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(Kussy et al., 2022) or (Kussy, Palomera & Silver 2022) within the text and
Kussy A., Palomera D., Silver D. (2022), The caring city? A critical reflection on
Barcelona’s municipal experiments in care and the commons, Urban Studies,
https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980221134191 in references.
The Caring City? A Critical Reflection on Barcelona’s Municipal
Experiments in Care and the Commons
Angelina Kussy, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
David Palomera, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Daniel Silver, the University of Manchester
Abstract
There is an urgent need to develop a coherent political strategy to address the crisis of
care. Allocation of care through the market or the state leads to a care and democratic
deficit. Organising care on the logic of the commons provides an alternative paradigm
rooted in democracy and solidarity. Municipalism aims to build institutions to enable
the commons; it represents a political strategy to the crisis of care at scale. In this paper
we explore Barcelona en Comu’s experiments in care to build upon what Dowling (2018)
has termed ‘care municipalism’. Our case study focuses on domestic care work as a
domain that reflects the core inequalities of the crisis. Through our analysis we have
identified three key features of care municipalism: firstly, a feminist narrative of care;
secondly, new forms of organising care; and thirdly, building social infrastructures. The
paper closes with a reflection on the limitations of Barcelona en Comu’s experiments in
care from a perspective of the commons, before outlining a future research agenda to
contribute towards more caring cities.
Keywords
care crisis, social reproduction, care commons, care municipalism, domestic work, care
democracy, social care
From Care Crisis to Care Municipalism
We are currently living through what Nancy Fraser (2016) has identified as a!‘crisis of
care’, where the crucial activities sustaining people’s lives, such as childcare, mental,
and physical health services, elderly social care or the maintenance of physical spaces
are unrecognised, undervalued, and under-resourced. Social care1 is at the centre of the
care crisis. The social care system has been placed under immense strain due to an
ageing population and the incorporation of many women (who had previously done
unpaid caring work) into the labour market. These dynamics have pushed up the cost of
caring for older and disabled people. As a result of social inequalities, many people who
require care support often experience low-quality services or are not supported in ways
that meet their needs. As well as inequalities that structure how people receive care,
the crisis is underpinned by an unequal allocation of care responsibilities. Capitalist
states externalise the public responsibility of providing care to private households,
which results in women doing unpaid caring activities within their families – very often
with limited social protection for themselves. Public provision of care is often delivered
by migrant women (Comas d’Argemir, 2020), who are overexploited and trapped in
global ‘care chains’ doing low paid and precarious waged care work (Hochschild 2014).
Austerity and the retrenchment of social infrastructures has deepened the crisis.
The pandemic has both exposed and intensified the crisis of care. Mezzadri (2022)
argues that the pandemic should be understood as a systemic crisis of social
reproduction that is consistent with the logics of capitalism. The growing privatisation
and commodification of care constitute part of the broader phenomenon related to the
depletion of social reproduction. Social reproduction explains how societies divide and
plan the efforts to provide and maintain the most basic means of existence, such as
shelter, food, health and social care, and methods of their redistribution. A critical lens
of feminist political economy on social reproduction entered the public debate from the
1 Defined here as physical care (such as feeding and washing) and mental care for more vulnerable
groups of the society including children, elderly and disabled people, as opposed to the sanitary care
provided in the hospitals.
1970s when feminist thinkers and political activists focused on women’s household care
activities that were treated as hidden work (Dalla Costa and James, 1975). As part of the
movement, they organised international strikes and campaigns, such as ‘Wages for
Housework’. Without domestic work, they argued, the productive paid labour that was
realised under employment contracts would not be possible - because before labour
power can produce anything, the labourer as a subject must first reproduce itself. This
reproduction is impossible without foundational caring activities. These care activities
are predominantly fulfilled by women in patriarchal societies.
Social Reproduction Theory (Bhattacharya, 2017) paints a broader picture of various
social struggles in this context. While the feminist analysis of social reproduction in the
1980s focused on unpaid domestic work, recent interest has shifted focus to include
both waged and unwaged daily activities of social reproduction (Bakker 2007). Feminist
scholars and activists argue that care should be central to an analysis of society and
economy, but also recognise social reproduction as the foundation for anti-capitalist
struggle (Jeffries, 2018). Activism against manifestations of the crisis of care can be seen
around the world. But despite this everyday resistance, ‘no mass movement to improve
care has arisen, despite repeated attempts on the part of scholars and activists to make
such a thing happen’ (Tronto, 2013: ix). Resistance to the crisis of care remains dispersed
and lacks the scale necessary to provide a coherent alternative for a more just allocation
of care.
This paper aims to contribute ideas about how to develop a concrete strategy to address
the crisis of care at scale. Tronto (2013) explains that while care is the foundation of
social life, it is relegated economics and rarely seen as a key political concern – resulting
in social injustice and an absence of democratic control. She argues that care must be
placed at the centre of a new political vision to transform the unequal allocation of
caring responsibilities in society and make politics more responsive to the everyday life
of the people: in other words, to make politics more meaningful. As the issue of care
affects everyday life and is foundational to society, so it requires a form of inclusive
democratic control. There is an absence of democratic control through the bureaucratic
state or capitalist markets. And so, Tronto (2013, p. xiv) argues that a fundamental
question for societies is how can caring responsibilities be more democratically and
equitably allocated? Responding to this question can address both the democratic and
care deficit.
