In this guest post, Dr Nina Ebner and Dr Matina Kapsali reflect on the results of the workshop “Grassroots Infrastructures and Urban Social Reproduction”, funded by the Urban Studies Foundation. As part of an effort to build sustained collaborations, the organisers also launched the “Urban Social Reproduction” network, a growing platform for ongoing exchange across disciplines and geographies.
The two-day virtual workshop Grassroots Infrastructures and Urban Social Reproduction was held over Zoom on 30 and 31 May, 2024. It was organised by USF postdocs Nina Ebner (Colegio de México) and Matina Kapsali (University of Manchester), and it was funded by the Urban Studies Foundation. The impetus of the workshop was to bring scholars and community-based organisations together from different urban contexts to think through how urban communities are building the material and social infrastructures, in response to, in the absence of, and to contest both long-standing (uneven) dynamics of disinvestment and an evolving crisis of care that impact their reproduction. The workshop brought together over 100 emerging and leading scholars and activists/practitioners from both the Global North and South to explore: 1) the ways that grassroots infrastructures are built and sustained through the everyday struggles of urban residents; and 2) how these infrastructures function as a dual form of urban social reproduction and political transformation.
Day one consisted of two sessions. The presentations of the first session, Grassroots Infrastructures as Spaces of Political Transformation, Everyday Life, and Resistance, were empirically rooted in different contexts, from Greece to Puerto Rico, the UK, Mexico, and beyond, and explored a diverse set of themes, including but not limited to: how the construction of grassroots infrastructures make spaces of politics that include ways of relating beyond the logic of markets and states; how researchers can learn from communities’ already existing theories of change; how conceptions of infrastructure help to break down barriers between political transformation and everyday life; the potentialities of a post-extractive future of housing; what we can learn about the uneven development of infrastructure from the experiences of workers who build and fix the city; the way that social reproduction functions as a space of resistance. Session two, The Gendered Politics of Social Reproduction in the City, also explored a diverse set of themes, including: the ways that intimacy can function as a form of infrastructure; care during times of crisis and the political potentialities of the idea of caring democracies; the embodied experiences of women construction workers building the city but also advocating for labor rights; the forms of gendered depletion interwoven with debt management; what an attention to mobilities can teach us about the gendered forms of inequality that make cities function but that also can be transgressive.
The second day of the workshop was designed to prioritise the voices of community-based organisations actually engaged in the work of urban social reproduction. It started with a closed session of 23 participants, both academics and advocates, with representatives from the following organisations: Colectivarte/La Promesa (Ciudad Juárez, Mexico), Luminas (San Luis Potosi, Mexico), Irida Women’s Center (Thessaloniki, Greece), Heart and Parcel (Manchester, UK), Inspire Women Oldham (Manchester, UK), the Austerity + Altered Lifecourses project (Manchester, UK). The closed session was structured around a zine-making workshop, during which participants created zines by sharing and discussing their contexts, experiences, and organising work. Connections, differences, and solidarities emerged, for example, around shared challenges, working with and against the state, and using activities like food preparation or jewellery making as part of political education and movement building.. For the zine-making activity, we used Miro, a digital collaboration platform designed to facilitate remote communication. The zine-making exercise helped participants to experiment and share their experiences and ideas creatively. Participants expressed excitement at making connections and expressed interest in continuing conversations after the workshop’s conclusion.
The second, and final, session of day two was open to the public. It featured a roundtable discussion with the following community-based organisations: (a) Colectivarte/La Promesa (Ciudad Juárez), (b) Heart&Parcel (Manchester), (c) Irida Women’s Center (Thessaloniki), and (d) Inspire Women Oldman (Manchester). The participating organisations presented their community building work and reflected on the realities, challenges, and successes of grassroots collaboration and transformation. Many presenters echoed or picked up on insights from the first day of presentations. For example, Colectivarte reflected on Amy Horton/Joe Penny’s point before about cities as resources for the private sector and spoke about how that manifested in northern Mexico.
Overall, the two-day workshop sparked a lively discussion around grassroots infrastructures and urban social reproduction and brought into dialogue early-career and more established scholars with community organisations across contexts (Mexico, Greece, and the UK). Throughout the workshop, we prioritised communicating across linguistic divides and bringing together organisations that work locally in different geographical contexts. Other days of the event featured simultaneous translation in English and Spanish, and participants expressed enthusiasm and excitement about having translation services (as did the audience).
Notwithstanding the important debates initiated in events such as this workshop, they often start and finish during the one or two days of the event. This lack of continuity does not enable the building of sustained and long-term collaborations between scholars and activists. Aiming to challenge this practice, we envisioned this workshop to be the first step of a long-term collaboration between academics and practitioners working on urban social reproduction and grassroots infrastructures. As a result, we created a website that functions as a living repository related to this ongoing collaboration. It houses the outputs of the 2024 International Workshop and, at the same time, functions as a convergence space for an emerging network of scholars, activists, and community organisations working around themes of urban and socio-material infrastructures, acting as a hub for the network’s activities, events, and publications. In January 2025, we launched the “Urban Social Reproduction” network. We envision this network to be a platform that brings together activists, scholars, and practitioners working at the intersection of critical urban studies, feminist geography, and feminist political economy, on issues of social reproduction and grassroots infrastructure. Right now it has a membership of over 70 participants located all over the world. We plan to use the network to build community and to spark collaboration. If interested, please join us by sending an email to urbansocialrepro@gmail.com.