it from sometimes from the interaction with people… The library is growing other more caring worlds whilst also challenging the problematic ways present injustices are manifest. By sharing these stories of how care was diversely practiced in incomplete, messy and ongoing ways at the library, I have been bringing these practices of care into view, politicising them, as practices to be valued as playing a role in maintaining, continuing, repairing and transforming our urban worlds. Paying attention to care in this way reveals how care is already practiced in the ordinary spaces of the city and the potential for facilitating caring practices in other sites. I now turn to reflect upon the possibilities of further research that might pay attention to/with care in our cities in order to advocate for the generative potential of a feminist ethics of care. 4. Paying attention to/with care in our cities A feminist ethics of care could radically alter our cities if it guided how cities were lived, constituted and experienced as it asks us to "raise crucial questions of [caring] practice" (Lawson, 2009, p. 211). The difficult work of a responsive, consensual, loving care that heals bodies and worlds is vital to the work of doing justice in the city. This work may involve re-working problematic notions of care and care-giving and thus reinforce our collective interdependence; and to continue to value caring practices in a way that challenges the inequalities that are part of who does the work of care and who does not (Cox, 2010). As Puig De La Bellacasa (2017, p. 56) argues, in the world as we know it, paying attention to care as a necessary doing still directs attention to neglected things and devalued doings that are accomplished in every context by the most marginalized – not necessarily women – and to the logics of domination that are reproduced or intensified in the name of care (Puig De La Bellacasa, 2017, p. 56). Paying attention to the role of care in our cities means continuing to broaden our understanding of the politics surrounding and geographies shaping how care is practiced in order to make visible the erasures, silences and ‘invisible labours of care’ (Puig De La Bellacasa, 2017, p. 57). Many of the places where care is needed are purposively and politically hidden from view so that collectively we do not care or are not given the opportunity to care. Making these places of silence and 5
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just cities; emphasise our collective inter-dependence and responsibility for one another; and reveal silences, injustices and neglect in a way that provokes action. The work of a feminist ethics of care is never done.
planet (Tronto, 2017). It is not enough to just make the injustices that our worlds suffer under and through visible. Rather, researchers might also continue to work with and alongside peoples and groups through participatory action research and activist research to bring more caring worlds into being through grounded engagements in sites where care needs to be transformed or facilitate transformation. It may therefore mean engaging in research that "step[s] beyond critique into action" (Conradson, 2011, p. 465) to directly shape urban futures through policy interventions, activism and other urban transformations forged through unlikely alliances.
Funding The PhD research project on which the case study field work was based was funded through an Australian Post Graduate Award completed through the University of Newcastle, Australia. Declaration of competing interest
5. Concluding remarks None. To conclude I reiterate the possibility of staying with the trouble of care and the potential of engaging with a feminist ethics of care as a way to resist and challenge the dominance of neoliberalisms. Caring practice is part of our broken and beautiful urban worlds, and the practice of care is crucial for the continuation of life (Lawson, 2007; Milligan & Wiles, 2010; Samanani, 2017). In a time where neoliberal understandings of who is responsible to and for care is dominant there is a continued need to pay attention to/with care and the politics of how care is being provisioned by governments and business. A political focus on a feminist ethics of care assists us in recognising the "inequalities of power and privilege" (Tronto, 1993, p. 101) that govern who does the work of care, who does not, who receives adequate care, who outsources care, who can care and whose opportunity to care is limited. Our cities need the framing of a feminist ethics of care to help us collectively think through ways to challenge these inequalities and find ways to collectively shape diverse cultures where caring is valued, competently practiced and fairly distributed. As evidenced in the case study, care can be woven through everyday practices and spaces in the city, maintaining, continuing and repairing our worlds within and beyond particular sites in the city at particular moments. There is much to be learnt through an engagement with these spaces, including focusing on how care might be further enabled and facilitated particularly in contexts where it is constrained. Paying attention to the mundane sites where care is practiced beyond the home can provide important insights for those concerned with a feminist ethics of care which has most often focused on institutional sites of care provisioning and the home as a container of care (Power & Williams, in press). There are many more ordinary sites in cities where people practice care and seek to bring more just worlds into being that could be the subject of further research and analysis. There are also many ordinary sites where caring capacity is limited and curtailed due to insufficient support and neglect that are potential spaces of caring in cities in need of care. Further documenting how people are diversely enacting a feminist ethics of care would generate new understandings of the possibility of care to transform the cities, regions, homes, institutions, policies and practice. I acknowledge that this paper has been written to specifically draw out caring practices and therefore does not focus upon their absence at the Women's Library which is a limitation. As an early career academic who experienced the precarity of academic work post PhD and whose research capacity was constrained by other caring responsibilities, I have drawn upon an example from fieldwork carried out a decade ago. The snapshot of caring practice provided is but one moment in time that can still be learnt from to understand the generative possibility of a focus on care. The Women's Library today remains active as space with the possibility for and to care in the city as do other ordinary sites where people collectively work together to address injustices and celebrate creativity. A feminist ethics of care is an everyday, grounded and transformative ethics with the potential to reorient urban theory to ask key questions about care and responsibility, thus making more care-full cities possible. Paying attention to/with care may assist us in understanding the role of maintenance and repair in creating more caring and
Acknowledgements I would like to thank Professor Pauline McGuirk who was my PhD supervisor who I will always be indebted to for her support throughout the period in which my PhD research was carried out at the University of Newcastle. Thank you also to the Women's Library volunteers and management at the time of this research. Thank you to Dr Fiona Miller, Dr Kristian Ruming and Dr Emma Power who provided some feedback on early versions of this paper which was presented as a keynote at the Cities of Care Institute of Australian Geographers Urban Theory Symposium. Thank you to the Urban Study Group of the IAG and the IAG for funding my attendance at the Symposium. Thank you to the Cultural and Political Geography Research Cluster in the Department of Geography and Planning at Macquarie University for your helpful feedback. References Amin, A. (2012). Land of strangers. Cambridge: Polity Press. Askew, L. (2009). “At home” in state institutions: The caring practices and potentialities of human service workers. Geoforum, 40, 655–663. Barnes, M. (2006). Caring and social justice. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Barnes, M., et al. (2015a). Conclusion: Renewal and transformation - The importance of an ethics of care. In M. Barnes, T. Brannelly, L. Ward, & N. Ward (Eds.). Ethics of care: Critical advances in international perspective (pp. 233–244). Bristol: Policy Press. Barnes, M., et al. (2015b). Ethics of care: Critical advances in international perspective. Bristol: Policy Press. Barnes, M., et al. (2015c). Introduction: The critical significance of care. In M. Barnes, T. Brannelly, L. Ward, & N. Ward (Eds.). Ethics of care: Critical advances in international perspective (pp. 3–19). Bristol: Policy Press. Barnett, C., & Land, D. (2007). Geographies of generosity: Beyond the moral turn. Geoforum, 38, 1065–1075. Bartos, A. E. (2018). Relational spaces and relational care: Campus sexual violence, intimate geopolitics and topological polis. Area, Early View. https://doi.org/10.1111/ area.12449. Bates, C., et al. (2017). Care and design: Bodies, buildings, cities. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. Bawaka Country, et al. (2019). Goŋ Gurtha: Enacting response-abilities as situated cobecoming. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 37, 682–702. Carmalt, J. C. (2010). Human rights, care ethics and situated universal norms. Antipode, 43, 296–325. Clement, G. (1996). Care, autonomy, and justice: Feminism and the ethic of care. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press. Conradson, D. (2003). Spaces of care in the city: The place of a community drop-in centre. Social & Cultural Geography, 4, 507–525. Conradson, D. (2011). Care and caring. In V. J. Del Casino Jr, M. Thomas, E., P. Cloke & R. Panelli (Eds.), A companion to social geography (pp. 454–471). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Cooper, D. (2007). Well, you go there to get off': Visiting feminist care ethics through a women's bathhouse. Feminist Theory, 8, 243–262. Cox, R. (2010). Some problems and possibilities of caring. Ethics, Place & Environment, 13, 113–130. Denis, J., & Pontille, D. (2015). Material ordering and the care of things. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 40, 338–367. Diprose, G. (2017). Radical equality, care and labour in a community economy. Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, 24, 834–850. Fasche, M. (2006). Creative people and gentrification: “Sowing the seeds of demise?” evidence from Newtown. Vol. 60, Sydney: Erdkunde147–156. Fincher, R., & Iveson, K. (2012). Justice and injustice in the city. Geographical Research, 50, 231–241. Gibson-Graham, J. K. (2006). A Postcapitalist politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
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Geography, 19, 303–313. Power, Emma R., & Bergan, Tegan L. (2019). Care and Resistance to Neoliberal Reform in Social Housing. Housing, Theory and Society, 36(4), 426–447. Power, E. R, & Williams, M. J. Cities (2019). Cities of care: A platform for urban geographical care research. Geography Compass, e12474. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3. 12474. Puig De La Bellacasa, M. (2017). Matters of care: Speculative ethics in more than human worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Raghuram, P. (2016). Locating care ethics beyond the global north. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographers, 15, 511–533. Samanani, F. (2017). Introduction to special issue: Cities of refuge and cities of strangers: Care and hospitality in the City. City & SOciety, 29, 242–259. Silk, J. (1998). Caring at a distance. Ethics, Place & Environment, 1, 165–182. Silk, J. (2004). Caring at a distance: Gift theory, aid chains and social movements. Social & Cultural Geography, 5, 229–250. Smith, D., M. (1997). Back to the good life: Towards an enlarged conception of social justice. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 15, 19–35. Smith, S., J. (2005). States, markets and an ethic of care. Political Geography, 24, 1–20. Smith, S., J. (2009). Everyday morality: Where radical geography meets normative theory. Antipode, 41, 206–209. Staeheli, L. A., & Brown, M. (2003). Guest editorial: Where has welfare gone? Introductory remarks on the geographies of care and welfare. Environment and Planning A, 35, 771–777. The Women's Library (2009). Annual Report 2009. Vol. 2011. Newtown: The Women's Library. The Women's Library. The Women's Library Incorporated Constitution. (2003). online http:// thewomenslibrary.org.au/about-us/ Date Accessed 2010 . Till, K. E. (2012). Wounded cities: Memory-work and a place-based ethics of care. Political Geography, 31, 3–14. Tronto, J. (1993). Moral boundaries, A political argument for an ethic of care. New York and London: Routledge. Tronto, J. (2013). Caring democracy: Markets, equality, and justice. New York: NYU Press. Tronto, J. (2017). There is an alternative: homines curans and the limits of neoliberalism. International Journal of Care and Caring, 1, 27–43. Williams, M. (2016). Justice and care in the city: Uncovering everyday practices through research volunteering. Area, 48, 513–520. Williams, M. (2017a). Care-full justice in the City. Antipode, 49, 821–839. Williams, M. J (2018b). Urban commons are more‐than‐property. Geographical Research, 56, 16–25. Williams, M. (2017b). Searching for actually existing urban justice. Urban Studies, 54, 2217–2231. Williams, M. (2018a). Urban commons are more-than-property. Geographical Research, 56, 16–25. Wright, S., et al. (2016). The politics of ontology and ontological politics. Dialogues in Human Geography, 6, 23–27. Yeandle, S., et al. (2017). Care and caring: Interdisciplinary perspectives on a societal issue of global significance. International Journal of Care and Caring, 1, 3–25.