The current allocation of care in society both produces and deepens inequalities.
Common resources have been historically expropriated through the state with policies
of imperialism, commodification, privatisation, and financialisation. The state actively
promotes and enforces such logics in ways that perpetuate the crisis of care. The
capitalist market has taken advantage of the care crisis through a ‘care fix’, driven by the
commodification of care services through financialised capital (Dowling, 2018). Through
existing state and market frameworks, care responsibilities are predominantly assigned
to women or migrants - subjects who are marginalised in political life and have little
influence on decisions about care. A more democratic model rooted in social justice
would be based upon the inclusive participation of marginalised groups to be able to
regulate the distribution and control of care. A reconfiguration of care requires the
involvement of public institutions to address the ‘gendered, class-laden, and racialised
divisions of care responsibilities that divide such responsibilities into public and private
ones’ (Tronto, 2013: 171). While Tronto identifies the need for democracy and care to
be connected, she does not prescribe how this should be achieved as she argues that it
should be democratically decided upon in particular contexts. But this does not preclude
thinking about the paradigms for democratic allocation that can best guide the norms
and rules under which these decisions are made. To develop an alternative mode of
governance for a more democratic allocation of care, we must first identify the
limitations with current alternative political strategies.
While reflecting on how to tackle the care crises, most scholars and activists tend to
think of the ‘public’ as equivalent to the state (Purcell 2016). However, there is a
theoretical and political contradiction in recognising the roots of the care crisis in the
productivist economic paradigm of modern nation-states, while at the same time
appealing to the state to resolve it merely through more investment. The current
political horizon is limited to asking the capitalist state to pay for some social protection
to support social reproductive activities on which it currently ‘free rides’ (Fraser, 2016).
Moreover, the literature on social reproduction often treats reproduction and
production as separate spheres (Kussy and Talego, 2017, Comas d’Argemir, 2020). In
doing so, firstly, this literature often essentialises caring work as a woman's job.
Secondly, through mirroring economic theories, it reinforces the distinction between
production and reproduction as two separate spheres - and so neglects the historical
roots of this division in the rise of nation-states and the growth of capitalism (Kussy and
Talego, 2017). Such an incomplete problematisation will result in strategies that do not
lead to transformation.
Dominant social policy approaches that allocate care through the state or the market
assign a passive role for communities in which democratic control is limited. An
alternative approach that is based on the commons can foreground more radical forms
of democracy and solidarity - emphasising the importance of including communities
within governance to co-determine the norms and rules to which they are subject
(Leithenser et al, 2021, p,2). In comparison to the exclusions that are inherent in private
and state management of resources, the key foundations of the commons are inclusion
and participation.
There is a connection between the crisis of care and the commons (Federici 2011;
Martínez-Buján, 2020; Recano, 2020). Commoning can be understood as an act of
resistance against enclosures and privatisations, and as an advocacy for the creation of
non-commodified systems of social production related to communitarian forms of
property and governance (Federici, 2011; Giuliani and Vercellone, 2019). Inspired by
Federici (2011: 144), we define three intertwined pillars of the commons in relation to
care: firstly, a common interest beyond the current capitalist social reproductive
regimes; secondly, solidarity, together with communal cooperation, co-responsibility,
and self-governance; and thirdly, the material dimensions, which constitute the assets
that allow for self-reproduction.
Place-based initiatives based on the commons are crucial for enabling a more
communitarian provision of care. But in themselves, place-based initiatives remain
insufficient as they rarely offer a political strategy for transformation at scale beyond
reclaiming the commons or ‘prefiguring’! small-scale!alternatives. Although these
initiatives offer daily care practices and provide conditions for caring relations, they
often fail to consider the material needs of society and the need for public
infrastructures to provide professional and technologically advanced care. Small scale
commons initiatives therefore represent only the communitarian part of the commons,
which without the material counterpart, can lead to ‘commons for a chosen few’!
(Federici, 2011: 145).
To advance the commons in ways that can transform society, post-capitalist ways to
reproduce social life other than those provided by states and markets are needed (De
Angelis, 2014). The public can be conceived of (both in theory and practice) beyond the
state: it is possible to ‘imagine and create publics without the State’ (Purcell, 2016).
Public institutions can be reconfigured to support the commons. There can be a
progressive relationship between public institutions and the commons, in which
institutions can enable new relationships of the commons to flourish (Leitheiser et al,
2021 p.7). Public institutions can enable commons projects to be connected and scaled
up to achieve more transformative change (Cumbers, 2015). Reimagined public
institutions hold potential to secure the democratic and material foundations needed
to address the care crisis.
Municipalism has a significant potential to address the crises of care through a
reimagined public that can enable the commons. Municipalist initiatives emerged as a
response to conditions of crisis in politics and urban governance (Davies & Blanco, 2017).
Protests and square occupations led to the 2011 Indignados movement (15M), which
perceived the state as a distant and abstract power hijacked by capital (Blanco et al.,
2019). This led to the inception of new municipalism, with Barcelona as one of the
vanguard cities in a global movement (Thompson 2021). Urban activists and intellectuals
argued that social movements should go beyond the squares and occupy institutions of
power by running in local elections to bring ‘real democracy’ into cities, towns, and
villages. Hundreds of platforms that were confluences of leftist parties, activists, and
citizens, ran in Spanish municipal elections referring to the paradigm of the commons.
