Sustaining Care-Full Public Spaces

This paper develops a multidimensional framework for sustaining care-full public spaces. We open by engaging with key understandings of the affective and relational dimensions of both public spaces and urban care scholarship. We then set out the elements of a framework for conceptualising the possibility of care-full public spaces. Writing from feminist and decolonial standpoints, we review emerging and foundational research to delineate three key components of such an approach: (1) governance, (2) materialities and design, and (3) performing public spaces. We then apply the framework, grounding our analysis of care in public spaces in a case study of caring for and as Country in Sydney, Australia. Throughout the paper we emphasise the generative possibility of care as an evaluative frame and central practice that sustains public spaces.