Care and social language linked to the built environment: Amsterdam and Barcelona cases
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.26439/limaq2026.n017.7911Keywords:
blackboxing, care, environmental crisis, public action, urban environmentsAbstract
The article addresses care as a language of public action in the context of environmental crises, through a comparative study of Amsterdam and Barcelona. Both cities, celebrated as global urban success stories, exemplify processes of blackboxing (Latour, 2001), where models from the Global North are projected as universal, rendering invisible the conflicts that shaped them that shaped them. In Amsterdam, the movement Stop de Kindermoord emerged in response to high child mortality caused by road accidents, prompting policies for safer active mobility; in Barcelona, the climate emergency and a fatal accident mobilized citizens and accelerated urban redesign. The research asks: Who are the main actors in constructing the discourse of urban care? and Which languages of public action are employed? The analysis shows how conflicts around care, through forms of situated co-production, can act as catalysts of systemic urban change in other geographic contexts.
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References
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