Barcelona en Comú (Bcomú), with Ada Colau (an anti-eviction activist back then) as a
candidate for mayor, won the 2015 municipal elections united with other existing left-
wing and ecologist parties. Similar processes also took place in other countries.
Municipalist platforms started to collaborate. They came together through the 2017
Fearless Cities summit in Barcelona. Consequently, new municipalism started to
consolidate as a global movement, situating municipal politics as a ‘strategic front’ for
developing transformative politics (Russell, 2019). The 2017 summit also promoted the
‘feminisation of politics’ (Roth et al., 2020), which was related to an ethics of care, and
aimed to transform patriarchal institutional and policy-making models into safe,
participatory, and inclusive environments with thriving direct democracy.
While some municipalist scholars have engaged with social reproductive issues such as
urban-placed tenant unions 1), or the re-municipalisation of resources (Angel, 2020;
Muehlebach, 2018), a connection between the commons, municipalism and the crisis of
care remains rare (Martínez-Buján, 2020). More broadly, the crisis of social reproduction
has not been sufficiently addressed in urban theory (Joy and Vogel, 2021). Recently,
scholars have highlighted the potential to use care as a principle to transform urban
spaces into ‘caring cities’ (Valdivia, 2018; Power and Williams, 2020). ‘Urban researchers
have expanded ideas of the sustainable city, the resilient city, the smart city, the creative
city, the just city, and the sharing city. Why not the caring city?’ (Power and Williams,
2019: 8). In this vision of the caring city, critical urban scholarship engages with the
creation of a city infrastructure that facilitates the practice of care; however, this
literature remains predominantly focused on physical urban infrastructures rather than
engaging with social infrastructures and the broader governing practices and modes of
organisation that inform care. We argue that an engagement with the commons should
be central to this literature because it represents a transformative paradigm for
organising care beyond the state and the market.
The transformation of local institutions through the logic of the commons has become
a key strategy of municipalism (Bianchi, 2022). Municipalism provides an institutional
framework to enable the commons to develop in ways that can create more caring cities
based on a democratic transformation of how care is organised. As Federici (2019,
p.721) explains, ‘we cannot exercise any form of collective self-government unless our
reproduction has a territorial basis.’ Bookchin (2015: 44) insisted how democratic forms
power can be most effectively realised at the municipal level. Municipal governance is
deeply embedded in the politics of everyday life and the starting point for participation
(Sitrin and Azzellini, 2014: 67). Municipalism represents an ‘institutional struggle for the
commons’ (Mattei and Mancall, 2019: 736) that opens a ‘participatory space between
the administration, community-based organisations, and social movements to reclaim
common resources and institutions’ (Bianchi, 2018: 3). Municipalism does not follow the
contradictions of state-centric scholarship; rather, it aims to extend the capacities of a
reimagined public sector together with a concrete strategy to foster the commons, while
also emphasising the material needs of everyday life.
A central principle of municipalism is ‘collaborative theory building’, which is practice-
led and identifies common features that can be used to enable shared learning across
diverse contexts (Russell, 2019: 991). Theories that are developed collaboratively
through practice can be used to guide future action. Dowling (2018) has put forward the
concept of ‘care municipalism’ based on using public funds and non-profit ownership
models (primarily through re-municipalisation) to!offer a democratic locale for the
negotiation of participation, ownership, and the allocation of resources, without the
‘dangers of exclusivity that are hazards of small, self-selecting collectives’!(Dowling,
2018: 258). Care municipalism provides a conceptual foundation that can be used to
facilitate thinking about a more democratic allocation of care through municipal
institutions. But as with any theory, there is scope to develop it further through
empirical investigation. In the following sections, we will contribute to the conceptual
development of care municipalism. Goetz’s (2005) three-level view of concepts consists
of theoretical description; the constituent features of the theoretical concept; and a
final dimension that can determine the extent to which a particular feature is present
or absent. In this paper, we build on the theoretical description of care municipalism to
identify three constituent features through an empirical case study of Bcomú’s
experiments in care. We then reflect on how these have been put into practice in
relation to whether logics of the commons are present or absent.
Case Study: Barcelona En Comu’s Response to the Crisis of Care
Bcomú is a paradigmatic case of new municipalism and provides an illuminating case to
explore the potential for care municipalism. We selected a case study research design
as this enabled us to ‘close in’ on experiments in care at a municipal level and explore
points of inquiry directly as they unfold in practice (Flyvbjerg, 2006: 235). Case study
research design supports an investigation of how different theoretical positions interact
with empirical evidence, which particularly suits the paper’s aim to strengthen the
conceptualisation of care municipalism by relating the ideas to BComú’s experiments in
care.
Thinking on the commons must go hand in hand with a continuous critique of capitalism
(Mattei and Mancall, 2019). And so, in our case study, we primarily focus on migrants’
domestic work in adult social care as a key intersection that reflects capitalist logics. The
poor working conditions of care workers and the way they are entangled in circuits of
migration, dispossession, racism, and exclusion based on citizenship represents a core
manifestation of the crisis of care. A focus on adult social care, in turn, is also crucial due
to the general devaluation of care work in capitalist societies, but also because under
capitalism elderly people are often seen as ‘unproductive burdens’ upon which spending
should be kept to a minimum (Federici 2014). The focus of our case study is particularly
pertinent as migrant’s domestic work became the major pillar of the Spanish long-term
care system during the last decades, while the core contribution of BComú on the issue
of care has been to focus public policies and discourse not only on the receivers of care
but also on the providers of care.
In Spain, the country's historically familial welfare regime and the migration model
encouraged the expansion of the domestic sector as the main source of care provision
for the elderly in the last three decades (León, 2010). Domestic care is a highly feminised
and ‘foreignised’! sector: 88,4% of the employees are women and around half of them
have foreign origins (Chulvi, 2019: 26). Domestic work in Spain is characterised by poor
work conditions and frail social security protection. Up to 40% of domestic workers work
in the underground economy. In 2017, 51,6% of domestic work employees (mainly
women) had part-time contracts (85% of them received a monthly salary of less than
€717,2). Employees are often exposed to bad working conditions, such as unpaid
overtime. There is a lack of paid holidays, and the incidences of sexual and mental
harassment are higher than average (Chulvi 2019: 27). Domestic care workers are also
discriminated against by law since domestic work is registered upon a Special Regime of
Household Employees, as opposed to the Social Security’s General Regime; as a result,
domestic workers do not benefit from the same rights to sick leave or unemployment
subsidy as other workers (León, 2010).
The crisis of social reproduction in Spain deepened after 2008, following the financial
crisis and the response of the Spanish state and the European Union in the form of
austerity (Papadopoulos and Roumpakis, 2018). Unemployment and poverty rates
rocketed. The number of foreclosures increased dramatically, leading to increased
homelessness - especially in low-income neighbourhoods (Blanco et al., 2019). Austerity
measures weakened the conditions necessary for caring including: the social and family
fabric, housing, time, mental health, and income (Palomera, 2014). Those deprived of
social protection became hard-pressed to care for others, which further exacerbated
the social care crisis. Due to the institutional hierarchy in Spain, municipalities depend
on budget transfers from higher administrations. In the context of austerity, municipal
budgets for social spending were significantly reduced. As an economically powerful
city, Barcelona had more financial capacity to partly substitute the reductions from the
state as opposed to municipalist platforms in poorer cities. Nevertheless, Barcelona still
does not have control of revenue or over the conduct of social care domains such as
nursing homes, which are of regional competence.
For our case study, we draw on a documentary analysis of the official sources of local
administration in Barcelona. We accessed 18 policy strategies and reports, and 10 press
releases (2015–2021). Documentation was selected relating to care policies in
Barcelona. In the data gathering process we mainly focused on public municipal
documents related to political statements and policies on domestic care work, whether
private or municipally provided, but also investigated key policies related to care in any
form. The municipality develops these policies mainly through strategic plans released
by the political body in charge of providing social care and other services relevant for
domestic workers (which has been governed by Bcomú in both mandates): The Social
Rights, Global Justice, Feminisms, and LGTBI areas (named Social Rights Area, or SRA).
For this political body, we did extensive research of all the strategic plans and policy
documents produced between 2015 and 2021. We also did selective research on policies
of other departments that related to domestic care work. In addition to the
documentary analysis, we conducted four in-depth semi-structured expert interviews
with Lluís Torrens, the Director of Social Innovation: Social Rights, Global Justice,
Feminisms and LGBTI in the City Hall of Barcelona; Xavier Rubio, the Project Manager in
the Commission of Social and Solidarity Economy of the City Hall of Barcelona; Carmen
Juares, a co-founder of Mujeres Migrantes Diversas, syndicalist, and former live-in carer;
and Maria Rosa Dalurzo, a care worker from Sindillar, an independent union of domestic
and care workers in Barcelona.
The following sections present the findings of our research and are analytically
organised through three key features of care municipalism. These features have been
developed through relating the data from our case study with the theoretical framework
of three intertwined pillars of the care and the commons, namely: common interest,
self-governance, and ensuring the material foundations for reproduction. Through this
iterative engagement, we have constructed three constituent features of care
municipalism (as related to domestic care work): firstly, a feminist narrative of care to
frame strategies; secondly, new forms of organisation for domestic care workers; and
thirdly, broader social infrastructures of care.
Developing a Feminist Narrative of Care
BComú developed a feminist diagnosis of the crisis of care and related it to gender
inequalities that reside in the invisibilisation, naturalisation and under-valorisation of
care. In doing so, BComú created a counter-narrative to contest dominant discourses.
Care has been re-framed as a matter of public responsibility as opposed to a private
issue (which in practice is predominantly ascribed to the work of women). BComú
designed the Democratisation of Care Government Measure (Ajuntament de Barcelona,
2017), based on the diagnoses and recommendations of two feminist scholars (Ezquerra
and Mansilla, 2018) and in consultation with members from social movements. This
measure focused on care recognition, socialisation of care responsibilities (care
commoning), un-gendering the division of care, and reframing the rights of care
receivers as citizens instead of consumers. Other strategic measures followed a similar
discourse, highlighting gender and class inequalities in the provision of care.
The strategic documents produced by BComú condemn the feminisation of care work
and poor labour conditions. They demonstrated how these factors disempower the
workers in both public and private care services, while also resulting in poor care
provision for residents. BComú adopted a multifaceted perspective to social care,
including a recognition of the broader conditions of social reproduction that are needed.
BComú’s new narrative highlights the need to move towards more person-centred care.
It demands the socialisation and co-responsibilisation of care, including new
participatory frameworks and empowerment of female carers to self-organise. Through
this process, BComú have promoted a new political vision for care work in the city that
recognises a common interest between receivers and providers of care.
A webpage entitled ‘Ciutat Cuidadora’ (‘Caring City’) has been created, which aims to
promote the new political vision to residents across Barcelona through explaining the
importance of ‘care’ and denouncing entrenched structural inequalities. Crucially,
BComú recognised the providers of care as subjects who should receive public attention
and policy interventions. This move represents a significant political shift, as people
providing care have traditionally been absent from dominant discourses and policy
frameworks. The City Council’s official documentation highlights the idea that family
carers (who are normally seen as ‘morally obliged’ to care) should be empowered with
the capacity to make free choices as to whether they feel able to care or not. If family
members do choose to provide care, then this care work should be supported by public
institutions, and they should be materially supported to fully participate in society.
During the pandemic, BComú launched the campaign ‘Let’s Take Care of Those Who
Take Care of Us, It Is Just’. This campaign delivered an itinerant orientation service for
live-in carers in affluent neighbourhoods (where domestic care work tends to be
concentrated), including the distribution of leaflets explaining domestic workers’ labour
rights. This new service not only informed workers about their rights but symbolically
demonstrated municipal solidarity with the workers. BComú also used their position to
give visibility to the civil-society demands in different places and support on the state
level the ratification of the 189 Agreement of the International Labour Organisation
concerning the protection of domestic work, which had been developed by associations
of care workers and labour unions.
Transforming the narrative of care to include a more gendered perspective
demonstrates the value of care work in the city. It emphasises how women have always
participated – in one way or another – in the public and productive spheres, as well as
how reproductive and care activities not only take place in the household but extend to
the public sphere. BComú’ have advocated the position that care should not be seen as
the sole responsibility of women, but rather should be recognised as a social and public
obligation (Ajuntament de Barcelona, 2017b: 3). BComú‘s narrative not only embraces
the feminist call for creating more caring cities (Power and Williams, 2020), but it also
creates a significant symbolic rupture with the conceptual divisions around issues of
production/reproduction and private/public. BComú have demonstrated how the
provision of care can be recognised within the fabric of the city by contesting the
discourses and dichotomies that contribute towards the crisis of care.
New Forms of Organisation to Support Care Workers and Commoning Care
BComú has recognised carers as key subjects of social policy. But turning this narrative
into concrete policies has challenges because there are limitations to what can be
achieved at the municipal level. The City Council does not have the power to introduce
laws to protect workers in the private sphere, where many problems exist. A key
proposed area for BComú’s intervention in care organisation was the municipal home
care service. The municipal home care service has previously been configured through
neoliberal logic of New Public Management, with norms and laws that rest upon the
values of competition, standardisation, rationalisation and the sanctity of the free
market. Consequently, tight efficiency rules and minimising costs has ultimately resulted
in poor labour conditions for workers.
BComú’s 2015 electoral programme advocated for a feasibility analysis for
municipalising the externalised home care services. This had been demanded by care
workers’ organisations. However, while Barcelona re-municipalised some services and
created new public companies (for example in the energy sector, see: Angel, 2020), the
proposed reforms to municipal home care service encountered legal, structural and
political barriers. The City Council has two possibilities for municipalisation: either to
create a new public company or to internalise workers inside the public worker’s regime.
Due to competitive rules imposed at the European level that demand new public
companies to be as cost-efficient as competitors, the legal reports of the City Council
concluded that the creation of a public company of care workers was not a viable option.
The other option of internalising the public worker regime of around 4000 care workers
in a City Council that has 13,000 municipal workers was not pursued because of
organisational dynamics, labour regulations, and budgetary limits at the local and
regional level, as well as the austerity rules at the national level. Laws on public hiring
imposed further limits, as service municipalisation would require recruiting municipal
workers through a competitive process, based on the accreditation of formal
competencies, which could result in the expulsion of many currently working home
carers. The lack of progress towards re-municipalisation of care remains a
disappointment for many of those involved.
Due to the difficulties in re-municipalisation of care work, BComú’s strategy has instead
turned to new forms of organisation inside and outside public service delivery structures
to support localised self-organisation. These new forms of organisation have focused
upon fostering a more cooperative organisation of care and rooting it in neighbourhoods
along with the principle of territorial proximity.
A key aspect of BComú’s strategy has been the creation of a new administrative
department that aims to strengthen and expand the cooperative movement. BComú’s
attempts to strengthen the cooperative organisation of care work has been done in
collaboration with an existing labour training and economic activation municipal agency
(‘Barcelona Activa’). The City Council supports the cooperative movement by giving
them visibility, strengthening the network of social and solidarity economy initiatives,
and supporting public and cooperative agencies to procure services from each other.
The migrant cooperatives Mujeres Pa’Lante (which includes many domestic workers as
members) and Ca l’Abril (exclusively dedicated to social care) have been supported by
the BComú administration. Mujeres Pa’Lante has existed as a network and mutual
support association of migrant women in Barcelona since 2007 and provides
psychological and legal support to domestic workers. Mujeres Pa’Lante was financially
assisted to be set up as a cooperative by the City Council. Ca l’Abril was developed
directly by the City Council by gathering care workers and devising a tailored plan to
develop their businesses. After its inception, the organisation started to work in an
incubatory process of the City Council, where they received information and support.
But organising domestic workers within cooperatives is only the first foundation;
enabling these cooperatives to achieve financial sustainability is an arduous task
because it is difficult to compete in the market against providers that are characterised
by a lack of unionisation and low costs.
Despite a vast array of actions, the City Council has been criticised for these new care
initiatives. Syndicalist Carmen Juares, the co-founder of Mujeres Migrantes Diversas,
emphasises how care workers and migrant associations have limited capacity to
participate and influence the policies that have been developed. The association has
experienced barriers in the public tendering process and found it difficult to compete
with larger organisations that have greater technical and financial capabilities. Even with
the training provision, it took two years of pressure by Mujeres Migrantes Diversas to
achieve a compromise and ensure the accessibility of courses for migrant live-in carers
who do not have the time during the weekdays nor the required documentation. Such
limitations reduce the scope for the City Council to fundamentally resolve issues
experienced by domestic care workers. As care worker Maria Rosa Dalurzo explained:
‘nothing has fundamentally changed here…Immigrants in Barcelona can manage their
registration, elsewhere they cannot [and] there are free training courses... but that is
not the essence of our problem’.
Care has also been reorganised on a territorial basis. This has been driven by the
principle of proximity, in which services are organised close to where people use them.
Development of services in a specified area creates the opportunities for fostering a
more effective organisation of care provision, as explained by Torrens: “When you divide
the city into 300 parts, you make a bigger problem smaller [referring to childcare and
elderly care]. You make it more manageable and human scale… It’s about dividing the
problems into smaller portions and dividing responsibility…”.
BComú have supported care and domestic workers (and their organisations) to regulate
and formalise care worker’s contracts (as in the campaigns mentioned before).
Consequently, a pioneering centre Barcelona Cuida (‘Barcelona Cares’) was created with
the aim of becoming a reference office for domestic care workers and family carers. The
centre provides counselling and training on labour and migrant rights, as well as other
types of support to care workers, including psychological aid. The City Council plans to
create more centres around the city in distinct neighbourhood centres. The aim is to
make the existing city services more accessible and to develop singular programs for
caregivers and care receivers - including community and public resources, legal and
labour counselling, and meeting spaces. According to the interviewees, Barcelona Cuida
offers services that are valued among care workers, but the services are not widely
known about. New governance structures to design and manage the centres do not
exist, and participatory spaces to support the involvement of social movements and
advocacy groups are limited. For instance, when it was first inaugurated, the centre did
not cover basic demands of organisations, such as a meeting room and computer access,
nor training or psychological support.
The creation of care superblocks has been piloted in four low-income neighbourhoods
in the city as another reform to organise care on the principle of proximity. Care
superblocks were inspired by an internal report of the municipality and the diffusion of
the Buurtzorg model (Monsen and Block, 2013). The system is based on creating small
teams of up to fifteen care workers. These workers support approximately 40 and 70
people who live in the same residential area (between three and six blocks in the
Eixample district, for example). A recent study showed that working in a reduced space
with a self-managed team improves service quality of care provision and work
conditions for carers (Moreno, 2021). The care superblocks have been created in
Barcelona to support stable communities of care that can improve the quality of service
and the labour conditions of the workers. The care superblocks aim to empower care
workers by creating small teams that self-manage their work, providing them with
physical space to meet and plan their activities, allowing greater communication with
other municipal and health services, and reducing their commuting times between
homes. Full time contracts for the workers are promoted.
The reorganisation of care provision is seen as a first step to activate community assets
in order to developed shared responsibilities for care and provide more tailored support.
By allowing workers to self-organise and adapt to particular household’s needs, it is
expected that improved forms of communication, organisation and co-responsibility
with families and neighborhood actors will emerge. This approach can potentially
strengthen the foundations for communitarian care, such as organising group activities.
Furthermore, it is expected that the efficiency gained through working in localised teams
will create more free working time for care givers, which will then allow them to spend
part of their working hours in designing communitarian activities. This communitarian
dimension has not been developed yet, but the ideas behind care superblocks highlight
the potential of the ‘public’ to foster the ‘commons’ (Martínez-Buján, 2020) and
highlights some ways in which communities can become more involved in care practices
(Moreno, 2021).
Building Social Infrastructures
Many care workers experience the effects of the crisis of social reproduction in their
everyday lives. As Torrens informed us, domestic care workers often need to access
assistance from other areas of social services. It is therefore imperative to also consider
the policies that can support care workers in their lives beyond their paid care work.
While it is outside the scope of this paper to explore all the policies of BComú concerning
social reproduction, in this section we look at some of the ways that social protection
has been developed that impacts on the everyday lives of those who provide care.
In 2019, BComú increased the budget of the Social Rights Area in the domain of social
care. Between 2015 and 2021, the budget of social services, social promotion, health,
and education increased by 39.7% (according to municipal budget information provided
to us by Torrens). The municipal home care service, the second-largest public tender of
the City Council in terms of budget, saw a significant increase from a total of €77m in
2015 to €101m in 2019. This increase in budgets demonstrates how municipal
institutions can adapt budget priorities to meet the material demands of people in ways
that are not possible through small scale alternatives.
