Creating Communities of Urban Care: The No to the Felling Environmental Movement in the City of Madrid

Abstract

The emergence of urban care communities has recently become a topic of study, with a focus on the social bonds shaped through mutual assistance and support in vulnerable and non‐vulnerable neighbourhoods following natural disasters, pandemic situations, and collective urban emotional suffering. We argue that not only is a more comprehensive conceptualisation of urban care necessary, incorporating urban green infrastructures as a component of collective wellbeing, but that care needs to be considered as a political element to develop urban resilience in the face of climate change and extreme events. With this in mind, the present research proposes the enlargement of the concept of the urban care community by means of a specific case study and using a qualitative methodology, underlining how the environmental urban care discourse strengthens new political subjects claiming for urban care‐full justice. Our case study is the No to the Felling movement, which emerged at the end of 2023 from the response of a group of residents to Madrid City Council's plan to cut down trees located mainly in the Madrid Río park to extend a metro line. The case is not only indicative of a growing concern about the preservation of green spaces in urban areas, but it is also related to the discourse of caring for the urban space. However, these demands did not arise from a vacuum. Their most direct antecedent was the emergence of networks of mutual support in the city that started during the pandemic, and already existing neighbourhood protest movements against urban planning processes. This article analyses how previous experiences of care generate conditions of possibility for current struggles and the constitution of a political subject that promotes environmental urban care through the shared perception of urban wellbeing deprivation and the absence of a caring approach to such issues.