Cape Town’s community kitchens as healing commons: The politics of care in a fractured city

Abstract

This paper explores how community kitchens in Cape Town, predominantly led by women from low-income areas, function as everyday infrastructures of solidarity and resistance. Drawing on participatory action research conducted between 2020 and 2024, we apply a feminist perspective on community kitchens as urban food commons. In a city marked by extreme and racialised spatial inequalities, these women-led initiatives respond to chronic food insecurity, gender-based violence (GBV) and persistent gang violence, through care and organising. Drawing on commoning as a transformative social paradigm, and on healing justice, we argue that community kitchens in Cape Town serve both as pragmatic responses to chronic food insecurity and as sites of embodied healing, addressing intergenerational trauma, systemic neglect and violence. These spaces nourish more than bodies: They offer emotional and physical safety, (gender-based) violence prevention and moments of dignity amid structural abandonment. As such, these spaces serve as temporary safety nets and embody feminist commoning practices that recall traditions of caring while challenging extractive, colonial-capitalist urban systems. We also attend to the contradictions these spaces embody: the feminisation and extraction of care labour, the risk of state co-optation, and tensions between invisibility as protection and recognition as a political demand.