Care and the City: Encounters with Urban Studies

Care and the City is a cross-disciplinary collection of chapters examining urban social spaces, in which caring and uncaring practices intersect and shape people’s everyday lives. While asking how care and uncare are embedded in the urban condition, the book focuses on inequalities in caring relations and the ways they are acknowledged, reproduced, and overcome in various spaces, discourses, and practices.

This book provides a pathway for urban scholars to start engaging with approaches to conceptualize care in the city through a critical-reflexive analysis of processes of urbanization. It pursues a systematic integration of empirical, methodological, theoretical, and ethical approaches to care in urban studies, while overcoming a crisis-centered reading of care and the related ambivalences in care debates, practices, and spaces. These strands are elaborated via a conceptual framework of care and situated within broader theoretical debates on cities, urbanization, and urban development with detailed case studies from Europe, the Americas, and Asia.

By establishing links to various fields of knowledge, this book seeks to systematically introduce debates on care to the interconnecting fields of urban studies, planning theory, and related disciplines for the first time.

Angelika Gabauer is Research Associate at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Urban Culture and Public Space at TU Wien, Austria. She is a political scientist with a primary focus in the field of political theory and its interface with urban studies. Her doctoral thesis focuses on the interplay between aging, subjectivity, and urban space production. In 2021 she was a guest researcher at the Institute of Sociology, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany.

Sabine Knierbein is Associate Professor and Director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Urban Culture and Public Space at TU Wien, Austria. She holds a venia in urban studies. Her research interests include social, political, and cultural theories of urbanization, social inequality, critiques of everyday life and lived space, social infrastructures, intersectional planning theory, disruptive urbanism, and open innovation.

Nir Cohen is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Geography at Bar Ilan University in Israel and was KTH & TU Wien Visiting Professor in Urban Studies (2019). His research interests are in the fields of migration studies and urban social geography. In 2018 he was a visiting fellow of Jewish Migration at the Parkes Institute in the University of Southampton, United Kingdom.

Henrik Lebuhn is Assistant Professor for Urban and Regional Sociology at HU Berlin, Germany and was KTH & TU Wien Visiting Professor in Urban Studies (2019). He holds a PhD in Political Science from FU Berlin. His research interests include urban politics in comparative perspective, urban citizenship, migration and borders, social movements, and participatory politics.

Kim Trogal is Reader in Social and Political Design at the Canterbury School of Architecture, University for the Creative Arts, United Kingdom, and was KTH & TU Wien Visiting Professor in Urban Studies (2020). She is co-editor of The Social (Re)Production of Architecture (Routledge 2017), Architecture and Resilience (Routledge 2018), and "Repair Matters," Ephemera (2019).

Tihomir Viderman is Research Associate at the Chair of Urban Management at BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg, Germany, with research interest in the relationship between affect, spaces of everyday life, and the praxis of urban design and planning. He is co-editor of Public Space Unbound: Urban Emancipation and the Post-Political Condition (Routledge 2018) and co-coordinator of the AESOP Thematic Group for Public Spaces and Urban Cultures.

Tigran Haas is Associate Professor of Urban Planning + Urban Design and Director of the Center for the Future of Places at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. He is also a guest scholar in residence at the MIT Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.