The Caring‐With Practitioner: Diffracting Practice‐Research Dynamics in Urban Care

Abstract

This article casts a light on the role of practitioner‐researchers working towards more caring cities within an expanded set of actors. By introducing the caring‐with practitioner, we draw attention to engaged, relational, and constitutively entangled forms of practice within urban care discourse. This contributes to professional practice scholarship (within urban planning, built environment, and design professions) by intersecting theory on/in practice with contemporary discourses around care. The article revisits interview transcripts from a British Academy‐funded project, Caring‐With Cities (2021-2022), in which practitioners working across policy and community‐led contexts discuss efforts to shift power dynamics within the urban realm. We also draw on our own experiences as design practitioner‐researchers embedded within collaborative projects that seek to put "caring with" (Tronto, 2015) theories into practice. Through diffractive inquiry (Barad, 2007), the article moves beyond established modes of thinking about practice‐research dynamics, which often use reflection‐in‐action/reflection‐on‐action (Schön, 1983) or conceptualise the practitioner as mediator (Forester, 1987). Set against design debates on difference and the pluriverse (Escobar, 2018), the caring‐with practitioner adds to and challenges thought on working in partnership to engage across difference. We contribute to an epistemology of practice founded on acts of caring‐with. The caring‐with practitioner operates not only through the apparatus of practice‐research, but through an intra‐active entanglement with the apparatuses and boundary‐drawing practices of others. To practice in this way involves holding multiple roles that are co‐emergent and mutually constitutive across projects and organisations, drawing attention to and determining what comes to matter.