INTRODUCTION: Everyday Struggles and Contestations Around Care

Abstract

While acknowledging that care creates social bonds and glues societies together, this chapter discusses the value of care and struggles to provide care as simultaneously revealing the alienated conditions in which they occur. The discussion contributes a spatial perspective on the crossovers of care and caring relations by casting a light on how care materializes in urban space. We argue that it is the struggle of distribution across the private-public boundary and its negotiation that makes care, as well as struggles and contestations over care, tangible. As capitalism cuts away at social relationships and reduces capacities to care, it also abstracts care as a commodified category, which it then materializes in urban space as a provision or service whose task is to simultaneously ensure the reproduction of society and consolidate asymmetries in power relations. In such an environment, we argue that affective caring relations matter all the more because they build agency and agency to contest.