Caring concepts will leave the books, take to the streets, and be appropriated through action.
Through the current pandemic, the multiple roles of care have been changing drastically. Lived spaces and public life have been encapsulated in the home and we witness further transformations of our lived space. As an addition to the many built projects in public spaces in Vienna and Tel Aviv, this project set out to further work on how visual interpretations of urbanistic thought and concepts can help recent research results sediment, materialize and become differently appropriated, embraced, and contested.
The book “Care and the City”, edited by Angelika Gabauer, Sabine Knierbein, Nir Cohen, Henrik Lebuhn, Kim Trogal, Tihomir Viderman, and Tigran Haas for the Interdisciplinary Center for Urban Culture and Public Space at TU Wien holds many empirical, methodological, and conceptual contributions from Europe, North and South America, Asia and Oceania.
However, those ideas and concepts should not be confined to academic writings, but rather discussed in different public arenas, especially in those types of places where caring infrastructures are needed and where they will be conceived. Therefore a virtual interface (https://skuor.tuwien.ac.at/research/publikationen/care-and-the-city) is thought to connect thinkers equipped with knowledge about care in public space and everyday life in different publics in Tel Aviv, Vienna, and other cities offering comment, critique, and feedback on the presented transdisciplinary research results. The page shall be linked to the open-access book by Routledge when it is published in fall 2021. It can then be used by authors to connect with fellow researchers, residents in different cities, and anyone interested in their topics, and thereby stimulate thought and innovation as regards caring infrastructure based on theories focussing on soulful encounters in the city, while focussing on ambivalences and antagonisms around care.
To illustrate the different aspects of care, that are being examined through diverse theoretical and empirical lenses, Theresa König supported the project team by creating a conceptual tree thereby visualizing selected articles developing themes around Care and the City. The many approaches are parted into four sections: (1) “Caring Collectivities, Encounters, and Critique”, (2) “Social Inequalities, Uneven Space, and Care”, (3) “Everyday Struggles and Contestations Around Care”, (4) “New Care Arrangements and Civic Innovation” which frame differently situated chapters.
