Beyond directional care: Theorising mutuality in the geographies of care through the lens of friendship

Toward care-with

We suggest this impasse is a result of the directional architecture that underpins much of dominant care theory. When care is taken to be directional (i.e. when care comes from a carer to the cared-for), units of analysis such as the caring-for/caring-about dyad cannot account for those relations in which care is co-emergent. As a corrective, we suggest care-with: an analytical lens rooted in assemblage theory's principle of ‘exteriority of relations’ (Anderson et al., 2012; Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) – the concept that all entities (be it people, places, and things) are not fixed in their capacities or relations, but rather they bring contingent capacities to a situation and only produce something new (in this instance, care) when in relation with other things. Care-with thus posits care as a simultaneously emergent effect of co-presence rather than an action undertaken by an individual. When friends stroll together, eat a meal side-by-side or are digitally attuned to one another, care comes to be generated in that relation; without a start or end-point, and without having to ascribe an identity as giver or recipient. This use of the term care-with is different to Tronto's use of ‘caring with’ (2013) that suggests collective responsibility (Osborne et al., 2025) or taking turns in directional care practices (Askins and Blazek, 2017); instead, care-with is posited as a qualitatively different mode of care that is simultaneous, emergent, and non-teleological.

Under this framework, the approach of care-with offers three interrelated contributions. Firstly, it develops a conceptual vocabulary for simultaneity, through which how moments of care materialise mutually may be analysed, without predetermined provider or recipient roles. Secondly, it foregrounds care that is enacted through presence rather than transfer, recuperating friendship practices that currently disappear into categories of ‘social participation’. Thirdly, it aligns care geography with debates on encounter, affect, and assemblage, opening dialogue with scholarship that emphasises the emergent capacities of relations.

The article proceeds as follows. We first unpack how directional thinking has become institutionalised within care geographies and the consequences of doing so. We then trace how these assumptions surface in scholarship on friendship, specifying the analytical manoeuvres to which researchers resort. This is followed by an elaboration of the care-with framework introduced above. Then, we consider its spatial, temporal, and more-than-human dimensions, demonstrating how care-with redirects analytical attention to the place, rhythms, and material mediators of mutually-enacted support. The conclusion reflects on how recognition of the mutuality of friendship as care recalibrates scholarly agendas and policy design.

Conceptual tensions

The first tension centres on the role ascribed to the subjects studied. Directional models identify the actors studied in certain care relationships as givers or receivers, tracking care's passage between carers and recipients (e.g. De Silva, 2017; Ho et al., 2021a; Osborne et al., 2025). Friendship unravels this schema: care does not flow from one person and become received by another, but instead emerges within the mutual presence of friends. Strolling side by side, revelling in comfortable silence, trading jokes, or jointly engaging around a shared interest, care materialises in the encounter itself. For instance, two individuals may have no concern for each other's personal issues (i.e. they do not care for/about each other), yet may find themselves together because of a mutual interest in looking after a neighbourhood cat. Attention is then paid to the shared situation instead of trying to fix a ‘needful’ other, and care becomes an ambient quality of being together. By ascribing seemingly defined giver-receiver roles, directional frameworks can miss the very phenomenon they purport to explain.

A second tension lies in how reciprocity is almost always treated as sequential. Care geography recognises reciprocity as a feature of friendship (Bowlby, 2011), but most accounts describe it as a relay: care flows one way, and only later is returned the other way. This temporal distancing maintains a precision by keeping giving and receiving positions apart over time. This logic underpins Tronto's (2013) ‘caring with’, which introduces solidarity and trust, but describes collective engagement in caring-for and caring-about as temporally sequenced relations rather than simultaneity. It also shapes Askins and Blazek's (2017) account of academic interdependence, where support is given and later reciprocated by different actors, and Osborne et al.'s (2025) study of dementia care, where neighbours rotate tasks to relieve a carer. Even Kittay's (1999) notion of ‘nested dependencies’ assumes carers and cared-for alternate positions rather than occupy them at once. Despite their different settings, these frameworks share a temporal sequencing that preserves the distinction between giver and receiver, rather than allowing for reciprocity as simultaneity.

Third, an analytic tendency to the dyadic. Scholars have called for friendship research ‘beyond the dyad’, by looking at chains, networks, and clusters of friends, to trace how friendship operates between individual ties and larger social structures (Bunnell et al., 2012; Eve, 2002). Care geographies, however, does not generally pursue analysis at this group or network level. With its directional architecture, care must map clear positionalities. In the dyad, positions of giver and receiver are traceable, so the directional vector can be securely attributed. In care of friendship groups, however, two problems become apparent. In egocentric ¹ network analysis: does the researcher map each member of the group in turn as alter ² , with care flows to others, thereby multiplying the collective group into as many individual-centred networks? Or try to represent the group as one alter in toto, losing the ability to see who gives care to whom? Eve (2002) writes about this as a methodological blind spot in sociology's treatment of friendship and calls for approaches that trace groupings, indirect ties, and collective dynamics beyond the dyad. Likewise, Keating et al. (2003), quoting Boaz and Hu (1997), find that research literature on informal care tends to be at the dyadic level of older people and individual care providers, and calls for analysis at the network level. Yet without tools to map care that belongs to a collective presence rather than between members, we are drawn back to analysing traceable dyadic exchanges (Eve, 2002). This methodological limitation leaves care theory unequipped to understand how a group of friends meeting together for coffee is more than the sum of each possible paired interaction. Drawing on assemblage theory (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987), however, we can understand the whole meeting as emergent. Café space, with its mugs, the shared routines and humour, and all the friends there together co-produce a ‘care assemblage’ that is more than any individual dyad, or even its sum.

Fourth, directional care embeds duration hierarchies. Care literature favours durable relationships. Policy frameworks valorise marriage, family ties, and long-term friendships as ‘real’ relationships that ‘deserve’ support. Academic work follows suit, using longitudinal methodologies that track relatively strong, measurable ties – those with frequent contact and emotional closeness (Cornwell et al., 2014). This is natural because duration bias serves directional analysis: over time, positions stabilise and patterns of giving and receiving solidify and become visible. Yet, during a brief encounter – the postman helping with directions, corridor neighbours having a chat – who is carer and who is cared-for? Sociologists have begun to acknowledge the value of ephemeral ties that might provide the ‘appropriate’ support at the ‘right’ time (Felder, 2020; Morrill et al., 2005; Small, 2017), but care geography has been slower to imagine brief encounters as care. This duration hierarchy renders invisible the accumulation of micro-encounters (e.g. daily greetings, chance meetings, brief conversations) that might provide company and even practical/emotional care. But because they end, before clear giver or receiver positions are established, they evade directional analysis. Survey methods compound the issue: most instruments do not account for these encounters, but focus on stable ties and pre-determined support categories; respondents rarely characterise such moments as ‘friends’ or ‘care’. Ethnographic methods can recover and make sense of these invisible care acts. Work on public sociability (e.g. Gardner, 2011) hints at this potential, but such insights have remained at the margins of care theory.

Fifth, anthropocentric boundaries remain. Despite geography's ‘more-than-human’ turn and associated flat-ontology frameworks that refigure animals, plants, objects, places, and affects as co-equal actants, care theory has been anchored in a human-centred subject-object logic, reiterating an asymmetric vision of non-humans as passive recipients. Feminist interventions such as Puig de la Bellacasa's (2017) recasting of care as a messy, intra-active process within more-than-human worlds have been crucial in unsettling this logic. However, their focus on technoscientific and ecological assemblages has meant that other social configurations, such as friendship assemblages, remain underexplored. In peer networks, where care-with comes about because a dog sparks off a neighbourly chat in the street, corridor plants engender a conversation on shared histories, or a beloved object induces a group's shared reminiscences, then care-with comes not as a transaction, flow, or intentionality directed from caregiver to care-receiver, but as a fundamentally relational, non-directional effect of heterogeneous co-presence. By contrast, studies of more-than-human care still tend to reproduce a ‘who-cares-for-whom’ logic; for instance, gardens framed as cared-for, chickens as care-recipients, or furniture choreographed as tools in parent–child interactions (Gordon et al., 2021; Gorman, 2016; Gray et al., 2022). While work on assistance animals has reversed this directionality, positioning non-humans as caregivers (Arathoon, 2022; Eason, 2020), the giver/receiver role structure persists. Extant literature has not yet developed the conceptual tools to describe how care comes about, and comes to ‘matter’, as it co-produces itself within more-than-human configurations of companionship that foreclose on delineating discrete giver/receiver roles.

