Caring in Crises: Spatializing infrastructures of care through tenant protections

Keywords: infrastructures of care, housing financialization, feminist geographies, care geographies
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 05:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 06:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 8

Abstract

Recent work has begun to theorize the ways that care is embedded within housing, with specific focus on how housing functions as an ‘infrastructure of care’. Yet, there remain gaps in our understandings of housing as care within theorizations of housing crises, including the debates, advocacy, and policies that render care possible in housing systems embedded with longstanding structural inequalities produced through racial capitalism and settler colonialism. To address this gap, I focus on understanding the forms of care that arise in response to urban housing crises through an examination of the enactment/retrenchment of municipal tenant protections in Seattle, USA and Vancouver, Canada, as shaped by everyday impacts of housing financialization. I draw on feminist care theory to analyze archival materials in these two cities, tracing the forms of care that arise in response to housing crises and how this care is experienced and enacted by the state and tenants, in different but connected urban contexts. I argue that theorizing tenant protections through care helps us to consider a broad range of possible caring housing futures.