Towards Caring Cities: Centering Care for Urban Development and Sustainability
By: Technical Secretariat of the Global Alliance for Care
Care, Inequality, and the Making of Our World
Care is central to our societies and economies. It allows individuals to flourish, build their capacities and participate in the labor force while sustaining a livable environment. Yet, due to conventional gender roles, care work is mostly relegated to women, underrecognized and undervalued as a fundamental motor for our communities. Globally, women dedicate three times more time to unpaid care work than men, contributing an estimated 9% of global GDP or 11 trillion USD. This unpaid work often leads to time poverty: A lack of time for women and girls to dedicate to their well-being, be it through participation in the labor force, education, or rest and leisure. Paid care workers, meanwhile, often face low wages, precarious working conditions, and limited social security protections.
The COVID-19 pandemic drew global attention to these injustices and brought care work to the forefront as a critical issue requiring urgent attention. Addressing these challenges requires a gender-transformative lens that reimagines our societies and economies. Placing care at the center implies recognizing the interdependence of all living beings and moving away from systems rooted in extraction and exploitation. Transforming care systems also lays the groundwork for tackling interconnected issues like climate change, migration, and aging populations.
Practical tools have been developed to guide us towards this horizon: The ILO famously developed the 5Rs of care framework, which calls to 1) recognize the centrality of care for our societies and the labor that care workers, mostly women, do to sustain our societies, 2) reduce the time, effort and drudgery involved in care tasks, 3) redistribute this work across all of society and all adults, including men, 4) reward care workers with decent working conditions, and finally, 5) represent care workers through organization and participation in decision-making processes.
Centering Care in Our Cities
Such an ambitious vision will require a whole-of-society approach. Governments, both national and subnational, must be considered the primary duty-bearers for care, but the private sector, communities and households also have a part to play. Cities are a particularly important actor in bringing about a new social organization of care. Far from being neutral spaces, cities influence human and non-human relations and access to resources, with the potential to either reinforce inequalities or foster inclusion and equity.
Recognizing cities' potential to drive change has led to the development of multiple paradigms for urban design and development: feminist, child-friendly, and, more recently, caring cities. The latter allows us to reimagine and engineer our cities to center care for people and the planet.
Local governments and authorities have often been in charge of important care-supporting infrastructure, such as water, transport, and electricity. These are all fundamental to women’s care work, and a lack of access to these resources significantly increases the time needed to carry it out. Cities also play a critical role in providing care services such as healthcare, childcare, and long-term care, among others, and ensuring accessibility across the urban environment.
Designing caring cities means seeking to recognize, reduce, and redistribute care through urban planning and the provision of public city services. For example, it involves generating data on care needs in their territories, providing quality, accessible, and sufficient care services connecting them to households, and offering spaces for caregiver self-care. Caring cities also reward and represent care workers by promoting decent work and the formalization, professionalization, and organization of care workers.
Cities That Care: Best Practices in Urban Policy
Around the world, we have observed growing commitment to the care agenda as States have mobilized to implement comprehensive care policies such as the National Integrated Care System of Uruguay. However, progress at the national level tends to be sluggish and plagued by political tensions and/or rigid bureaucratic structures. Local governments have proven to be great innovators in transforming care economies, despite gridlocks or lack of political will at the national level. The Bogotá district care system, described in this issue, has become a world-renowned model of urban development that centers care and gender equality.
The Barcelona City Council launched the Barcelona Cuida (Barcelona Cares) program. The initiative aims to raise awareness of the city’s care-related resources, including services and programs both public and private, while also promoting exchange and networking among caregivers. The program consists of an information, networking, training, and awareness-raising center, as well as, since 2022, a Caregiver Card. The latter is provided free of charge to domestic workers and all paid and unpaid caregivers. It aims to support the well-being of caregivers by enabling access to personalized resources such as psychological support, legal assistance, and recreational and educational activities.
In Iztapalapa, Mexico City’s largest and most populous municipality, former municipal president and current Mayor of Mexico City, Clara Brugada, launched the Utopías project to address women’s time poverty and lack of time for self-care. While the project initially aimed to reclaim public space lost to abandonment or crime, it quickly expanded to account for women’s unpaid care work. The Utopías are recreational spaces offering arts and sports activities, but they also include health, laundry, and leisure services. There, women can enjoy a spa treatment while they leave their children for their extracurriculars.
Finally, in Nagarayema, Japan, the city government staved off a financial crisis due to its declining population by rethinking urban planning to support mothers. The city, a popular living destination due to its proximity to the country’s capital and its more affordable housing, set off to attract young families. Authorities devised innovative solutions: a low-priced school bus system based at the train stations where parents usually leave for work, equipped with childcare services and professionals. The city also implemented an entrepreneurship program for mothers, created co-working spaces for new mothers to ease their return to the workforce, and improved recreational and natural spaces.
Elevating Caring Cities: The Global Alliance for Care
Many of these best practices and more have been explored through the Global Alliance for Care’s publications, webinars, and communities of practice, among many others. Launched in 2021 during the Generation Equality Forum, the Global Alliance for Care is the first multistakeholder community seeking to promote the care agenda from the global to the local levels. As this agenda gains momentum worldwide, it becomes necessary to create an enabling environment where key actors, including policymakers, can learn from each other, advocate collectively for this issue, and generate paradigm-shifting narratives on care.
Today, over three years since its creation, the Alliance comprises over 240 members representing national and local governments, civil society organizations, international organizations, academia and the private sector. It has advocated transforming care economies in such fora as the Commission on the Status of Women sessions, the United Nations General Assembly, the G20 and the Regional Conference on Women of Latin America and the Caribbean. It has also fostered exchanges and learning on the right to care and financing for care policies. Lastly, it has developed communications materials to elevate the voices of caregivers and receivers.
The Alliance continues to grow together with its members. This community hopes to incorporate more actors from the Mediterranean region, which faces similar conditions such as conflict, migration flows, and often-limited state infrastructure. All of these issues have important consequences on care infrastructure and women’s well-being, and the region stands to gain importantly from the platform the Alliance offers to explore creative solutions and gain practical knowledge.
Find out more about the Alliance here, and read more about care-related best practices in the publication “30 Succesful Experiences to Recognize, Reduce, Redistribute, Reward and Represent Care Work” (translation forthcoming), as well as in the Global Digital Community on Care.
