CARE MATTERS IN THE ENTANGLED COMMONS: Perspectives on a Temporality of Urgency, Knowledge Co-production and Infrastructures of Sociality in Diverse Urban Contexts

Abstract

Experiencing crises, such as the pandemic, has affected infrastructures of sociality and intensified social and spatial inequities while revealing the fragility of systems we depend upon. In this Interventions collection, we collaboratively search for paths toward visionary lifeworlds, taking the entangled commons as a commitment to coexistence, diversity, inclusion and a critical look at (un)common sense. Contributions address a temporality of urgency, knowledge co-production, more-than-human relations, and the matters and materialities of care in conceptually, physically and technologically interconnected worlds. In this editorial introduction, I develop two interrelated frameworks to ground these explorations: infrastructures of sociality and care matters in the entangled commons. I examine how crises transform the relational arrangements through which collective life takes shape. Moving beyond human-centric notions of shared resources, I introduce entangled commons as a framework to understand how social, physical and digital dimensions interweave in urgent times, demanding new approaches to design, governance and collective action. Entangled commons emerge through the infrastructural arrangements created to navigate crisis and precarity, incorporating more-than-human actors and agency as part of care-full practices that recognize the interconnectedness of human and planetary health and our fundamental interdependence.