Spatial practices of care among women facing housing precarity: a study in greater Lisbon during the pandemic

Abstract

COVID-19 made visible the care world. Care includes everything we do to sustain, preserve, and repair our world so that we may live in it as well as possible. This paper addresses carework spatially, bridging the concepts of spatial justice, participation, situated knowledge and solidarity, with the pandemic as a backdrop. Based on an action research project, this paper elaborates a conceptualisation of care, both as a practice and a process, focusing on the experience of women living in a context of housing precarity. Using mixed methods, including in-depth interviews, ethnographic work, and workshops, it aims to deepen the comprehension of socio-spatial care practices during COVID-19, focusing on the agency of poor marginalised women, providing frameworks of care within the places they inhabit, also considering the impact on the research itself. Empirically driven, this paper shows that housing precarity and housing deficits affect women more dramatically. Notably, those spatial care practices also reveal forms of mutual aid and solidarity capable of questioning - or even overcoming - obstacles created or intensified by the pandemic.