𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐂𝐫𝐢𝐬𝐢𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐜𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐚𝐬 𝐚𝐧 𝐮𝐫𝐛𝐚𝐧 𝐩𝐨𝐥𝐢𝐜𝐲 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐧𝐠𝐞: How to mitigate the crisis of social reproduction through municipal land and housing policy?

Our colleague, Dr. Deniz Ay, gave a guest lecture in our Political Ecology and Spatial Development course, where she provided a feminist political ecology perspective on how to operationalise “strong sustainability” objectives in urban redevelopment.

In her lecture, Dr. Ay formulated urban redevelopment as a process of spatial reorganization of urban infrastructures of life-making, following a feminist social reproduction approach. Building on theoretical perspectives of feminist political economy, intersectional political ecology, and critical urban studies, “crisis of care” is a day-to-day lived experience in embedded spaces of care: Housing, Care Facilities (nurseries, elderly homes), and outdoor spaces with implicit or explicit care functions for the youngest and the oldest in the society.

Care as a resource  –

A resource-based approach to care helps to understand the “crisis of care” as an ongoing process of making care a resource that is extracted from communities by diminishing societal and ecological capacities to take of the children and the elderly.

If care has become a resource that is extracted from communities, how childcare and elderly care as a resource should be managed, governed, and regulated to mitigate the crisis? New forms of organizing care as a commons to resist commodification and double-privatization (within the family and the market): as an alternative paradigm rooted in democracy and solidarity (Kussy et al. 2022).

Developing accesible spaces of care through urban planning instruments  –

Dr. Ay demonstrated with empirical cases from Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Turkey that municipal authorities, together with community initiatives, can mobilize urban planning instruments, including zoning, district plans, building codes, and policy strategies, including long-term ground leases, building obligations to enable the development of affordable and accessible spaces for child and elderly care.