Gleeson, B., & Kearns, R. (2001). Remoralising landscapes of care. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 19, 61–80. Haylett, C. (2003). Class, care, and welfare reform: Reading meanings, talking feelings. Environment and Planning A, 35. Healy, S. (2008). Caring for ethics and the politics of health care reform in the United States. Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, 15, 267–284. Held, V. (1995). Justice and care, essential readings in feminist ethics. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press. Held, V. (2006). The ethics of care, personal, political and global. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Horton, J., & Kraftl, P. (2009). Small acts, kind words and “not too much fuss”: Implicit activisms. Emotion, Space and Society, 2, 14–23. Imrie, R., & Kullman, K. (2017). Chapter one designing with care and caring design. In C. Bates, R. Imrie, & K. Kullman (Eds.). Care and design: Bodies, buildings, cities (pp. 1– 17). Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. Iveson, K. (2010). Some critical reflections on being critical: Reading for deviance, dominance or difference? City, 14, 434–441. Iveson, K., & Low, S. (2016). Propositions for more just urban public spaces. City, 20, 10–31. Lawson, V. (2007). Geographies of care and responsibility. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 97, 1–11. Lawson, V. (2009). Instead of radical geography, how about caring geography? Antipode, 41, 210–213. Mcewan, C., & Goodman, M. K. (2010). Place geography and the ethics of care: Introductory remarks on the geographies of ethics, responsibility and care. Ethics, Place & Environment, 13, 103–112. Mee, K., J. (2009). A space to care, a space of care: Public housing, belonging, and care in inner Newcastle, Australia. Environment and Planning A, 41, 842–858. Midgley, J. L. (2016). Perspectives on responsibility in practice as revealed through food provisioning offers for rough sleepers. Critical Social Policy, 36, 610–629. Milligan, C., & Wiles, J. L. (2010). Landscapes of care. Progress in Human Geography, 34, 1–19. Morse, N., & Munro, E. (2018). Museums' community engagement schemes, austerity and practices of care in two local museum services. Social & Cultural Geography, 19, 357–378. Ngurra, D., et al. (2019). Yanama budyari gumada: Reframing the urban to care as Darug Country in western Sydney. Australian Geographer. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 00049182.2019.1601150. Peace, S. (2017). Chapter two age-inclusive design: A challenge for kitchen living? In C. Bates, R. Imrie & K. Kullman (Eds.), Care and design, bodies, buildings, cities (pp. 18–36). Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. Philips, J. (2007). Care. Cambridge: Polity Press. Popke, J. (2006). Geography and ethics: Everyday mediations through care and consumption. Progress in Human Geography, 30, 504–512. Power, A., & Bartlett, R. (2018). Self-building safe havens in a postservice landscape: How adults with learning disabilities are reclaiming the welcoming communities agenda. Social & Cultural Geography, 19, 336–356. Power, A., & Hall, E. (2018). Placing care in times of austerity. Social & Cultural
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Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Cities journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/cities
The possibility of care-full cities
T
Miriam J. Williams Department of Geography and Planning, Macquarie University, 6 First Walk, Macquarie University, NSW 2109, Australia
1. Introduction There is nothing necessarily remarkable about the practice of care nor its presence in our everyday urban lives (Samanani, 2017). Care is defined as both an "orientation and embodied practice" that "holds the possibility, in other words, of facilitating new ways of being together" (Conradson, 2011, p. 454). The practice of care itself can be both liberating and oppressive (Puig De La Bellacasa, 2017). Caring can be hard work: it can be messy, dirty, exhausting, burdensome and boring (Puig De La Bellacasa, 2017, p. 5). At the same, caring can be joyful, bountiful and beautiful. We are dependent upon care for "our individual and collective survival" (Lawson, 2007, p. 5), yet our collective capacity to care exceeds what we are individually able to practice. We are limited by our bodily capacity to care, which through illness, exhaustion and trauma can be dramatically curtailed. We feel the absence of care in a very embodied way. We feel it as varying degrees of neglect. Each day practices of care are carried out for human and often non-human others who can become "both givers and receivers of care all the time, though their capacities and needs shift for each person throughout life" (Tronto, 2017, p. 31). Care becomes the very fabric of city life, woven through moments where life is maintained, continued and repaired (Tronto, 1993). The very ubiquity of caring practice is part of the reason why it "often remains forgotten, marginalized or excluded" (Yeandle et al., 2017, p. 8) from our analysis, our political focus, and the broader valuing of care and carers in our societies (Barnes et al., 2015b; Conradson, 2011; Lawson, 2007; Yeandle et al., 2017). Caring practice and who does the work of care in our worlds remains deeply political, as it is gendered, classed and often racialised (Barnes et al., 2015a; Tronto, 1993). At this present political moment, after periods of intense deinstitutionalisation that has undermined care provisioning by governments (Gleeson & Kearns, 2001), we are seeing diverse experiences of further divestment from care provisioning and the increasing commodification of care in countries suffering under austerity and other unjust neoliberal policies (Morse & Munro, 2018; Power & Hall, 2018). How care is planned for, enabled, facilitated, constituted, performed, funded and practiced is political, as is our collective neglect of care in an age of neoliberalisms. Care work is unequally born due to the
dominance of neoliberal ideologies shaping our collective understandings of responsibility for and to care. Neoliberal ideologies perpetuate three problematic assumptions about responsibilities for care: firstly care is cast as a ‘personal responsibility’, secondly as a ‘market problem’, and thirdly as having to take place within families (Tronto, 2017). This forms what Power & Bergen, 2019 see in their study of housing in Australia, as a neoliberal ethics of care. Through the logics of a neoliberal ethics of care, care continues to be problematically cast as an individual responsibility in worlds of autonomous rational individuals who are (in) adequately serviced by a market economy (Power & Bergen, 2019; Tronto, 2017). A neoliberal ethics of care has not facilitated our collective flourishing, on the contrary it has continued to erode our collective sense of responsibility to care for each other and our worlds as interconnected and inter-dependent beings. Due to our collective dependence upon care for our survival, it is not possible to give up on care (Lawson, 2007) rather we need to ‘stay with the trouble’ (Puig De La Bellacasa, 2017 drawing on Haraway) of care in order to rework our collective understanding of care responsibility. A feminist ethics of care can potentially assist us in this task. A feminist ethics of care is grounded in a relational social ontology that recognises our collective inter-dependence and responsibility to care for and sustain life (Barnes, 2006, p. 149; Lawson, 2007, pp. 3–4). The most well-cited definition of a feminist ethics of care1 was developed by Tronto, drawing on her work with Bernice Fisher, (1993, p. 113) who define it as. a “species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible”. That world includes ur bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, lifesustaining web. Following Lawson (2009, p. 211) and other advocates of a feminist ethics of care, I call for the valuing and ‘centralising’ of care to our understanding and analysis of our (urban) worlds. Moreover, I call for a re-working of how care work and the responsibility to care is allocated through a renewed understanding of care '‘as the substantive work of democratic life’ (Tronto, 2017, p. 38).
E-mail address: [email protected]. I draw on this definition of a feminist ethics of care to distinguish it from other ethics of care that may have differing ideological foundations (see Power & Bergen, 2018 for how neoliberalism may shape a particular form of care ethics). 1
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2019.102591 Received 11 April 2019; Received in revised form 7 November 2019; Accepted 26 December 2019 0264-2751/ © 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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markets and through universal human rights (Carmalt, 2010; Conradson, 2011; Cox, 2010; Milligan & Wiles, 2010; Popke, 2006; Smith, 2005). A feminist ethics of care has four principles or ‘dispositions’ that are seen to facilitate the practicing of care is a way that is contextuallysensitive and genuinely caring: attentiveness, responsibility, competence and responsiveness (Imrie & Kullman, 2017; Peace, 2017; Tronto, 1993). These principles are connected to what Tronto (1993, p. 127) refers to as the four values of an ethics of care:
In this paper I care-fully make visible the key contributions of an urban research approach drawing on a feminist ethics of care and reflect upon the ways in which a feminist ethics of care can be already seen in work that maintains, continues, repairs and transforms our urban worlds. Firstly, I begin by discussing the key elements of a feminist ethics of care and how it has been defined and applied in human geography and urban theory. Due to the importance of situating any work on an ethics of care, I secondly follow this theoretical reflection by revisiting a case study example from my PhD research where I completed approximately 13 months of researcher volunteering and conducted seven interviews with volunteers at The Women's Library, Newtown (between 2009 and 2010). I acknowledge that the traditional owners of the land on which the library is situated, the Cadigal tribe of the Eora people, and the land on which this paper is written, the Darug people.2 I acknowledge that they have cared for and continue to care for this country since the dreamtime despite the ongoing violence of colonialism. I discuss how a feminist ethics of care is a grounded and relational ethics that maintains, continues and repairs our worlds ‘as well as possible’ (Puig De La Bellacasa, 2017). I reflect on care-full practices and make visible the work of care in growing more care-fully just cities in the here and now (Williams, 2017a). The case study illustrates how care can be woven into the very fabric of our everyday urban lives within, beyond and through a physical site in the city. Finally, I conclude by proposing ways we might continue to pay attention to/with care in our cities. A feminist ethics of care assists us in making visible worlds in need of care and those places that are becoming more care-full at particular moments that we may be able to learn from, foster and grow.
caring about [attentiveness], noticing the need to care in the first place; taking care of [responsibility], assuming responsibility for care; care-giving [competence], the actual work of care that needs to be done; and care-receiving [responsiveness], the response of that which is cared for to the care. More recently, Tronto (2013) has further extended her initial conceptualisation of these values to include that of caring with, which reveals the ways care can be practiced through acts of mutual aid and solidarity that challenge the problematic power dynamics of care giver and care receiver. A feminist ethics of care is founded on a relational social ontology (Barnes, 2006, p. 149; Lawson, 2007, pp. 3–4), an understanding that to be in the world, is to be dependent on others at some point in the course of our lifetime (Barnes, 2006; Cox, 2010; Held, 2006; Lawson, 2007; Philips, 2007; Tronto, 2013). A relational social ontology reinforces our collective responsibility for other and self, both human and non-human. A feminist ethics of care therefore has similarities with other ontologies that live and practice the values of reciprocity, inter-dependence, interconnection and kinship between all beings and the non-human worlds. Ontologies that understand the relationship between humans and more-than-humans as kin have been practiced for many thousands of years in Indigenous Australian ontologies such as those formed with Bawaka Country whereby "the ontologies of Bawaka, then, co-become through intra-action “Barad, 2008” and bring with them relationally proscribed ethics and responsibilities" (Wright et al., 2016, p. 26). For example, Ngurra et al. (2019) discuss the responsibility of human and non-humans to care for and be cared for by and through country and reveal how "everything is reciprocal; interconnected; multidirectional". Recognising our collective inter-dependence and position as care-receivers can play a role in refashioning a culture whereby the responsibility for care is more equitable shared (Tronto, 2013). As urban theory engages with a feminist ethics of care and other ontologies that highlight our collective inter-dependence, the neoliberal market logics of competition, unlimited growth and individualism may be resisted and challenged. A feminist ethics of care asks us to collectively share the burden of care work and grow ‘as well as possible’ (Puig De La Bellacasa, 2017) worlds. Recently, urban theory has begun developing an urban notion of caring through a more tentative engagement with a feminist ethics of care. This work explores the possibility of a ‘politics of togetherness’ (Amin, 2012) in contexts of division, how care can be enacted