Alternate infrastructures of care: Restoring people's abilities to care in a city of thresholds

Circular grassroots initiatives worldwide—such as repair movements, libraries of things, and community composting—are experimenting with innovative practices to address the intertwined waste, climate, and broader socio-ecological crises. Challenges related to space and to the construction of alternative infrastructures of care are emergent strands of research in the circular grassroots literature that require further exploration. Informed by a food-saving initiative in Gothenburg and drawing on the concepts of infrastructures of care and threshold spatiality, this article examines how such infrastructures expand and restore our ability to provide and receive care. The study is based on three years of ethnographic research, focus groups, interviews, and participatory visual methods with volunteers and participants in one of the initiative's hubs at the University of Gothenburg.

The paper shows how this infrastructure intervenes in large-scale waste management systems by redirecting surplus food from waste treams. Through theatricality, it inverts the invisibility of food waste by ‘turning the inside out’, exposing the end of the loop to users and raising awareness of systemic challenges within unsustainable global food regimes. These infrastructures also carve thresholds, mediating encounters between people with differing life courses, and nurturing a sense of the self that restores individual's capacity to care collectively. Theatricality further inverts the stigma associated with care-receiving, transforming ‘care-receivers’ into active providers of care, embodying Tronto's notion of homines curans. Although small in scale, such infrastructures demonstrate the potential to scale through interlocking with the infrastructures of highly legitimate organisations, such as universities and business schools.