Quandaries of Radical Care Politics: The contested politics of care in urban commons movements

In recent years, the concept of “care” has been pushed by overlapping global crises to the center of political debate. No longer confined to feminist thought and movements, it now anchors many social movements’ agendas, especially in urban commons, where activists manage resources beyond state and market logics. Yet we still know little about what “care” means to urban commons movements, and about the negotiations through which it is articulated or tacitly practiced in everyday politics. Guided by the question of how urban commons movements articulate and practice care, I conducted a long-term, theory-building ethnography (2021-2023) of l’Asilo, a self-managed cultural center in Naples, and Àgora, a community urban garden in Barcelona, combining participant observation and semi-structured interviews with participatory and experimental methods. After proposing a theoretical framework for radical care politics based on both value and values, this thesis situates each case historically and then traces the language, practices, and conflicts of care across the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. It finds, first, that at l’Asilo “care” has diffused as a contested political keyword, widely regarded as missing in practice and therefore placed at the center of debate, prompting continual reflection on gender, ethics, and praxis. Second, the pandemic revealed the fragility of spontaneous mutual aid, leading activists to devise deliberative care infrastructuring: an experimental, partial and processual organization of care while avoiding bureaucratization. Third, comparison with Àgora shows that class influences the practice of discursive, or embodied, care: middle-class “immaterial” workers center deliberation, whereas the caring classes (such as women, migrants, and interpersonal-service workers, intersectionally understood) sustain tacit material care, each pattern carrying distinct implications for commons democracy. Finally, disputes over boundaries, inclusivity, and safety, show that boundary work is care, and that it can both widen and narrow participation, complicating intersectional hierarchies of gender, race, and class. The thesis synthesizes the findings with a four-part typology of care infrastructures in urban commons movements: discursive, embodied, organized, and boundary. It contributes to social movement studies, critical commons literature, and sociology more broadly. Through extended ethnography, it offers scholars empirically grounded insights into radical care politics and provides activists with tools to identify both the complexities and the promises of care for collective action and commons governance.