through design and foster ‘togetherness’ (Bates et al., 2017), the role of care and repair in creating just public spaces in the city (Iveson & Low, 2016), situated care ethics and responsibilisation (Midgley, 2016), alongside care and everyday justice in the city (Williams, 2016, 2017a, 2017b). The work of Till (2012) in particular explores how people are practicing a place-based ethics of care through creative performances of artistic memory work in contexts of violence, oppression and exclusion manifest in wounded cities. In response, Till (2012, p. 13) emphasises the possibility of a place-based ethics of care to cement understandings of our collective responsibility to each other and our worlds to become care-giver as part of our role as citizens of a city. Furthermore, Till (2012) highlights that an ethics of care may assist more just cities come into being. In work on justice in the city, the calls of feminist philosophers (Clement, 1996; Held, 2006, 1995) and geographers (Milligan & Wiles,
2. Care-full urban worlds A feminist ethics of care has the potential to help us build more caring worlds in the here and now by bringing how care already contributes to making these worlds into view and calling for key changes to present practices and structures (Williams, 2017a). These practices and structures are by no means universal, but are socially, geographically, politically and culturally specific (Raghuram, 2016). Since its conception, a feminist ethics of care has been applied to a wide range of research in human geography and beyond including in areas of ethical consumption (Cox, 2010; Popke, 2006; Silk, 1998, 2004), spaces of care (Cooper, 2007), housing (Mee, 2009; Power & Bergen, 2019; Smith, 2005), landscapes of care (Milligan & Wiles, 2010), diverse and community economies (Diprose, 2017; Healy, 2008), times of austerity (Power & Hall, 2018), intimate geographies (Bartos, 2018) and welfare (Haylett, 2003; Staeheli & Brown, 2003), amongst many others (see Mcewan & Goodman, 2010 for an extended discussion). Each of these contributions highlight that caring takes place in contexts of power and politics that are inherently geographical (Bartos, 2018; Mcewan & Goodman, 2010). A feminist ethics of care is a grounded ethics that focuses on maintaining, continuing and repairing our worlds in the here and now in order to bring more caring worlds into being (Askew, 2009; Lawson, 2007; Smith, 2009; Williams, 2017a). Carol Gilligan in 1982 first made the case for a feminist ethics of care, arguing for a moral theory that was reliant on an understanding of people as relational and interdependent beings, rather than autonomous rational individuals (Barnes et al., 2015c; Tronto, 1993). As a moral theory, a feminist ethics of care has stemmed from an understanding of the propensity of humans to care for those who are proximate (Barnett & Land, 2007, p. 1066; Smith, 1997, p. 30). However it is no longer restricted by this initial framing, as care has been theorised as able to be practised across distance through mediated relations of consumption, through housing 2 In an Australian context we take responsibility to acknowledge First Nations people as an ‘ethical imperative’ (Bawaka Country et al., 2019, p. 683).
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2010; Popke, 2006; Staeheli & Brown, 2003; Till, 2012) to equally value a feminist ethics of care alongside an ethics of justice have been expressed through the concept of care-full justice (Williams, 2017a). Whilst often problematically positioned as part of a binary in political philosophy, a feminist ethics of care and justice are complementary and equally important ethics for urban theory (Williams, 2017a). According to Clement (1996, p. 2) the exclusion of care from theorisations of justice and vice versa "has resulted in extreme forms of the two ethics, in uncaring forms of justice and unjust forms of care". An ethics of justice grounded in liberal political philosophy which problematically reinforces understandings of humans as rational, independent individuals (Clement, 1996; Held, 2006; Staeheli & Brown, 2003; Williams, 2017a). In contrast, feminist philosophy challenges this conceptualisation by arguing that humans are relational, connected and situated beings that make decisions in response to relationships (Barnes, 2006; Lawson, 2007). In engaging with the ways justice and care are practiced in the everyday spaces of a drop-in-center, I Williams (2017a) reveal the generative potential of a focus of an ethics of care for work that is seeking to recognise the possibility of what cities could be in the here and now.I argue that care and justice are that care and justice are inter-dependent in practice and need to be approached as contextually-dependent, relational, everyday and mediated. In this paper I acknowledge the inter-dependence of care and justice in practice but focus on specifically amplifying the work of an ethics of care as a performative act. In the section that follows I discuss how care is woven through a space of care (Conradson, 2003), the Women's Library, at particular moments by amplifying particular caring practices that contribute to bringing more just and caring worlds into being in the here and now. The library is not a site of formalised care provisioning, but rather an ordinary space (Morse & Munro, 2018) in the city where through the affective orientation and competence of people involved at the library at particular moments, library volunteers can be enrolled in caring practice alongside non-human others such as books, lounges and artwork.
Photo 1. No ordinary chair. (Source: Williams, 2018b).
