Care as urban policy domain

Framing Bogota's District Care System

Bibliographic Data

ID6419397
AuthorsCatalina Ortiz (0000-0001-5000-7428, University College London, corresponding author), Isabel Duque Franco (0000-0003-0180-9517, Universidad Nacional de Colombia)
Year2025
Volume169
Pages106572-106572
Publication date2025-10-11
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueCities (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0264-2751 • E-ISSN: 1873-6084
PublisherElsevier BV (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1016/j.cities.2025.106572
OpenAlexW4415056418
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited40

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, debates around care have gained unprecedented visibility in both scholarship and policy. This article argues that care is an emergent and contested urban policy domain—through which cities negotiate responsibilities, reshape spatial governance, and reconfigure institutional arrangements. Latin America has long been a site of feminist theorisation and urban policy innovation, yet the incorporation of care into urban governance remains under-theorised in spatial and institutional terms. We address this gap by analysing Bogotá's District Care System (SIDICU), a pioneering initiative launched during the pandemic that embeds care into the city's planning and service infrastructure. We locate Bogotá's experience within Colombia's decentralised planning model and its trajectory of urban policy experimentation, examining how SIDICU emerged from the convergence of feminist mobilisation, mayoral political will, and the policy opportunity created by the pandemic. Drawing on document analysis, interviews, and field observation conducted between 2022 and 2024, we propose an analytical framework linking relational contexts, institutional design, and spatial strategy to theorise care as a spatialised and politically generative urban policy domain. We argue that SIDICU enacts a territorial politics of care that transforms state presence, reframes infrastructure as reproductive, and inserts care into the urban planning apparatus. At the same time, it reveals tensions between the emancipatory aspirations of feminist actors and the rationalities of state-led policy delivery, as well as the fragility of care initiatives in changing political contexts. The article contributes to debates on feminist urbanism, policy mobility, and the transformation of urban governance in Latin America and beyond. • Care is theorised as an emergent urban policy domain. • Bogotá's District Care System is a municipal experiment in feminist governance. • Care is unstable, cross-cutting, and negotiated across actors, sectors, and spaces. • Embedding care in urban governance opens possibilities but risks depoliticisation.

Corporate governance · Framing (construction) · Historical institutionalism · Negotiation · Politics · Public policy · Scholarship · Urban planning · Healthcare innovation and challenges · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism