Cities of care? Towards more ‘scalar-attuned’ perspectives in urban care research

The expanding scholarship on ‘caring’ or ‘care-full’ cities has usefully reconceptualised cities as spaces of care and, by exposing real-world local initiatives, compellingly argued in favour centring care in urban governance and planning. Arguably, however, the insufficiently nuanced understanding and use of the concept of scale has weakened the analytical grip of this body of work on how and which practices and relations of care emerge, with which impact and for whom. Relatedly, the subtle but persisting tendency to foreground the urban as the primary site of caring has undercut the possibility to problematise and repoliticise care as a multiscalar field of praxis and intervention. This intervention develops a sympathetic critique of research on urban care, calling for more ‘scalar-attuned’ perspectives that explicitly and reflexively engage with the concept of scale. To illustrate the relevance of our argument, we call for the (re)insertion of the national scale into scholarship on urban caring and highlight three intertwined modalities in which the national co-constitutes care in the city. We do so not to demand top-down state intervention to care, but to invite scholars working on urban caring to consider, discuss and contest the full spectrum of scales-as-relations that constitute the practices and politics of (un)caring.