Childcare services have been made more accessible by constructing new childcare
buildings in shipping containers, which allowed for the fast creation of publicly managed
buildings with a territorial perspective (based on the needs of each district and
neighbourhood). BComú introduced progressive pricing for municipal nursery schools
and raised the age that children are eligible for public after-school care from four to
twelve years old for low-income families. These reforms facilitated the entry of low-
income families and therefore reduced the care burden on women who would not
otherwise have been able to afford it. BComú plan to increase the number of municipal
nursery schools from 102 to 115 over the next four years, adding a thousand more
places for children to reach a total of 9500. The new plan involves a budget of €24.9m
and expands the services offered by nursery schools, extending more care activities and
services to vulnerable families (Zechner 2021).
BComú’s designed policies to provide support to people through the pandemic that
recognised the disproportionate impact it was having (Shea Baird, 2020). BComú
increased spending on social services and specialist support, for example through
additional support for women experiencing domestic violence. The municipality froze
rent payments for residents of public housing. There has also been an active registration
of undocumented migrants as official residents by BComú. As a result, migrants were
able to access housing, health, and education services that they would otherwise be
denied. Moreover, Barcelona invested €1.5m in dealing with the mental health impact
of the pandemic The city has identified the importance of strengthening grassroots
community initiatives beyond city hall and provided funding for them. While in many
places the pandemic exacerbated inequalities, these reforms have helped reduce some
of the most deleterious effects.
Advancing Care Municipalism Through the Lens of the Commons
Through this paper, we have investigated the case of BComú to explore a concrete
example of what Dowling has termed ‘care municipalism’. We have primarily focused
on migrant domestic workers in the domain of adult social care as this represents a key
nexus of inequality in the crisis of care, and as such represents a pivotal foundation for
democratic transformation and social justice. BComú’s strategy for the care crises
demonstrates how the public sector can begin to organise care based on the principles
of the commons. BComú’s feminist narrative of care has helped to build a new common
social interest. Through the project of care superblocks, public municipal assets have
been used to provide a foundation for more communitarian provision of care beyond
the current market/state dichotomy. The construction of social infrastructures helps to
embed crucial local support for residents. BComú have made important steps forward
to develop a more caring city.
Despite clear advances, it is important to reflect on the limitations of BComu’s
experiments in care to develop the concept of care municipalism. BComú has recognised
the importance of care and has helped to provide training for care workers. However,
despite the stated aim to alter the existing unequal gender division of care work
(Ajuntament de Barcelona, 2017), the measures to address this remain insignificant (Celi
and Ezquerra, 2020). The same limitations are evident with the persistence of class, race
and citizenship status inequalities in the allocation of care. While the need for a free
choice to care is highlighted concerning family carers, no similar incentive has been
created by BComú concerning waged care workers, who are mostly low-earning
immigrants working in poor conditions.
To be recognised as a social force of transformation (De Angelis, 2014), the municipalist
strategy must proceed beyond the narrative recognition of care and towards the
concrete improvement of labour conditions for carers; it must empower them with real
choices and disrupt the current regime of social reproduction based on the divisions
between native population and migrants (del Re, 2020). Zechner (2021: 96) has
explained that one of the main limitations of care commoning under new municipalism
in Spain is a certain blindness to the issues of race and class. Our case study confirms
Zechner’s critique on the absence of migrant perspectives and active participation in
shaping municipalist discourses on the commons (Zechner 2021: 153). Expanding the
concept of care municipalism through a lens of the commons would mean that a
strategy is needed to build a common interest between women and men, native
population and migrants, and upper class and working-class communities. By creating a
more comprehensive common interest on the foundation of care, support for
transformation of the existing system can be broadened.
The need to overcome a division between a caring administration and cared-for citizens
is fundamental to building care municipalism on the logics of the commons. In terms of
communal cooperation and self-governance, the case of Barcelona reveals the dangers
of reproducing existing hierarchies and creating a division between those who care and
those who are cared for; for instance, Barcelona’s participatory framework for the
design and implementation of care policies stands between public tenders that are
highly bureaucratised and remain inaccessible for non-professionalised collectives. The
limited expansion of democratic modes of governance in the domain of care work has
been a disappointment. While there have been significant barriers, the limitations of
BComú’s interventions demonstrates the need to imagine and effectively common the
governance structures to create a system of collective decision making between the
municipality and citizens, as well as between professional carers and those who receive
care. The same process of commoning governance can be used to build broader social
and spatial infrastructures to support a more caring city.
The care superblocks represent an important measure to think prefiguratively about
fostering communitarian care. But there are also critical challenges to consider with this
model. In an overworked capitalist society, social reproduction is rooted in capitalist
accumulation and its logic of imposing intensive labour. Therefore, shifting care
responsibilities from the households to the neighbourhood could enable capital’s
tendency to exploit caring work without paying for it. To avoid such exploitation,
initiatives such as the care superblocks would require a simultaneous partial de-
commodification of social life. Policies would need to be implemented that break up the
relation between income and labour to support the equal participation of residents in
social life. Failing to do this means that the commons could easily be co-opted and end
up supporting capitalist accumulation as another element of its current care fix (Federici
2011, De Angelis 2014, Dowling 2018). A ‘communitarian care’ model in the current
context could, in fact, mean that people end up doing more unpaid caring work in their
time outside of waged work. This would result in people having less time for
autonomous activities, such as active political participation - which is a hallmark of
municipalism and a condition sine qua non for altering the whole social reproductive
regime. Commoning without the material assets for a more equal distribution of care
responsibilities means that only those who command the material resources for their
own reproduction can fully participate in the caring city.
