Alternate Infrastructures of Care: Restoring People's Abilities to Care in a City of Thresholds

Abstract

Informed by a food saving initiative in the city of Gothenburg, and drawing from the concepts of infrastructures of care and thresholds spatiality, this article examines how alternative infrastructures of care expand and restore our ability to provide and receive care. Firstly, it shows how these initiatives create alternative infrastructures that intervene in large waste management systems through incremental infrastructuring. They invert the invisibility of food waste by ‘turning the inside out’, opening the end of the loop to users and raising awareness of systemic challenges within global food systems. Its expansion is sustained by its interlocking with existing educational and work infrastructures, which offer resources and access to potential users, while also presenting resistance. Secondly these infrastructures of care carve thresholds, opening the inside out and mediating encounters between differing life courses, where people can physically meet and nurture new temporary identities – food savers, active caregivers, and homines curans- which restore individual’s capacity to care collectively. Thirdly, through teatricality, large, centralized food waste management infrastructures are inverted, thereby making the environmental footprint of our society visible. By inverting the stigma associated with care-receiving, this theatricality transforms ‘care-receivers’ into active providers of care, embodying the notion of homines curans. Finally, although small in scale, this infrastructure of care represents one of the many hidden and emergent postcapitalist counter-cities—a city of thresholds and alternate infrastructures of care— with the potential to scale up through interlocking with highly legitimate organisations’ infrastructures, such as universities and business schools.

Keywords: infrastructures of care, thresholds, food sharing movement, circular grassroots, postgrowth cities