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Through exploring the spatial conditions and materializations of caring practices and relations, this chapter aims at developing an urban(ized) understanding of care. It thereby seeks to interweave care debates into conceptual debates in urban studies and planning theory. The chapter discusses the tension between fields of care and ‘uncare’ as an analytical lens to situate care debates—and the ambivalences unfolding around them—within broader theoretical debates on cities, urbanization, and urban life. By taking a spatial perspective and by fostering an understanding of care geographies, three perspectives are developed: 1) How the scale of analysis and research in urban theory contributes to a wider understanding of the changing landscape of care; 2) how moments of presence and of encounters in public space allow both the acknowledgment and alteration of caring infrastructures; and 3) how care and crisis are fundamentally linked, and how care perspectives bear a potential to move analytical prisms beyond crisis-centered narratives.

In this symposium, we explore how urban citizenship is about expressing, if not producing, difference, and how fragmentation of claims affects urban citizenship and right to the city movements with their universal, all-inclusive ideals. Investigating social movements, political participation and conflicting diversities in public space in Tel Aviv and Berlin, we see a trend towards a diversification of interests, a weakening of movements, and even a competition over rights and resources rather than a development of mutual support and solidarities among various groups on the pathway to a livable city. This tension, we argue, deserves attention. Radical urban scholarship and politics need to better understand the historical and place-specific contexts that structure the formation of citizenship claims and the courses that citizenship struggles take. Celebrations of urban citizenship as a more contextualized, community oriented, and bottom-up framework (in comparison to national citizenship) should therefore be complemented by a careful investigation of their fragmented and fragmenting practices.

Based on a comparison of Berlin and Tel Aviv, this article investigates the ways in which ensembles of participatory instruments mediate between neoliberal urban regimes and political agency shaping differentially the meaning of participation and the types of claims that can be advanced. The article gives an overview of the recent history of both cities through the lens of participatory politics. Two in-depth case studies further examine the relationship between participatory politics and claim making in each setting: the recent conflict over a social center in the district of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg in Berlin and the Levinsky tent city of 2011 in Tel Aviv. In the concluding section, the article suggests that, rather than assuming that participatory tools either co-opt movements or can be appropriated by them, we need to rethink the relationship between participatory tools, rights and recognition, and ask how participatory structures and political agency constitute each other in interwoven dynamics.

The article reviews the book "Remaking Urban Citizenship. Organizations, Institutions, and the Right to the City," edited by Michael Peter Smith and Michael McQuarrie.