…a lending library, a reference library and an information exchange. The Women's Library will house print and non-print material for and about women, in particular lesbians and feminist women…The Women's Library will be a safe and supportive space where Lesbians and Women can relax, read, study and exchange information. The Women's Library will be a resource particularly for students enrolled in courses addressing the status of lesbians and Women, and research workers… (The Women's Library, 2003). The library holds a unique collection of fiction and non-fiction texts by women authors including rare lesbian and feminist texts that are a vital part of how care is practiced everyday through the library. I spent 13 months volunteering at the Women's Library fortnightly during which time I recorded my observations of everyday practice in a field diary and conducting seven interviews with volunteers. The library is comprised of books, couches, magazines, journals, chairs, brochures, shelves, artwork and other materials that may be enrolled in responsive practices of care. This chair was part of how care was manifest at the library. It was positioned next to a collection of books about survival from abuse, incest, domestic violence and some brochures that have contact information on counselling services and resources on where to access support. Jennifer (a pseudonym) recognised that there was a need for people to have privacy whilst reading the books and resources if they desired it. As a volunteer she cared about the people who may come into the library and their need to access resources to help them heal from trauma. She recognised that the library
3. The Women's Library: care-full everyday urban practices In this section I firstly situate how a feminist ethics of care can be manifest as a relational ethics grounded in practice. Secondly, I discuss how a feminist ethics of care can be seen in the work done to maintain and continue and, finally, repair our worlds. The Women's Library is a community organisation in Newtown, a suburb of Sydney's Inner West. Newtown is a geographically distinctive suburb as it is a key home to Sydney's LBTQIA community and is an area that has been undergoing gentrification for some time (see Fasche, 2006 for example). As part of this research project I sought to tell stories of the city that made visible the sites where people were attempting to respond to injustices and neglect and grow more caring and just worlds in the here and now (see Williams, 2018b). To do so I adopted a politics of possibility (GibsonGraham, 2006): a hopeful politics attuned to progressive worlds and oriented towards the practice of amplifying and making these worlds visible. At the Women's Library collective responsibility to care for other women both known and unknown can be enacted through everyday practices of maintenance and repair. Women's library can be approached as a critically exclusive safe space in the city (Williams, 2018b). The acts of care practiced through and within the library do not remain contained in the physical space of the library, as they can permeate throughout the broader city, re-shaping and re-fashioning the urban as a care-full place.
space is really important… this came from one of the reasons why I set up the little back area with a chair… so people could access stuff that they might not want to sit on the lounge and read… The placement of important phone numbers alongside this chair was intentional and reveals how an ethics of care is practiced in a way that is responsive to the context dependent needs of particular others (Lawson, 2007, p. 3; Williams, 2017a). Not all women would experience or notice the chair as caring as care is diversely experienced and expressed. Yet, in paying attention to this act of care and the intention behind it, we can see how it makes visible the significant issue of gender-based violence in our worlds which make a women's only safe space necessary, the chair necessary, the books and resources necessary and the potential need for privacy necessary due to the problematic nature of silence and shame. As Barnes, et al. (2015a, p. 241) explains, "the face-to-face, everyday experience of giving and receiving care is often the starting point for understanding injustices experienced by those in need of care". As an ‘affective orientation’, ‘material practice’
3.1. Care as a grounded and everyday practice There was a chair that sat at the back of the Women's Library in Newtown pictured in Photo 1. This chair was more than just somewhere to sit and this is no ordinary library. The Women's Library opened in 1992 with, as explained in the constitution, the aim of comprising: 3
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practices of care, making the possibility for repair and transformation.
and movement towards another, care comes into being through these intentional and grounded practices in the everyday sites of the city such as in this library in very context-dependent ways (Conradson, 2011). Care is a grounded practice than maintains and continues life.
3.3. Repairing our urban worlds: within and beyond the library Whilst repair is often discussed in terms of repairing and maintaining infrastructures or technology (Denis & Pontille, 2015; Puig De La Bellacasa, 2017), I approach it also as a way that caring practice is enacted as intentional practices of care that redress specific forms of injustice in an attempt to heal worlds. At particular moments, the Women's Library volunteers cared about and for the various women who came into the library in an attempt to offer ways in which they might access the tools needed to repair or access support to begin the journey of acknowledging and healing from experiences of injustice. For example, repair occurred in multiple ways through the library from the provision of an ordinary chair, books and resources, to the provision of a safe space for women of diverse sexualities to be, or to sit and breastfeed or express milk for their babies. It occurred through enabling women access to books written by and for women as Jennifer explained:
3.2. Maintaining and continuing the library Responsibility for others and a recognition of our collective interdependence was manifest in the care of volunteers who maintained and continued the library. At the time of the research in 2009–2010, the library was run by approximately 27 volunteers who diversely practiced caring for, caring about, care-giving and care-receiving in a context that clearly reflected a politics of caring with: a form of democratic caring whereby volunteers collectively care for each other, the library, and other women who may occupy the library (Tronto, 2013). Practices that continue and maintain our worlds are care work: they are the material and social practices that reproduce the library as a space of care (Conradson, 2011). On a day-to-day basis the types of maintenance tasks performed by volunteers did not vary greatly, however they could be responsive to particular needs. These everyday maintenance practices or, ‘implicit activisms’ (Horton & Kraftl, 2009) could be hard work; they could be joyful, boring or mundane. They included sorting mail; cleaning; chatting and listening to members and volunteers; sorting and accessioning books; counting money; printing; organising events; emailing; making tea; and selling second hand books. It is these everyday practices that contributed to the reproduction of the library as a space of care (Williams, 2018b). The library became a space of care or safe haven where people could drop in and be and groups could use in the city (Power & Bartlett, 2018; Tronto, 1993). Whilst not necessarily running the groups, those that meet at the library enable people to build connections and in that sense, grow other spaces of care. Jennifer explains that:
when someone comes in here and say walks up the back and realises that we've got a whole lot of books about child sexual assault, we've got a whole lot of books about sexuality, we've got a whole lot of books by women authors … one of the nice experiences I've had is with a young Arabic woman who volunteered with us for a while and I was telling her that all the books were by women and she said ‘do you know that when I was at uni in Pakistan, I said I wanted to write a book and my teacher said to me ‘women don't write books’, and she said ‘and now I'm standing here and all these books are by women’. Importantly the care enacted here had to be received as caring by those in need of care. The library was not always experienced as caring, the volunteers were not always caring and caring practice was at time inhibited by exhaustion, fatigue and bodily frailty. Care is both resilient and fragile but care has the potential to emerge and come into being through the practices of volunteers at particular moments. The library became a space of care through the affective orientation of other members and volunteers expressed through interpersonal relationships. For example Kim experienced the library as caring when people were supportive of her at a difficult point on her life journey:
There's the Open House, which is a lesbian support group, there's cancer support for lesbians. There have been in the past and probably will be again other types of women's support groups, that meet here and continue to meet. We've run a depression group for women with depression … and we've run writing and art groups which essentially all of those work towards, I suppose increasing women's sense of their own value … which is the core of, for me it's the core of social justice. It's valuing people.
… when I left my husband … I was looking for a connecting point and I was coming out. And I saw the library advertised somewhere and I came along… when I first came here, I was pretty messy and the women were very kind and supportive … And that seems to be a pattern for a lot of the people who've come here.
Jennifer sees valuing people as a core way that social justice is practiced and the library provides a location for this type of connection to take place. There are a number of groups run for women connected to the library and beyond (see Fig. 1). For example, Oestrogen Does not Rot Your Keyboard (ODRYK) was a group run by one of the long-term library members who is a skilled IT professional. This group aimed to skill up women in the library community and create a space for colearning and knowledge sharing on computer skills. The practices of volunteers that maintain and continue the library facilitate various
Her involvement enabled Kim to connect with other lesbian women, many of whom provided her with an inclusive support network. Her experience of the practices of care with and through the library, transformed it into a space of care at a particular moment when people
Fig. 1. Groups at the Women's Library in 2009–2010. (Source: The Women's Library, 2009) 4
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neglect visible can be vital to the work of making more just and caring cities. In this section I reflect upon the potential of paying attention to/ with care for those of us interested in facilitating the emergence of carefully just cities in the here and now. To do so I offer three areas of research focus for paying attention to/with care in the urban. Firstly, there is potential in a continued focus on understanding how a feminist ethics of care is or could be practiced through maintenance and repair in the city. Through a focus on maintenance and repair a feminist ethics of care epistemologically offers a way for us to recognise how ‘implicit’ (Horton & Kraftl, 2009) or ‘quiet’ everyday activisms are manifest in everyday practices, and offers the potential to uncover how more caring worlds are being brought into being in the here and now at particular grounded moments. As shown in the example of the Women's Library, paying attention to maintenance and repair can make caring practices visible and reveal the need for care, the important role it plays in our worlds and the ways it is practiced (Puig De La Bellacasa, 2017, p. 11; Tronto, 1993). In the everyday sites of the city we can also develop an understanding of the ways everyday justice activism is manifest through hard, messy, boring, banal and dirty practices of care and justice (Horton & Kraftl, 2009) that respond to the lived experiences and violent expressions of injustice, neglect and oppression (Williams, 2016, 2017a, 2018). The Women's Library example revealed how generative a focus on acts of maintenance and repair can be for understanding the everyday practices that are constituting spaces of care in the city that respond to injustice and neglect. Making visible other ways of doing, being and thinking urban life that are viable alternatives in the here and now can powerfully contribute to this work of understanding how radically caring subjectivities are fostered and grown. Secondly, paying attention to/with care may mean continuing to understand our worlds through a relational social ontology which has implications for our collective sense of responsibility to human and non-human others, planet, animals and materials in the context of a climate changing world. It may mean continuing to value and demonstrate the value an ethics of care as guiding ethics for urban theory as they enable us to emphasise both "collective and individual responsibilities for care" (Barnes et al., 2015c, p. 6). The Women's Library example revealed the ways in which care is emergent towards others known and unknown at particular moments manifesting within and beyond the library. Scholars mobilising a feminist ethics of care can potentially learn from other actually existing relational ontologies beyond the Global North (Raghuram, 2016), such as indigenous ontologies seen as care for country (Ngurra et al., 2019), in order to further inform urban theory and our understanding of the work that needs to be done in the everyday sites of cities to maintain and continue more caring and just worlds. These worlds need to be aware of the role of both the human and non-human in caring so that "… humans remember that places also care, and care-full relationships honour and assert Country's agencies" (Ngurra et al., 2019, p. 12). Care-thinking can learn much from the ways in which care has and continues to be practiced. Thirdly, paying attention to/with care may mean exposing injustices and neglect, proposing solutions and amplifying alternatives that exist and that are realisable in the here and now (Iveson, 2010). The need for a chair situated in a private place in a women's library points to larger systematic issues of power, injustice, inequality and violence that permeate our worlds. Urban theory has a long history of engaging with issues of injustice and inequality (Fincher & Iveson, 2012). Inequalities are often hidden surreptitiously due to their complexity. This work means making visible contextually-dependent emergences of inequalities and injustices in the city that are both enduring and temporal and highlighting how a feminist ethics of care could work through policy and practice to address these issues. As Power & Bergen, 2019 note, care is resilient in the face of diverse neoliberalisms. Neoliberalisms problematically place the responsibility for taking care of others on individuals and families which is an ideology that needs to be transformed in order for governments and corporations to be held responsible to care for people, animals and
cared for each other or were attentive to their needs (Conradson, 2003). These spaces of care could extend beyond the physical bounds of the library. The library became caring when that care was not just contained within its walls, but permeated out and transformed the wider city. The library was a site of many official and spontaneous ongoing conversations about feminism and was a site of feminist and Lesbian activism: it held stalls at International Women's Day and Reclaim the Night, encouraged women artists to exhibit on its walls, held an exhibition in 2009 called ‘Silent no more’ which enabled women to make visible their stories of abuse similar to the #metoo movement to occur 10 years later, and actively preserved the history of the Australian Feminist Movement in the form of posters, books, art and journals. The library is symbolically and materially connected to the feminist movement and some volunteers who care about the feminist or lesbian rights movements saw their roles as volunteers at the library as also actively contributing to growing sites of both implicit everyday activisms and more formal forms of action. Rachel describes how by volunteering at the library, she has: a feeling that I'm actually contributing to, to keeping the library open. And that I'm, in some, though a very small way you know contributing to … the local women … and because it's lesbian, transgender too, all of though sort of groups as well, because it's