Cities of care? Towards more ‘scalar-attuned’ perspectives in urban care research
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 24212866 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Krisztina Varró (0000-0002-8735-2548, Utrecht University, the Netherlands), Bárbara Oliveira Soares (0009-0004-7734-1222, Utrecht University, the Netherlands) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Publication date | 2026-09-28 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Urban Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0042-0980 • E-ISSN: 1360-063X |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/00420980261486360 |
| OpenAlex | W7214681616 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 44 |
The expanding scholarship on ‘caring’ or ‘care-full’ cities has usefully reconceptualised cities as spaces of care and, by exposing real-world local initiatives, compellingly argued in favour centring care in urban governance and planning. Arguably, however, the insufficiently nuanced understanding and use of the concept of scale has weakened the analytical grip of this body of work on how and which practices and relations of care emerge, with which impact and for whom. Relatedly, the subtle but persisting tendency to foreground the urban as the primary site of caring has undercut the possibility to problematise and repoliticise care as a multiscalar field of praxis and intervention. This intervention develops a sympathetic critique of research on urban care, calling for more ‘scalar-attuned’ perspectives that explicitly and reflexively engage with the concept of scale. To illustrate the relevance of our argument, we call for the (re)insertion of the national scale into scholarship on urban caring and highlight three intertwined modalities in which the national co-constitutes care in the city. We do so not to demand top-down state intervention to care, but to invite scholars working on urban caring to consider, discuss and contest the full spectrum of scales-as-relations that constitute the practices and politics of (un)caring.
multiscalarity · national scale · politics of care · scale · urban governance · urban health services · Urban planning · Feminism, Gender, and Intersectionality · Urban and sociocultural dynamics · Urban Planning and Governance
Building an infrastructure for everyday lives
Reclaiming the City Through Care
The Urban Infrastructure of Care
Reflecting on regendering care at different scales
No Commons Without Micropolitics. Learning with Feminist and Municipalist Movements in Spain
Care policies in practice
Making the state care
Rationales of Care in Contemporary Welfare States
Who Does Bogotá “Care” for? Care Blocks, Care Workers and the Sustainable Development Goals
Avoiding the Local Trap
Rural geography I
Beyond rescaling
Scale and the limitations of ontological debate
Cities of care
Rethinking care as alternate infrastructure
Care‐full Justice in the City
The caring city? A critical reflection on Barcelona’s municipal experiments in care and the commons
Moving nurses to cities
Pro scale
Vagabond Capitalism and the Necessity of Social Reproduction
Care as urban policy domain
Confronting capital’s care fix
Against the local trap
Feminist everyday political economy
Social reproduction and capitalist production
Reconstructing scale
Wounded cities
Social infrastructure and the public life of cities
Cities of care
Reconfiguring the breastfeeding body in urban public spaces
The Scale Politics of Spaliality
Critical Urban Pedagogy
The Political Place of Locality Studies
Behind the Locality Debate
The Care Agenda in Latin America
Situated Knowledges
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |