Book Presentation, Lecture and Discussion: Tuesday, 23 March, 09:00
Care and the City, edited by Angelika Gabauer, Sabine Knierbein, Nir Cohen, Henrik Lebuhn, Kim Trogal, Tihomir Viderman and Tigran Haas (2021, forthcoming), Routledge: New York/London.
The interdisciplinary book Care and the City offers an array of contributions that deal with different manifestations and understandings of urban care in various geographical contexts. Against processes of capitalist urbanization manifesting extractive, perverted and dispossessive features, daily struggles continue to reshape interpersonal geographies of inequality towards more just and egalitarian futures, with a promise of a more egalitarian society. Taking these ambivalences impinging everyday lives of urban dwellers as starting point, the authors of this volume identify and analyze these various and interweaving urban geographies of care and ‘uncare.’ Authors coming from disciplines such as geography, architecture, design and planning, sociology and political science try to understand how care practices impact upon and change urban space. The book surfaces both the political ambivalences inherent to care regarding social progresses achieved so far and ongoing struggles around care. It reflects as well on the power of caring practices in shaping civic innovation and solidary urban futures. It thereby pursues a systematic integration of a plurality of empirical, methodological, theoretical and ethical approaches to care in urban studies and planning theory. In this way, it helps to settle the care debate in closer relation to empirical analysis and theoretical advances when studying the city, urbanization and urban space.
The lecture is part of the KTH and TU Vienna Visiting Professorship Program for Urban Studies 2021: ”Exploring Intergenerational Practices of Care in Vienna and Beyond: Intersectional Perspectives for Society and Environment“
Angelika Gabauer is a political scientist whose primary focus is the field of political theory and its interface with urban studies. She is a doctoral candidate and university assistant at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Urban Culture and Public Space at TU Wien, Austria. Her dissertation focuses on the interplay between age(ing), subjectivity and space production. Her interests include democratic theory, affect theory, planning theory, research on social spatial justice, social movements, (urban) space, and feminist approaches to planning and the distribution of (public) space.
Sabine Knierbein is Associate Professor and the Director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Urban Culture and Public Space, Faculty of Architecture and Planning, TU Wien. She has co-edited “Public Space and the Challenges of Urban Transformation in Europe” (2014), “Public Space and Relational Perspectives” (2015), “City Unsilenced: Urban Resistance and Public Space in the Age of Shrinking Democracy” (2017) and “Public Space Unbound. Urban Emancipation and the Post-Political Condition” (2018), all with Routledge. Research foci: theory of urbanization, critique of everyday life, and civic and open innovation.