Over the last decades, critical urban scholarship has shown that spatial injustice is not an accidental feature of urban life but the outcome of historically situated power relations embedded in planning, housing policies and capitalist accumulation. Yet these debates have often privileged formal politics and visible mobilisation, sidelining the mundane practices through which inequality is lived, negotiated and contested in everyday life. This article addresses that blind spot by bringing feminist theories of care and social reproduction into dialogue with spatial justice. Drawing on long-term feminist ethnographic research in a working-class neighbourhood in the northern periphery of Granada (southern Spain), the article examines how women collectivise care and organise mutual support in a context marked by segregation, infrastructural neglect and territorial stigma. Rather than treating care as a merely social or adaptive response to deprivation, the analysis conceptualises it as a political and spatial practice that reconfigures the conditions of urban life. Empirically, the article traces a repertoire of everyday urban politics: the defence and regulation of shared spaces, neighbourhood-based infrastructures of care, and the scaling up of care networks into institutional claims-making and disruptive collective action. The findings challenge androcentric definitions of politics and argue that rethinking spatial justice requires recognising care-based practices as central to the right to the city.

This paper revisits and revitalizes an older yet still relevant debate regarding the explanatory power and political traction of assemblage urbanism. The discussion, which unfolded across the pages of City in 2011, involved a key critique: that assemblage urbanism is too theoretically vague to clearly identify the ‘social forces’ of urban becoming—offering, in turn, limited value to those seeking to explain, interrogate, and intervene in urban realities. We address this theoretical quandary by employing Theodore Schatzki’s practice-based ontology. Following Schatzki’s lead, we articulate practices as the social forces of urban assemblages, contributing, in turn, an analytic for understanding the powers through which urban phenomena take shape. This analytic is put to work through two empirically informed vignettes on urban homelessness and the constitution of urban energy demand. These provide two different takes on how social practices underpin urban assemblages, with the rigors of performance highlighted in the first instance and constitutive chains of action emergent of multiple practices in the other. By articulating a practice-based account of the social forces of urban assemblages, we contribute to conceptual debates long at the heart of City on the power and politics of urban becoming and discussion of possibilities for intervention. The key implications of this contribution for future critical urban research are laid out.

This photo-essay explores the migration crisis that has hit Cuba in recent years, with a focus on street-front material traces such as real estate sale signs testifying to the material cultural belongings left behind by people leaving or attempting to leave the country. The authors collected photographs in Santiago de Cuba from 2023 to 2025. We collaborated to develop collage visuals to show at a glance the quantity of houses for sale and the creativity that emerged in a period of extreme scarcity. Yet, we argue that the Cuban ingenio, the ingenuity and creativity often referred to as a resource to navigate daily difficulties, is fading away like the surface of a house-for-sale sign exposed to daylight. Instead, a sense of betrayal in the revolutionary project—for which home-making, home ownership, and housing were a materialization of the socialist values—is leading to a lack of hope in a future on the island. The images aim to visually portray the story of a forced diasporic movement and the betrayal of a promise of belonging deeply rooted in the Cuban Revolution. Therefore, we explore what the street signs tell about this story. How are they representative of a society at loss of its own sense of belonging and home-making? Through visual methods, we aim to record and recount how material culture testifies to socio-political issues such as forced migration, diaspora, and belonging.

This paper examines how street vendors in Chandigarh deploy everyday design as a political strategy of spatial negotiation. Focusing on the rehri—a mobile handcart, it traces how restrictive bylaws produced non-compliance by design. In response, rehriwallas collaborated with local technicians to retrofit existing carts, developing an electrified rehri that was affordable, locally sourced, and legally legible. These interventions exemplify everyday design—iterative material adaptations produced within the constraints of informal work, where technical decisions are inseparable from questions of formal compliance and affordability. Read against Chandigarh’s modernist legacy, where mobility functioned as a technique of discipline and displacement, the redesigned rehri reclaims mobility as a tactic of presence. Electrification also enabled the cart to be reframed as municipal innovation and adopted as a formal program, culminating in a mayoral launch of an electric rehri fleet. The paper argues that everyday design operates as a material politics of legibility—an ongoing negotiation through which informal workers reconfigure the terms of recognition. By centering retrofit and affordability as forms of technical expertise, the case expands what counts as design beyond professionalized planning and demonstrates how informality is not residual to the city, but a generative mode of city-making.

Curatorial work has increasingly transcended the confines of traditional cultural institutions, intervening in diverse urban contexts, from prominent public squares to marginal and disused sites. This article positions ‘the curatorial’ as a form of critical spatial agency, interrogating how curatorial thinking and practice mediate public interests, contest institutional power, and reimagine civic life. Drawing on foundational and contemporary scholarship—including Lefebvre’s production of space, Rendell’s site-writing, Awan, Schneider, and Till’s spatial agency, Miessen’s antagonistic participation, and Krasny’s ethics of care—this paper synthesises critical theory with a systematic literature review from the past decade. It identifies four recurring modalities of curatorial practice in urban settings: (1) temporary activations that enable alternative uses of public space; (2) collaborative platforms fostering situated co-production; (3) narrative interventions engaging with collective memory and identity; and (4) critical curating which challenges institutional power and the status quo. The analysis demonstrates that curatorial practices have tangible spatial, socio-political and economic effects, shaping urban imaginaries, public discourse, and the material conditions of city life. By critically examining the overlap between curatorial practice and spatial agency, this paper argues that curatorial interventions are not merely symbolic or aesthetic, but embedded within the complex dynamics of urban governance, cultural economies, and struggles over space. This paper's central aim is to map the spectrums of curatorial action that emerge when practice engages with these complex urban dynamics. These actions can range from gestures focused on artistic practice or engaging a specialised audience, to more locally-situated interventions whose explicit intent is to address structural urban challenges, such as spatial justice, contested memory, or public access to power. It calls for a more rigorous and situated understanding of curatorial processes in the urban realm, attentive to local contexts, sustainability, and power asymmetries, in order to better address the entanglements of cultural production and urban transformation.

This paper examines the immediate aftermath of the Grenfell Tower fire through the perspectives of those who experienced it. Drawing on twenty-four interviews with survivors, bereaved family members, local residents, and early responders, alongside Public Inquiry evidence and media reports, the analysis identifies three interlinked processes structuring the state’s response: abandonment, stigmatisation, and securitisation. The local authority and other statutory bodies were largely absent in providing coordinated care, leaving residents, families, and community organisations to organise relief. At the same time, racialised, classed, and territorial stigmas shaped how the community was understood and treated, while policing and security operations intensified. These dynamics reflect not only the uneven presence of the state but also broader neoliberal policies that devalue social housing estates and marginalised communities. By foregrounding first-hand accounts of the immediate aftermath of the fire, this paper offers original qualitative evidence on a period that remains under-documented in academic research.