Institutional entrenchment

Institutional processes further embed these conceptual limitations. Grant and funding proposals are often required to define specific service users/providers, incentivising an approach to fit the directional model. Assessment criteria are usually couched in outcomes for ‘direct’ receivers of care, leaving out of focus and difficult-to-count shared improvements (Wayodi, 2024), such as those brought by mutual support. Community programmes often require service users to identify as either ‘beneficiaries’ or ‘volunteers’, recreating the helper-helped binary. Most research-ethics frameworks omit an operationalised definition of ‘vulnerability’, instead opting for an enumeration of vulnerable populations (Bracken-Roche et al., 2017) which, in its default silence, assumes a passive recipient of protection and reproduces the giver-receiver logic. Such procedural frameworks influence what forms of ethical relation become possible, creating gaps between institutional prescriptions and the relational practices of care (King, 2023). These shape what counts as legitimate care, decisions which marginalise friendship's inherently mutual forms.

In sum, these five tensions (role clarity, sequenced reciprocity, dyadic bias, duration hierarchies, anthropocentric boundaries) evidence the degree to which internalised habits of directionality have structured the conceptual infrastructure of care geography. These framings have been invaluable in surfacing asymmetries of power and rendering previously overlooked labour visible. But in so doing, they downplay the sorts of reciprocal, co-present, multi-agent forms of care that characterise friendship. To address this gap, care geography must find new vocabularies and methods that do not already presume giver-receiver positionalities or directional movement. Possibilities include tools from multispecies assemblages, attunements to group dynamics, and an openness to ephemeral encounters that would help us see care as an emergent quality of mutually relational arrangements, rather than an enveloping exchange of directional flows. Only by going beyond the vectorial paradigm can we more easily register friendship's caring-with in its simultaneity, collectivity, and more-than-human richness.

Feminist ethics of care

First, feminist care ethics itself was birthed from an analysis of kinship relations (prominently, the mother–child dyad) (Noddings, 1984; Ruddick, 1980), and only later sought to extrapolate from the familial into friendship (Holt, 2021; Wollstonecraft, 2008). Although care theory's original, founding critique was against universal principle-based models of moral reasoning (Gilligan, 1982; Noddings, 1984), its focus on kinship as a model relationship helped entrench an inherent, directional logic of giver-to-receiver. When friends are then reimagined as ‘chosen families’, ‘fictive kin’, ‘kin-friends’, or ‘given-as-chosen’ relations (Nardi, 1992; Spencer and Pahl, 2006), non-biological ties are legitimised as sites of care, but at the cost of importing a weight of permanence, duty, and hierarchy implied by familial norms. When, for example, Spencer and Pahl (2006) asked participants to map both friends and kin on concentric-circle ‘closeness’ maps, the spatial ordering of concentric circles mirrors genealogical schemata, privileging long-standing and encircling ties while marginalising more fleeting check-ins and practical errands. If friendship is already cast as a quasi-kinship relation, then researchers are liable to apply the same duty-focused framing used for kin – asking ‘who would you turn to in a crisis?’ (Pahl and Spencer, 2004 ) risks treating friends as if they had the same responsibilities we tend to assume of family.

Attempts to loosen feminist care ethics from its kinship-heavy roots have offered only a partial reprieve. Held (2005) grounds care ethics in the fact that every human has a childhood history of being cared for within a family, but immediately also cautions that this familial grounding must not be allowed to domesticate care to the private sphere, and must also reach into politics, law, and global institutions. Shakuto (2018) takes important steps toward reframing care morality around ideals of individual independence and mutual support, rather than inherited family obligations. Yet even here, participants tend to be positioned as either ‘independent givers’ or ‘dependent receivers’, a binary that shows how difficult it remains to escape the directional logic of care. Consequently, despite feminist care ethics’ desire to be more reciprocal in its understanding of care, its current conceptual vocabulary and methodological toolkits continue to reinscribe directional constraints that occlude the lateral and fluid, co-constructed networks of care friends are capable of sustaining.

Social network analysis

The second example comes from the domain of SNA. This is a methodology rooted in social capital theory (Putnam, 2000), with its greatest attractions being its reduced, simplified visualisations of often complex patterns of social interaction (Crossley, 2010). Typically, egocentric surveys ask respondents who they turn to for support or who care about them, and multiplexity measures record overlapping functions (e.g. emotional, services, financial, companionship) as distinct categories of support (Wellman and Wortley, 1989). Yet even these apparently neutral tools are highly sensitive to the wording of prompts: Campbell and Lee (1991) demonstrated that small variations to the ‘who do you know?’ prompts (e.g. discuss important matters/feel emotionally close/watch your home) systematically change the networks that get reported.

