Analyzing the city of care and uncare - Ethics of care, care labor and caring relations

Research and activism at the intersection between care debates and urban studies has gained significant attention in recent years; and cities worldwide have begun to incorporate ideas and vocabularies from care research into policy and planning agendas, giving them greater visibility. These developments are based on different theoretical traditions and intellectual debates. This paper offers a differentiated introduction to key analytical frameworks within the discourse on “caring cities” and situates them in relation to urban sociology. It discusses three key perspectives: (1) care ethics, which advances a relational understanding of society and foregrounds practices of interdependence and solidarity; (2) care work, which examines inequal and gendered roles in the social reproduction of the city; and (3) caring relations, which highlights different qualities and the embodied dimensions of urban coexistence. Situated within the context of various interdependent crises of urbanization, it is argued that bringing these perspectives into dialog enables a partially open yet systematic approach to researching both care and uncare in the city. In doing so, the paper offers an analytical and normative vocabulary for critically engaging with the intersecting crisis of democracy, of social reproduction and of the body.