a safe place. So yeah, that's basically what I feel that I get out of it. But I also feel that I get a lot more out of it from sometimes from the interaction with people… The library is growing other more caring worlds whilst also challenging the problematic ways present injustices are manifest. By sharing these stories of how care was diversely practiced in incomplete, messy and ongoing ways at the library, I have been bringing these practices of care into view, politicising them, as practices to be valued as playing a role in maintaining, continuing, repairing and transforming our urban worlds. Paying attention to care in this way reveals how care is already practiced in the ordinary spaces of the city and the potential for facilitating caring practices in other sites. I now turn to reflect upon the possibilities of further research that might pay attention to/with care in our cities in order to advocate for the generative potential of a feminist ethics of care. 4. Paying attention to/with care in our cities A feminist ethics of care could radically alter our cities if it guided how cities were lived, constituted and experienced as it asks us to "raise crucial questions of [caring] practice" (Lawson, 2009, p. 211). The difficult work of a responsive, consensual, loving care that heals bodies and worlds is vital to the work of doing justice in the city. This work may involve re-working problematic notions of care and care-giving and thus reinforce our collective interdependence; and to continue to value caring practices in a way that challenges the inequalities that are part of who does the work of care and who does not (Cox, 2010). As Puig De La Bellacasa (2017, p. 56) argues, in the world as we know it, paying attention to care as a necessary doing still directs attention to neglected things and devalued doings that are accomplished in every context by the most marginalized – not necessarily women – and to the logics of domination that are reproduced or intensified in the name of care (Puig De La Bellacasa, 2017, p. 56). Paying attention to the role of care in our cities means continuing to broaden our understanding of the politics surrounding and geographies shaping how care is practiced in order to make visible the erasures, silences and ‘invisible labours of care’ (Puig De La Bellacasa, 2017, p. 57). Many of the places where care is needed are purposively and politically hidden from view so that collectively we do not care or are not given the opportunity to care. Making these places of silence and 5
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just cities; emphasise our collective inter-dependence and responsibility for one another; and reveal silences, injustices and neglect in a way that provokes action. The work of a feminist ethics of care is never done.
planet (Tronto, 2017). It is not enough to just make the injustices that our worlds suffer under and through visible. Rather, researchers might also continue to work with and alongside peoples and groups through participatory action research and activist research to bring more caring worlds into being through grounded engagements in sites where care needs to be transformed or facilitate transformation. It may therefore mean engaging in research that "step[s] beyond critique into action" (Conradson, 2011, p. 465) to directly shape urban futures through policy interventions, activism and other urban transformations forged through unlikely alliances.
Funding The PhD research project on which the case study field work was based was funded through an Australian Post Graduate Award completed through the University of Newcastle, Australia. Declaration of competing interest
5. Concluding remarks None. To conclude I reiterate the possibility of staying with the trouble of care and the potential of engaging with a feminist ethics of care as a way to resist and challenge the dominance of neoliberalisms. Caring practice is part of our broken and beautiful urban worlds, and the practice of care is crucial for the continuation of life (Lawson, 2007; Milligan & Wiles, 2010; Samanani, 2017). In a time where neoliberal understandings of who is responsible to and for care is dominant there is a continued need to pay attention to/with care and the politics of how care is being provisioned by governments and business. A political focus on a feminist ethics of care assists us in recognising the "inequalities of power and privilege" (Tronto, 1993, p. 101) that govern who does the work of care, who does not, who receives adequate care, who outsources care, who can care and whose opportunity to care is limited. Our cities need the framing of a feminist ethics of care to help us collectively think through ways to challenge these inequalities and find ways to collectively shape diverse cultures where caring is valued, competently practiced and fairly distributed. As evidenced in the case study, care can be woven through everyday practices and spaces in the city, maintaining, continuing and repairing our worlds within and beyond particular sites in the city at particular moments. There is much to be learnt through an engagement with these spaces, including focusing on how care might be further enabled and facilitated particularly in contexts where it is constrained. Paying attention to the mundane sites where care is practiced beyond the home can provide important insights for those concerned with a feminist ethics of care which has most often focused on institutional sites of care provisioning and the home as a container of care (Power & Williams, in press). There are many more ordinary sites in cities where people practice care and seek to bring more just worlds into being that could be the subject of further research and analysis. There are also many ordinary sites where caring capacity is limited and curtailed due to insufficient support and neglect that are potential spaces of caring in cities in need of care. Further documenting how people are diversely enacting a feminist ethics of care would generate new understandings of the possibility of care to transform the cities, regions, homes, institutions, policies and practice. I acknowledge that this paper has been written to specifically draw out caring practices and therefore does not focus upon their absence at the Women's Library which is a limitation. As an early career academic who experienced the precarity of academic work post PhD and whose research capacity was constrained by other caring responsibilities, I have drawn upon an example from fieldwork carried out a decade ago. The snapshot of caring practice provided is but one moment in time that can still be learnt from to understand the generative possibility of a focus on care. The Women's Library today remains active as space with the possibility for and to care in the city as do other ordinary sites where people collectively work together to address injustices and celebrate creativity. A feminist ethics of care is an everyday, grounded and transformative ethics with the potential to reorient urban theory to ask key questions about care and responsibility, thus making more care-full cities possible. Paying attention to/with care may assist us in understanding the role of maintenance and repair in creating more caring and
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