Cooking, Caring, and Commoning: Grassroots Community Kitchens Across Five European Cities

Abstract

In this article, we analyse collective cooking initiatives in Florence, Copenhagen, Ljubljana, Berlin, and Bern, illuminating how they foster care and commons amidst multiple urban crises. From our ethnographic explorations, these community kitchens emerge as forms of resistance against current urban conditions characterised by displacement, "care‐lessness," precarisation, and individualisation. These five kitchen initiatives exemplify countermeasures to such developments, where acts of communal cooking and eating nurture a sense of commonality and collective power. Within them, acts of cooking and eating transcend the private sphere of reproductive work and become foundations for community engagement, offering insights into radical collective care and autonomous social infrastructures. These kitchens operate within a variety of contexts - ranging from a public park, a squat, a housing project, to a refugee and social centre - and are not easily identifiable as either private or public. Instead, they address a variety of concerns in specific socio‐spatial settings and attend to individual and collective needs. Thereby, the collective care for people and spaces extends into what we conceptualise as "direct care for the urban space." Although the diverse and complex initiatives face challenges from external socio‐political conditions and internal ambivalences and conflicts, their experimentations remain essential; not only to prefigure futures built on collective relations and common infrastructures of care, but also because they convey a sense of belonging, mutual aid, and collective care in the here and now.