Care commons: Infrastructural (re)compositions for life sustenance through yet against regimes of chronic crisis

Abstract

Infrastructures constitute key sites in the contemporary crisis regime. Emerging infrastructural configurations, particularly in the urban setting, are raising questions about the possibilities and challenges that these transformations may bring regarding more just and sustainable modes of social provision. Attention is being drawn to the grassroots, where experiments with novel forms of organisation are bringing about new collective contexts and political conceptions. In this context, infrastructure has been proposed as a concept to both examine contemporary crises and devise ways to cope with breakdown that can gesture towards living alternatives at the service of life. In this article, I engage this debate through an ethnographic study of two grassroots initiatives in Athens (Greece) intervening in the realm of life sustenance. I will show that these people-driven initiatives (re)compose networked infrastructures in ways that advance organisational modes of social provision different to institutions, and forms of political engagement and possibility. They do so by infrastructuring care through commoning. I will argue that infrastructural systems of care commons contribute to an infrastructural imagination that moves away from modern ideals towards values of relationality, conductivity, care and repair, which may nurture a transformative politics for a world in crisis, yet against crisis regimes.