The issue is that this form of representability comes at the expense of reifying support as ‘discrete goods’ that can be transmitted along ties. Social worlds are affective (Bunnell et al., 2012), but the ambience of a breakfast club is not captured on the map because its conviviality (the warmth, laughter, solidarity, collective buoyancy) is not easily reducible to resource flows. There is no indication of how that dimension of support matters. Whole-network and role-based approaches can do more to reinsert group-level effects, but they are not central to a framework that locates relational value in measurable forms of exchange. Except in hybrid or mixed-method variants of SNA (Crossley, 2010), this aspect of what ‘good’ support ‘does’ is not on the network map.

Community care

The third example is community care scholarship and its compression into metrics of participation. Ethnographies of walking clubs, coffeeshop meetups, and peer support groups register the horizontal conviviality of these scenes – shared jokes, collective activities, and spontaneous gestures of help that, in their accumulation, help lift the weight of loneliness and make care possible (Grant et al., 2017; Marks, 1998; Richaud, 2018). But when these experiences enter the vocabulary of policy and grant making, they are reduced to participation scales that track people on a spectrum from ‘isolated’ to ‘active volunteer’ (see Aw et al., 2017). Horizontal exchange is flattened into a metric of civic engagement rather than a modality of care in its own right.

In Raap et al. (2021), for instance, ethnographers trace how neighbourhood ‘connoisseurs’ called on decades-old personal networks to restart a community newspaper and redirect delayed ambulances – but the municipality classifies all of this relational work as ‘resident self-management initiatives’, smoothing over the friendships and collective care that made the initiative possible. Grant requirements double down on this compression by stipulating defined roles for beneficiaries-volunteers, forcing ethnographers to overlay a vertical logic onto a horizontal care scene (cf. Domenech and Tirado, 1997; Macmillan and Townsend, 2006). The result is that the ground-up, peer-to-peer care that makes these community spaces possible is demoted to a background condition for formally orchestrated interventions, yet policy and research lack the conceptual tools to track emergent, co-produced forms of support outside of participation rates.

Friendship-as-care shows up throughout feminist care ethics, SNA, and community care research, but in each case, we see similar moves that filter this mutuality through more familiar frameworks. First, friendships are framed in kinship terms, importing models of hierarchy and obligation. Second, mutual support is deconstructed into individual transactional encounters – who's giving, who's receiving – which obscures the collective, affective aspects of these moments that are difficult to replicate. Third, shared practices are abstracted into individual participation rates, eclipsing the emergent dynamics of peer-to-peer networks. These moves cumulatively install an epistemological filter that marginalises simultaneity, collectivity, and more-than-human mediation. Cumulatively, this produces a default framing that treats peer-based care as secondary or incomplete when it does not fit formal or familial modes. Highlighting these blind spots in turn makes visible the need for a new lens. In the following section, we introduce our conceptualisation of ‘care-with’, lay out its theoretical underpinnings, and illustrate how it can be used to track the spontaneous, co-present emergence and mutuality of friendship assemblages.

Defining care-with

This section offers a working definition of care-with and the circumstances under which it tends to arise. Diverging from prior articulations (Askins and Blazek, 2017; Osborne et al., 2025; Tronto, 2013), we reframe care-with as non-directional, mutual care. These are situations where care is accomplished through acts of companionship (doing things together) and confiding (sharing information about important things).

Care-with emerges when people gather because of a common interest or pleasure and without predetermined roles in a relationship of giver and receiver. An older adult feeding and caring for cats with a neighbour: the thing they have in common is the subject of being together, rather than caring for each other. Bird watchers convening to look for birds: their point of connection is the birds, not caring for/about each other. There may be (or not be) a caring relation for (or about) each other. But it is the care about birds in common that sustains their being-with. Peer support and self-help groups also operate in this register: people facing similar challenges, conditions, or life stages gather for companionship or confide in a common concern, with care arising through being-with, rather than identified acts of provision.

There are three concepts germane to how care-with comes to be: these are encounters that pattern mutual availability; affective atmospheres that generate capacities to care; and assemblages that produce emergent properties. Incorporating the geographies of encounter, affect, and care assemblages can help discern the appearing of care-with.

