Caring With/In Place: Future‐Oriented Practices of Care in Local Initiatives in Gothenburg, Sweden

Drawing on relational perspectives of care and understandings of place as an assemblage, we discuss how engagements in local initiatives can be understood as practices of care. We focus on two local initiatives in Gothenburg, Sweden—an allotment garden and a neighbourhood house. The empirical material used here forms part of a study focusing on environmental and material legacy‐making, where 35 persons living in and around Gothenburg were interviewed. In this article, we focus on two participants whose engagements went beyond minimising their environmental traces to actively contributing to shaping specific places in the city. We develop the idea of caring with/in place to illuminate the context‐specific and situated nature of care. By referring to place as assemblage, we approach places as groupings of various heterogenous elements constantly in the process of being assembled and reassembled. Assemblages are thus emergent and made up of various interdependent living and non‐living beings contributing to shaping future trajectories. Importantly, place as assemblage foregrounds more‐than‐human interdependencies, where no actor is alone in control of realities coming into being. Nevertheless, we show how (human) participants involved contribute to shaping the initiatives by caring with/in specific places. Taking a constructivist grounded theory approach that combines inductive and abductive techniques of data analysis, we argue that the research participants' practices of caring with/in place can be understood as future‐oriented legacy‐making practices. Such practices have the potential to foster attentiveness towards other‐than‐humans, while contributing to maintaining and shaping the future of specific places.