Afterword

In an age marked by the fragility of democracy, the erosion of civic culture, and the abandonment of collective life, care for the other has vanished. It has been replaced by regressive forms of individualism, which undermines the social imagination and breaks apart civic institutions. As Hélène Frichot proposes in Infrastructural Love (2022), care is a relational approach, which creates links to and across pedagogy, practice, and theory. As Ellen Meiksins Wood argues in Democracy Against Capitalism (1995), democratic life is vulnerable and requires constant attention and reconfiguration. We argue that care as critical action, is one way to critique capitalist modes of spatial production and for thinking about how to live and act well.
This issue brought together critiques of architecture and the city. It brought into dialogue the ethical discourse of care and spatial discourse of urbanism. It meant that care as a practice and principle, normally understood as individual, may be rethought relationally and collectively. It shifts the discourse. It means thinking about what are the typologies of care? The networks, hubs, staff rooms, and institutions; the fields, land, sites, and neighbourhoods that may act as places of care—for solidarity, reflection, or collaboration with others. We wanted to open questions of scale, thinking about micro institutions of care, for the planet, and care for the relations of critical thought.