Care, Uncare, and the City

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.