| Description |
This interdisciplinary seminar examines how cities are shaped through the everyday practices and infrastructures of care. Care includes both paid and unpaid labour as well as access to essential infrastructures such as housing, childcare, eldercare, food, water, and green space. Privatization of services, escalating housing costs, shrinking welfare provisions, and declining real wages have made basic forms of care increasingly inaccessible. In response, diverse commoning initiatives keep emerging to reclaim and collectively manage vital urban resources. These practices help reimagining housing, land, social infrastructure, and community support systems as urban commons rooted in shared governance and collective responsibility.
The seminar draws on human geography, urban planning, and feminist political economy to analyse how urban commons can contest and mitigate the care gap. Through engagement with theoretical debates and empirical cases, we explore the institutional, political, and economic possibilities of commoning in cities and how collective practices of care might contribute to more equitable, sustainable, and solidaristic urban futures. Students will learn the social reproduction perspective's main concepts that challenge the public/private and production/reproduction binaries through an intersectional feminist understanding of the economy of life-making.
Assigned reading material for weekly discussions balance scientific research, policy reports, and popular debates in media. With regular reading notes, students synthesize their thoughts to actively prepare for the in-class discussions and get feedback on their writing as a means of systematic learning. Students will acquire knowledge on crises, responses, and transformations from various parts of the world, including Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Europe, which also introduces a diverse range of scientific and practical knowledge on social reproduction and urban commons. |
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