Urban Spaces of Crisis Solidarity: Mutual Aid, Prefiguration, and Critical Imaginaries

Abstract

This study engages with urban spaces of crisis solidarity through the case of Oxford Mutual Aid (OMA). Providing food under an ethic of care and solidarity, OMA's everyday practices contest the neoliberal order by opening material, relational, and imaginative space to enact and envision alternative ways of being. At the same time, OMA embodies the tensions of interstitial urban movements struggling to sustain non-hierarchical forms of organisation within a hostile political-economic landscape. Their capacity for more transformative or agonistic politics is structurally constrained by the very conditions they seek to address, leading to an emphasis on social reproduction over overt political disruption. I centre this paradox in the recurring phrase that OMA “shouldn't exist”, reading it as a powerful discursive and material critique of the status quo, a foundation for solidaristic socio-material relations, and an ambiguous, yet open, gesture toward more just and caring political futures.