Everyday politics against spatial injustice: an ethnographic approach to women's resistance in a southern European urban periphery

Over the last decades, critical urban scholarship has shown that spatial injustice is not an accidental feature of urban life but the outcome of historically situated power relations embedded in planning, housing policies and capitalist accumulation. Yet these debates have often privileged formal politics and visible mobilisation, sidelining the mundane practices through which inequality is lived, negotiated and contested in everyday life. This article addresses that blind spot by bringing feminist theories of care and social reproduction into dialogue with spatial justice. Drawing on long-term feminist ethnographic research in a working-class neighbourhood in the northern periphery of Granada (southern Spain), the article examines how women collectivise care and organise mutual support in a context marked by segregation, infrastructural neglect and territorial stigma. Rather than treating care as a merely social or adaptive response to deprivation, the analysis conceptualises it as a political and spatial practice that reconfigures the conditions of urban life.Empirically, the article traces a repertoire of everyday urban politics: the defence and regulation of shared spaces, neighbourhood-based infrastructures of care, and the scaling up of care networks into institutional claims-making and disruptive collective action. The findings challenge androcentric definitions of politics and argue that rethinking spatial justice requires recognising care-based practices as central to the right to the city.