Architectures of Caring Encounters with Street Homelessness
Final Report Abstract
The project looked at how the city prefigures possibilities for care. Drawing on insights from an ethnographic study of Polish homeless migrants in Berlin and their experiences with care in the city, it identified a complex ecology of social practices and material arrangements that, in acting infrastructurally to sustain precarious urban lives, generatively shape the city's caring capacity. Polish migrants make up the majority of Berlin's non-German homeless population. Since most of them are either not entitled or practically unable to claim state benefits, they rely on care that operates in the city beyond the local welfare system, mainly through non-state emergency services, the city’s material infrastructure, and people’s care-full non/engagement. Taken together, these care infrastructures form a life-sustaining web that interweaves multiple and diverse sites of care and extends throughout the city. Prefiguring the everyday work of caretaking, maintenance, and repair, this web sustains Polish migrants throughout their experience of homelessness in Berlin. The incapacity of the state and its institutions to look after all members of urban society underscores the importance of the study's findings regarding urban care as a means of social protection and the conditions that make it possible. In particular, city dwellers with migrant backgrounds who are formally and/or practically excluded from local welfare state systems find themselves devoid of the social protection provided by state-based social solidarity. Against this background, the question of informal means of social protection becomes increasingly important.
Publications
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Caring Capacity of the City – Virtual Exhibition. Artsteps
Martini N. & Rivero Z.
