Imagining infrastructures of care: Seeing care as a resource and introduction to the special issue

This article first introduces the special issue on “Imagining Infrastructures of Care,” which aims to reclaim public imaginaries of infrastructure by reinvigorating and reinterpreting its many potential meanings and functions by putting urban political ecology (UPE) in conversation with a lively range of academic disciplines and place-based practices. Drawing, among others, from Bronfenbrenner and Ceci bioecological and integrative frameworks, the article then makes a conceptual contribution for “seeing care as a resource,” and provides entry points for the articulation of “the right to a caring city.” The view of care as both a resource and a right helps to grow the collective capacity to forge new visions, centering imagination as a civic skill that can better prepare us to respond to our state of emergency while simultaneously getting us out of the feedback loop of (perma)crisis. The article concludes with a reflection on the potential for UPE as a field to serve as an infrastructure of support that allows communities, researchers, and institutions to forge more generative relationships of co-stewardship and solidarity in the work of responding to the complex challenges of our time.