The Urban Infrastructure of Care: Planning for Equitable Social Reproduction
Name
The Urban Infrastructure of Care.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
927.9 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
95de8311bc66e6b3b30e680344cbf79a
Author(s)
Binet, Andrew
Houston-Read, Rebecca
Gavin, Vedette
Baty, Carl
Abreu, Dina
Genty, Josée
Tulloch, Andrea
Reid, Azan
Arcaya, Mariana
Date Issued
September 12, 2022
Journal
Journal of the American Planning Association
Publisher
Informa UK Limited
Citation
Binet, A., Houston-Read, R., Gavin, V., Baty, C., Abreu, D., Genty, J., … Arcaya, M. (2022). The Urban Infrastructure of Care: Planning for Equitable Social Reproduction. Journal of the American Planning Association, 89(3), 282–294.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Problem, research strategy and findings
Around the world, people’s life-sustaining capacities for caring for one another are overextended in unequal and unsustainable ways, with major implications for gender, racial, and health equity in cities. Here we explore how care work depends on the urban environment and how planning can enhance the social and material conditions for caregiving in cities. We analyzed semistructured interviews with family caregivers across the Boston (MA) metropolitan area conducted as part of a participatory action research study. We found that caregivers’ day-to-day efforts to meet the needs of their dependents relied on the availability and adequacy of specific components of the urban environment, which we argue comprise an urban infrastructure of care. When this infrastructure is inadequate or incomplete in a caregiver’s context, they must work harder to ensure satisfactory background conditions for caregiving. By shaping the extent and nature of this infrastructural labor, the urban environment influences what the work of care involves, how difficult and taxing this work is, and the sociospatial distribution of the burden of this labor.
Takeaway for practice
Planning for care is a necessary element of building equitable, livable, healthy, and just cities. We offer an empirically grounded framework for making matters of care visible and valued in planning via an infrastructural approach that treats the urban environment as a social and material technology that makes care possible. We recommend strategies for integrating care as an outcome of concern into planning decisions and practices and for making coordinated investments in urban infrastructures of care that seek to more equitably distribute resources for and burdens of care in cities.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Urban Studies and Planning
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1080/01944363.2022.2099955
