The Urban Infrastructure of Care: Planning for Equitable Social Reproduction

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.