Collective Resources of Social Reproduction and Care? Potentialities and Limitations of Urban Initiatives of Commensality

Bibliographic Data

ID22018457
AuthorsAnna Verwey (0009-0009-3848-8981, Goethe University Frankfurt), Rivka Saltiel (0000-0001-6440-8732, University of Graz)
Year2025
Volume10
Publication date2025-09-10
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueUrban Planning (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2183-7635 • E-ISSN: 2183-7635
PublisherCogitatio (PUBLISHER • PT)
DOI10.17645/up.9913
OpenAlexW4414090167
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited55

Urban initiatives of commensality (UICs) form micro‐public spaces where people meet, cook together, and share a meal. UICs thereby address both social needs for encounter, care, and community as well as material needs for (free) food. As lived examples of caring‐with, UICs resist neoliberal individualisation, privatisation, and marketisation and experiment with alternative ways of being and relating in common. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a neighbourhood centre in the city of Graz, Austria, this article explores the practices and social relations of a weekly communal lunch and asks about the potentialities and limitations of UICs as collective resources of social reproduction and care in the city. The analysis is guided by feminist care ethics and social reproduction theory and emphasises, first, the organisational structure and the central role of the employees as curators of this commensal context, second, the caring‐with relations that are established by being and doing in common, and, third, the ambiguous socio‐spatial divisions of labour, both within the UIC and beyond. This contribution extends existing debates of commensality with a feminist analysis of micro‐public curated commensal contexts

Ethnography · Reproduction · Social relation · Social reproduction · Culinary Culture and Tourism · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Rural development and sustainability

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Open DOIOpen Access