Architectures of Caring Encounters with Street Homelessness

• Applicant: Dr. Natalia Martini
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 517411812

In the last forty years the ascent of the neoliberal urban regime, marked by the impairment of formalized social security frameworks and privatization of risks, has fostered the subordination of urban social life to the rationalities of self-reliance and competition. As a result of this market-driven transformation, members of the urban populations have found themselves devoid of social protection assured by the state-based social solidarity and increasingly vulnerable to risks (associated with, i.a., economic crises, pandemics, climate change). Against this backdrop, the questions concerning informal means of social protection gain in importance. The proposed project considers urban care – which manifests itself through ordinary acts of support involving strangers in everyday urban spaces – as such a means of protection and examines the cultural-discursive, social-political, and material economic conditions which render it possible. It takes a practice-theoretical approach to study architectures of informal care for Polish homeless inhabitants of Berlin. Their lived circumstances, marked by both migration background and homeless situation, make a strong case for learning about care for urban others. The proposed project asks what creates the capacity (signaling both an ability and a desire) of ordinary people (clerks, cleaners, security guards, etc.) to support homeless urbanites in prosaic urban spaces (corner stores, shopping malls, train stations, etc.). By shifting the focus from care as a moral motivation for individual prosocial behavior to the host of interlocking factors that enable the enactment of care as a social practice, this project offers the prospect of a contextual explanation of the ‘happening-ness’ of urban care. The importance of questions raised by the proposed project, regarding informal care as a means of social protection and the conditions that make it possible, is strengthened by the universality of care needs and the incapacity of the state and its institutions to look after all members of society, revealed with the utmost acuity during the Covid-19 pandemic. Through examining the sociomaterial constitution of caring capacity of urban dwellers, this project is expected to generate valuable insights into the conditions facilitating protective societal response to precarity and vulnerability in times of growing social insecurity.

• DFG Programme: WBP Position