First, care-with is initiated when everyday encounters and co-presence become patterned. Routine meetings – nods in corridor, coffee beside patrons, morning exercise groups – produce light-touch mutual recognitions with no obligation: part of the mundane social choreographies through which everyday life is continually assembled (Laurier and Philo, 2006a; 2006b; Milgram, 1972; Thrift, 2000; Valentine, 2008). What matters less is the relationship or tie strength (Granovetter, 1973) than encounter density and predictability: repeated being-there episodes scaffold mutual availability. Through the repetition of everyday practices, such encounters ‘produce’ space (Lefebvre, 2013). The bench where two or more people always gather becomes ‘where the tai chi group meets’, the coffeeshop corner becomes ‘the morning regulars’ spot’. Bird-watchers enacting a regular gathering produce its own geography in repeated movement patterns, places where they stop and focus their attention, and shared body orientations toward particular habitats. Space itself is produced as both medium and outcome of the caring encounter.

The precarity of this form of non-directional care is salient when one considers the condition where quite small perturbations are sufficient to break existing social choreographies. A bench is removed, the café closes down, the timing of the meeting is changed. Each of these does not just remove a point of entry to care as service delivery. They undo the spatio-temporal arrangement that allowed support-without-obligation to materialise in the first place. The same fragility is apparent in digital encounters. WhatsApp groups or Zoom sessions can also come undone when a platform changes, participants drop out, or internet connectivity is lost. The arrangement is less held by an intent to care than by a habit of shared exchanges or doing something together.

Second, and affectively, co-presence is apprehended as care through the atmospheres that enable it. Affect here does not refer to individual emotions, but to circulating intensities (ease, warmth, awkwardness) that configure capacities for relating to one another (Bunnell et al., 2012; Pile, 2010). These circulating intensities happen between bodies and spaces, such as the ‘upness’ or ‘downness’ of an encounter that precedes conscious recognition, or the warmth of a situation that shapes interaction before it is cognitively processed. These atmospheric qualities configure what becomes possible in that assemblage when people gather together.

Where an atmosphere of welcome is palpable, mutuality or co-presence can flourish without power geometries of ‘helper’ and ‘helped’ that Ahmed (2004) has detailed in how ‘otherness’ comes to be materialised in everyday life. The peer support group's atmosphere of belonging, the hobby group's atmosphere of shared enthusiasm, the comfortable silences between people feeding neighbourhood cats – these affective atmospheres constitute care-with as much as the material support that people might or might not be providing to each other. They constitute a situation where everyone at once is both giving and receiving simply by being there, rather than by cycling between states of being a carer and a care-recipient. The affective qualities of any such assemblage have material bases; the smell of coffee marking the regulars’ table at a neighbourhood café, the acoustic qualities of the space that preclude comfortable co-presence, and so on.

Third, an assemblage approach highlights the way care-with coheres through the organisation of heterogeneous elements that co-function in order to sustain viable relations (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). It draws attention to the fact that care is not a property transported by a particular actor (e.g. caregiver), but emerges in and through the interaction of different autonomous entities. Care is not, therefore, the result of a caregiving relation in which entities are said to be brought into being by a particular relationship. Rather, care materialises when different bodies, rhythms, and environments, each of which could potentially exist independently of the relation at hand, come together.

When neighbours come together to feed cats, care materialises through the co-functioning of the human participants, feline agencies, feeding schedules, seasonal and weather cycles, territorial negotiations, and collective expertise. Each of these heterogeneous elements remains in relations of exteriority (ibid) with others, which is to say that each can continue to exist as separate from the others while at the same time participating in a caring assemblage. The same community garden, for example, may support encounters of quiet co-presence in the cool of the morning, collaborative work in the heat of the afternoon, and knowledge sharing at harvest time. Each of these could be considered different assemblages with their own caring-with possibilities.

Care-with as an expanded vocabulary

Once care is located in the with and sustained by configurations rather than roles, we can see that care-with is not a standalone category of care, but a lens that cuts across familiar domains.

First, it is not tethered to ‘friendship’ alone. Care-with is broader in scope than what one might typically consider a friendship. It spans the network which Antonucci et al. (2013) call a ‘social convoy’: a metaphorical web of people and elements accumulated over time. This includes friend-like modes of kin and spouses (Pahl and Spencer, 2004) who choose to spend time and confide with one another, beyond caregiving obligations. Neighbours whose home proximity enables regular encounter, hobbyists from other neighbourhoods who share a common interest, even consequential strangers who provide presence or words at the right moment (Blau and Fingerman, 2009; Small, 2009). Memories, spiritual practices, and cherished objects also provide accompaniment and comfort, generating care-with through different temporalities rather than face-to-face encounter (Sedikides et al., 2016; Turkle, 2011).

