The caring city? A critical reflection on Barcelona’s municipal experiments in care and the commons

Abstract

There is an urgent need to develop a coherent political strategy to address the current crisis of care. Allocation of care through the market or the state leads to a care and democratic deficit. Organising care on the logic of the commons provides an alternative paradigm rooted in democracy and solidarity. Municipalism aims to build institutions to enable the commons; it represents a political strategy for the crisis of care at scale. In this paper we explore Barcelona en Comu’s experiments in care to build upon what has been termed ‘care; municipalism’. Our case study focuses on domestic care work as a domain that reflects the core inequalities of the crisis. Through our analysis we have identified three key features of care municipalism: firstly, a feminist narrative of care; secondly, new forms of organising care and thirdly, building social infrastructures. The paper closes with a reflection on the limitations of Barcelona en Comu’s experiments in care from a perspective of the commons, before outlining a future research agenda to contribute towards more caring cities.

Politicising proximity: Radical municipalism as a strategy in crisis

“…Municipalist efforts in social reproduction focus on accounting for and making visible tasks traditionally performed by women, such as domestic labour in capitalism's 'hidden abodes' (Federici, 2020;Fraser, 2023;Gibson-Graham, 2006), as well as improving labour conditions and instituting social justice in the formal economic sectors of health and social care. This is precisely what Kussy et al (2023) document with respect to Barcelona en Comu´. Clearly, a formal righting of wrongs in quantitative terms is not enough: a wholescale 'molecular' transformation of value and social relations (Bookchin, 2015) is required to materialise the feminist imaginary of the 'caring city' -through what Kussy et al (2023) characterise as 'care municipalism', building on Tronto's theory of 'caring democracy' and advancing notions of collective wellbeing, psychological support, mutual aid and socio-ecological balance.…”

“…This is precisely what Kussy et al (2023) document with respect to Barcelona en Comu´. Clearly, a formal righting of wrongs in quantitative terms is not enough: a wholescale 'molecular' transformation of value and social relations (Bookchin, 2015) is required to materialise the feminist imaginary of the 'caring city' -through what Kussy et al (2023) characterise as 'care municipalism', building on Tronto's theory of 'caring democracy' and advancing notions of collective wellbeing, psychological support, mutual aid and socio-ecological balance.…”

“…This means those things which are 'foundational' to living wellhousing, food, mobility, education, water, energy, care, and so on -are at the centre of an antagonistic economic strategy. In areas such as care, this specifically requires 'a transformation of the current division between care and wealth, as well as between the economic sphere and the reproductive one' (Kussy et al, 2023(Kussy et al, : 2049. The intersection between the pressures of tourism and affordable housing, and the challenges in navigating such issues when faced with entrenched regime interests, are a recurring theme (Bua and Davies, 2023).…”

“…As municipalist praxis has proliferated, so too have descriptors and typologies, with multiple municipalist monikers springing up across this diverse field; prefixes range from ‘new’ (Roth, 2019a, 2019b; Russell, 2019) and ‘democratic’ (Shelley, 2022) to ‘autonomist’, ‘platform’ and ‘managed’ (Thompson, 2021b) to ‘pragmatic’ (Warner, 2023) and ‘entrepreneurial’ (Thompson et al, 2020) to ‘degrowth’ (Vansintjan, 2018) and ‘post-growth’ (Schmid, 2023). With the publication of this double special issue, we can add many more: care municipalism (Kussy et al, 2023), southern municipalism (Pinto et al, 2023), peripheral municipalism (Toro and Orozco, 2023), territorial municipalism (Arpini et al, 2023) and weak municipalism (Béal et al, 2023). All this typological creativity certainly suggests a vibrant, ‘pre-paradigmatic’ scholarly field of empirical enquiry trying to keep up with fast-moving, diversifying experimentation on the ground (on pre-paradigmatic fields, see Nicholls, 2010).…”

Strategies for a new municipalism: Public–common partnerships against the new enclosures

“…This has given rise to a breadth of new practices orientated towards the emergence of ‘new political subjectivities, strategies and organisational forms’ (Thompson, 2021: 325). Whilst recent contributions on new municipalist practices have focused on a wide range of themes – including technopolitical participatory innovations (Charnock et al, 2021), municipal energy democracy (Angel, 2021), water remunicipalisation (Popartan et al, 2020), participatory governance (Bua and Bussu, 2021), care regimes (Kussy et al, 2023), urban food policy (Morley and Morgan, 2021), refugee reception (Garcés-Mascareñas and Gebhardt, 2020) and electoral platforms (Blanco et al, 2020) – there has been little focus on the issue of land, and the role that alternative approaches to land ownership and stewardship may play in municipalist strategy.…”