Provoking Care-full Cities

SAXO Lecture with Dr Miriam Williams, Senior Lecturer in Geography and Planning in the School of Communication, Society and Culture at Macquarie University, Australia

Abstract

Drawing on a chapter from our forthcoming book – Cities that care: towards caring urbanisms – [forthcoming book by Dr Miriam Williams and A/Prof Emma Power] this seminar aims to make visible the times and places when urban worlds have become more caring. We draw on the concept of affect, and the associated scholarship of learning to be affected (Latour, 2004), to consider how care might be triggered and care responsibility taken up. Our intention is not to provide a prescriptive formula which urban actors might follow but instead speculate on how cities and urban actors might be provoked to recognize their collective interdependence and the importance of care to collective flourishing. We first explain how provoking care and learning to be affected are deeply connected. Second, we look at this across four domains: care provoked through embodied encounters, care provoked by being-in-common, care provoked through crisis and care provoked by ethics. We attend to the potential of ordinary encounters and ways such encounters may temporarily and spatially provoke care for individuals, by drawing on the example of more-than-human entanglements. We explore how care might be provoked collectively by sharing space or being-in-common, focusing on an example of a food poverty relief initiative as care infrastructure. We provide examples of how care might be provoked by the crisis that prompts new infrastructural configurations. Finally, we attend to the ways a relational ethics of care and understanding that cities have responsibility for care has led to urban transformations. To conclude, we bring together these insights to assist us in considering how caring cities might be provoked, sustained, and cultivated by urban actors now and in the future.

The event is open to all. However, please notify Tilde Rasmussen in advance to be included in the refreshments order.

Biography

Dr Miriam Williams is a Senior Lecturer in Geography and Planning at the School of Communication, Society and Culture at Macquarie University, Australia. Miriam is an urban geographer whose work focuses on how urban life could be made more just and caring for people and the planet. Miriam leads research and teaching teams that advance knowledge through research and education to inspire flourishing global futures. She is Deputy Director of the Centre for Housing and Urban Research (CHUR MQ), a member of the Community Economies Institute, and Associate Editor for Geographical Research. Miriam is currently working on an Australian Research Council-funded Linkage research project with the NSW Government on The Power of Public Spaces, researching care-informed planning and co-authoring a book on Cities that Care: towards caring urbanisms with A/Prof Emma Power for the University of Minnesota Press.