(Un)care practices and policies in urban austerity

Editors: Juliet Davis (Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University), Federica Gatta (Laboratoire PACTE, Université Grenoble Alpes), Neil Turnbull (Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University), Ianira Vassallo (DIST, Politecnico di Torino)

Juliet Davis (Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University), Federica Gatta (Laboratoire PACTE, Université Grenoble Alpes), Neil Turnbull (Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University), Ianira Vassallo (DIST, Politecnico di Torino) are guest editors of City, Culture and Society

The call for paper is now open at:

City, Culture and Society

Special Issue Information:
This special issue seeks to contribute to the care debate by focusing on the practices, policies, and associated relations that shape care through the resources, transformations and spatial/material qualities of urban environments in contexts of neoliberalism.
The publication will host theoretically informed, empirically grounded contributions from academics and practitioners. Across the set of papers, it will acknowledge and reveal the ambiguities of care in the afterlife of austerity (Turnbull, 2023). It will question the experimentation of ‘commons-state-institutions’ (Bianchi, 2023), the emergence of shadow care infrastructures (Power et al. 2022) and the alternatives to market logic in urban development. It will reveal care practices and relations as the outcomes of policies that individualise, co-opt, commercialise, and attest in various ways to an austere waning of the state. Building on the notion of care as a hopeful concept, it will also highlight the potential of the city as a commons, offering alternatives to the “carelessness” or “uncare” that arise in neoliberal contexts (Tronto 2017, Fraser, 2017). Finally, it will reveal care as not only mediated by but enacted through spaces, materialities and transformations of the urban environment.
Overall, therefore, the special issue will offer both new lenses on and understandings of the contexts, contingencies, challenges, and promise of care in cities.

Submission deadline: 03 June 2025