Prefiguring the Caring City: Everyday Practices and Postcapitalist Possibility in Neighborhood Living Rooms

Abstract

This article brings an ethic of care into conversation with prefigurative politics to position practices of care as examples of everyday life beyond capitalism. Examining everyday practices in community spaces as prefigurative practices of care illustrates two distinct but interrelated ways these spaces function: firstly by facilitating cultures of care in the present, sustaining individuals and communities within an uncaring urban context, and secondly by making possible and visible other ways of caring, relating, and living. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews in Dutch neighborhood living rooms, we show how participants in these spaces practice an ethic of care, how this transforms their everyday experience and their sense of future possibility, and how a desire for change motivates their continued care practices. Reading this through the lens of prefigurative practice reveals concrete examples of what everyday postcapitalist urban life might look like if cities were instead organized around an ethic of care. Finally, we call attention to the socio‐spatial infrastructures that make these practices possible in the present and would support an expanded capacity to care in the future.