As urbanization accelerates globally, cities have become the main scenes and sites of the crisis of social reproduction- a crisis rooted in the erosion of both the ecological and social reproductive capacities that sustain life. A feminist urban theory perspective highlights that urban is not merely a locus where the social reproduction crisis unfolds but also dynamic spatial process where struggles over public and commons interests are renegotiated and reformulated as a result of reimagining the relationship between capitalism and (re)production of social inequalities.

A social reproduction perspective helps us understand the centrality of life-making activities and infrastructures for sustaining economic production. As theorists shaping the Early Social Reproduction Approach argue, social reproduction is not external to economic production; rather, it produces the very conditions and labor force that make production possible. From this perspective, homes, childcare and eldercare facilities, and public spaces—where care relationships are formed and enacted—constitute the urban as a process of social reproduction. These “spaces of care,” in turn, shape broader urban inequalities.

Care as labour, activity and more-than-human relations

There are multiple conceptual approaches to care. Feminist political theorist Joan Tronto defines care as activities that maintain, contain, repair our world to live in it as well as possible. Barbara Laslett and Johanna Brenner, from a sociological perspective, emphasize care as the work that maintains existing life and enables the reproduction of future generations. Complementing this human-focused approach, a feminist political ecology lens highlights care’s ecological dimensions, emphasizing the dependencies between social and ecological capacities. As Stefania Barca argues, care is not only the labour of making non-human nature fit for human reproduction but also  the work of protecting it from exploitation and securing conditions for its own regeneration.

Bringing these three approaches together, I propose a resource-based approach to care- one that acknowledges care as both labour and infrastructure, shaped by material conditions and dependency on the ecological conditions. While work/labour dimensions of care are fundamental for the performance and the delivery of care and formation of caring relationships, the spatial context and material conditions determine the care ontologically. In the context of the urban, these material conditions include dwelling, access to food, water and energy, and public space, as well as the time that is negotiated on a daily basis between the income generating labour and unpaid care work that sustains life particularly for children, elderly, and the sick. This constant negotiation between paid and unpaid work at the individual, household and community-level is a key aspect defining the conditions of care in urban context, also in connection with public provisioning of the material conditions for care.

From this perspective, care can be understood as a resource—one that is systematically extracted from communities through processes of commodification, precarization of care labor, and increasing dependence on market-based services. The extent to which public authorities support and facilitate caring capacities determine degree of privatization of care, either as the responsibility or the burden of the individual or a market-based service to be purchased. In other words, the resourcialization of care epitomizes the “crisis of care” manifesting through extraction of social capacities, commodification of labour as means of survival in the urban, and privatization of care as a market commodity under the pressure of financialization of life’s basic necessities.

New Municipalisms as a Resource Governance System for Care?

Approaching care as a resource that has material and immaterial dimensions opens up new conceptual and political possibilities for institutional transformations to govern resource of care as a commons: Collectively, inclusively, needs-based, and sustainably.

This brings us to new/radical municipalism, political experiences and experiments of transforming local governance to challenge the market-driven recentralization of power in allocation and provision of urban resources. Rooted in historical municipalist traditions, contemporary radical municipalism has been shaped by movements like the Barcelona en Comú platform in Spain, which emerged after the 2008 financial crisis, and other similar initiatives that attempt to reclaim the city from corporate and state-led privatization. These movements often advocate for and experiment with participatory democracy, ecological sustainability, and public or cooperative control over essential services such as housing, childcare, and public transport.

Despite roughly a decade of political momentum, new municipalist movements face structural challenges and contradictions in implementing transformative policies within existing institutional, political and economic structures. Scholars describe this as the “crisis of new municipalism” to underline key tensions including institutional constraints setting back transformative goals, tensions between grassroots movements and institutionalization within municipal organization, fiscal dependence on state and markets, and challenges of scaling up given the limits of localism and remaining fragmented without broader institutional support. These limitations reveal that while new municipalism creates openings for democratic control of urban resources, it does not inherently guarantee a structural shift away from the enclosure of care through commodification and marketization.

Care-full Municipalisms to Mitigate the Crises of Care and New Municipalism

I propose “Care-full Municipalisms” as a theoretical framework and as a policy vision to address both the crisis of new municipalism given the limitations it entail and the crisis of care that deepens without interventions to collectivize care as a resource.

Care-full Municipalisms has double meaning. First is reclaiming care as a commons. This involves putting care back into communities and to the core of municipal functions and decommodifying care by restoring it as a collective, public responsibility rather than an individual burden. It means putting care back into the hands of communities and municipal governance structures to respond the structural extraction of caring capacities. Second, it is an agenda for adopting care as a methodology for governance, a guiding principle for governance itself to avoid paternalistic and market-driven models of care provisions and embracing feminist, collective, and solidarity-based approaches to urban policy.

These two dimensions are complementary. Reclaiming care as a commons addresses the structural extraction of care labor and resources, while care as a governance methodology ensures that municipalist approaches avoid reinforcing patriarchal and exclusionary models of care provision. Inspired by Joan Tronto’s concept of “caring with”, Care-full Municipalisms envisions a democratic, collective, and inclusive approach to the governance of care. By integrating care into the core of urban politics—not just as an economic necessity but as a political and ethical commitment—municipalism can offer a transformative pathway to mitigate both crises.

The pic on the cover and the blog post are by Deniz Ay, University of Bern, Institute of Geography

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.