Putting care at the centre of democratic politics requires a transformation of the current
division between care and wealth, as well as between the economic sphere and the
reproductive one (Tronto, 2013). BComú has not fundamentally transformed these
divisions. It maintains different departments for economic affairs and social services, for
the productive and reproductive spheres. The danger of the commons being co-opted
is related to this maintained division, whereby the community might be seen as a
mechanism through which to save on what the economic approach sees as a “cost” for
increasing resources for production (Federici, 2011; Martínez-Buján, 2020).
Municipalism has been most effective in promoting the commons when it has engaged
citizens through assemblies and organised around concrete material demands of social
reproduction. These participatory politics can form a strategy to advocate for more
competencies for the municipality to address the care crises. To secure the material
foundations that can support the commons and overcome the challenges imposed by
limited budgets and capabilities, cities could aim to become stronger political actors and
demand more powers from the state. Municipal institutions could collaborate
effectively with social movements from their cities to make these demands collectively.
Municipal institutions can work with these new movements to collectively pressure the
state to provide more competencies and investment to address the care crisis. If this
was successful, then municipal would have more possibilities to expand the commons
and sustain the material foundations that are needed.
Despite the limitations of BComú’s experiments in care, there are clear insights that we
can draw upon from our case study to inform the conceptual and practical development
of care municipalism. Bookchin (2015) argued that minimum reforms aim to improve
daily life, while maximum reforms are about building on the ideas produced through
these reforms to encourage the imagination of alternative forms of social relations
beyond capitalism. Applied here, BComú have instigated a series of what we might
consider being minimum reforms. These reforms can be used to think more expansively
about alternatives to the existing organisation of care. An approach that is rooted in the
commons can push the practice and theory of care municipalism further; it can also
create the foundation to overcome the neglect from theorists of social reproduction on
questions of democratic control. Analysing BComu’s case through the commons allows
us to reflect on the limits of Barcelona’s experiments in care municipalism and advance
ideas through which to build the commons through the public.
Engaging with the improvements and limitations of Barcelona has helped to identify the
importance of the commons to the concept of care municipalism: firstly, there should
be a common interest beyond the current capitalist social reproductive regime which
addresses inequalities of race, gender, and class: BComú’s case demonstrates the need
to develop a common interest that can overcome divisions between the carers and
those who are cared for, as well as broader social inequalities. Secondly, there should
be support for communal cooperation and self-governance: the case of BComú
highlights the limitations when the municipalist platform creates or uses the communal
assets for creating local welfare without the mechanisms for their self-governance; and
finally, the material dimension that involves the assets that allow for self-reproduction
should be developed: Barcelona shows the need to consider the material conditions
upon which communitarian care can be effectively implemented. Barcelona’s case
shows the limits of care municipalism when all the pillars are not implemented together.
The approach that we have demonstrated through this paper can be used to guide
collaborative theory building on care municipalism to create more caring cities. The
theory and practice of care municipalism can be developed through future research that
explores empirical cases of democratic experiments in care. The analytical framework
identified through our case study can be used to guide investigation into firstly, the
foundational narrative of care in the city; secondly, new forms of organising care that
are being created; and thirdly, the building of social infrastructures to support equal
participation. Further analysis to assess the extent to which experiments relate to the
logic of the commons can help to inform an assessment of an alternative social
organisation of care in different locations. Urban scholars can work alongside those
involved in practices of care and the commons at a municipal level to contribute towards
collaborative theory building. These collaborations can help to create more caring cities
to fundamentally challenge the democratic and care deficits at the heart of capitalist
societies.
Acknowledgements
We are enormously grateful to our friend, Lorenzo Velotti, who invested his work in
the process of development of the very first draft of this article. Also, our thanks go to
the editors of the special issue, especially Matthew Thompson, and to Ugo Rossi, Luca
Recano and Mauro Pinto. We are also grateful to three anonymous reviewees for your
positive, very encouraging, and useful reviews. The comments and contributions of all
of you mentioned here greatly assisted a long work on this article, eventually leading
to its current version.
Funding
This article was prepared as one of Angelina Kussy’s paper-based doctoral thesis’
publications and as such received the financial support from the Secretariat for
Universities and Research (AGAUR) of the Ministry of Business and Knowledge of the
Government of Catalonia in form of individual grant (2020 FI-B2 00033). David
Palomera’s contribution was supported by the individual grant from the same
institution (grant number: 2020FI_B1 00049). Furthermore, the article was developed
within the framework of the I+D+I research project CARE MODEL (The long-term care
model in transition: political, family and community strategies to face the
consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic; PID2020-114887RB-C31), in which Angelina
Kussy participates. It is funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and
conducted at the Rovira i Virgili University (2020-2024). IP’s: Montserrat Soronellas
and Yolanda Bodoque.
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