Imagining the urban care infrastructures for freedom: On the transformation of labour and care in Tokyo's collective childcare

In societies where both labour power and care have been commodified and care further systemically devalued, ‘care’ has emerged as a critical concept for social transformation. However, care transformation cannot be separated from labour transformation. This paper redefines care as the affective-ethical dimension inherent in labour (metabolic activity) and theorises labour-care transformation as a political-ecological process of world-making from an urban political ecology perspective. The study examines Chinbotsukazoku (Sinking Family), a childcare experiment in 1990’s Tokyo emerging when the Japanese welfare model began to collapse. Forged through encounters with Japan's disability movements, participants rejected the dominant care infrastructure—wage labour, the nuclear family, and state welfare—and actively invited strangers into care spaces, constituting what this paper calls ‘the urban care infrastructure’—relational and affective patterns through which strangers meet, correspond, and build shared forms of life, becoming a commons with others . Drawing on 11 volumes of childcare diaries and rich socio-historical contextualisation, this study reveals how the alternative infrastructure was created through ‘unproductive work’ and ‘relaxed care’. Theoretically, the paper extends UPE's metabolic analysis to subjectivity production. Empirically, it demonstrates how alternative infrastructure is constituted through open metabolism. Politically, it decentres care and UPE scholarship by showing how diverse alternatives emerge within specific socio-historical contexts, embodying the legacy of autonomous movements. Ultimately, the paper reveals that care transformation requires cultivating bodily capacities to entangle with others through working together, building forms of interdependence that spread through countless variations rather than universal forms.