Importantly, care-with is not confined to enduring relationships. In contrast to the strong-versus-weak ties distinction in network studies (Granovetter, 1973), care-with does not correlate care quality with tie strength. Fleeting encounters, nodding acquaintances, and ‘strangers on a train’ may have surprising, meaningful significance in terms of companionship and confiding precisely because of their ephemerality, offering different perspectives unavailable from intimates (Blokland, 2017; Felder, 2020; Morrill et al., 2005). The hairdresser who offers just-right encouragement, the fellow bus passenger who provides unexpected insight: these encounters generate care through their particular, momentary configuration, not through accumulated obligation. To be clear, attending to fleeting encounters is not to suggest that ephemeral connections substitute for durable relationships. The point is rather that directional frameworks systematically render such moments invisible, even when they accumulate into significant forms of support. A focus on encounter density and the conditions that enable care-with to emerge offers analytical traction on phenomena that existing tools miss, rather than a normative hierarchy that privileges the fleeting over the enduring.

Moreover, care-with is not exclusive to informal or extitutional settings. It can emerge within the interstices of formal care institutions: patients forming friendships in hospital rooms, residents chatting in care homes, or visitors meeting in waiting areas. In such cases, care-with develops alongside, rather than in opposition to, directional care relations. What matters is not the absence of institutional framing but the presence of configurations that allow mutual co-presence to flourish without predetermined provider-recipient roles.

Care-with can also be discerned within, but also stretches beyond, what is commonly measured as social participation. Participation studies typically rely on vertical scales that privilege formal activities over quieter modes (Aw et al., 2017; Levasseur et al., 2010). Care-with, by contrast, suggests a horizontal continuum that recognises how different forms of being-with may be more or less suitable for particular personalities, preferences, and life stages without hierarchising them. It includes complex social, emotional dynamics missed by linear participation scales. The more social participation, the more social support? Not necessarily, especially for belonging and social connectedness (Hawkley and Cacioppo, 2010). The bird-watching group which never asks for practical care but generates companionship, the morning walkers who never exchange favours but make each other's days possible: these become legible as care-with through this lens.

Care-with is also not synonymous with ‘commoning’, which involves shared responsibilities (e.g. common rights over land use) (Shelby, 2022). Care-with can even be self-directed and self-centred, while remaining relationally sustained: an older adult who cares about their life while walking with other peers who understand and recognise similar troubles and demands. Such care is more about peer support, shared needs, or interest than instrumental, unilateral, or directed motivations as in care for/about. Emotional and practical support may still arise (Osborne et al., 2025), and reciprocal exchanges of that may happen (Askins and Blazek, 2017), but as a by-product rather than a goal in itself.

Reframing care in this way has analytic and practical implications. Analytically, it shifts the unit of analysis from directed actions between actors to situations in which co-presence itself develops capacities for support. It is not so much a matter of who is helping whom but of what configurations allow care to emerge. Methodologically, it cautions against assuming there is no care in the absence of caregiving or reciprocated transactions, since standard measures overlook the attuned forms crucial for well-being.

Examining conditions that enable care-with excavates its manifestations in ordinary settings and how it can be expanded or constricted. Simple provisions can enable care-with: protecting venues for informal gathering, maintaining spaces for regular encounter, enabling being-with through physical and digital modes. The following section develops this view in three trajectories: spatial, temporal, and more-than-human.

Spatialising care-with

Built environments script interaction. Many places designated for ‘care’ encode asymmetry – entrance counters as control points, numbered queues, privatised consultation rooms – thereby fixing whose time matters, and positioning recipients as manageable bodies (Foucault, 1977; Gieryn, 2002). After all, care recipient and provider logics often require clear role demarcation, with one party identified as in need of help and another as qualified to give it. By contrast, care-with can flourish in places of voluntary co-presence, such as third places – benches, neighbourhood parks, coffeeshops – where entry and exit are easy, and lingering is legitimate (Oldenburg, 1999). Side-by-side configurations, such as in benches or supermarket queues, can sustain Goffman's (1963) ‘civil inattention’, permitting acknowledgement without intrusion, while threshold areas such as verandas, foyers, and vestibules allow scanning, approach, and departure without formal role assignment. In these spaces, individuals may share the same physical presence without role assignment or an obligation to interact, allowing for the potential of more mutual and spontaneous forms of social engagement. Singapore's void decks in housing estates exemplify such adjustable micro-zones – benches for solitary sitting or group use, neighbourhood grocery shops for marketing, and open strolling space that tolerates pausing and moving on (Ooi and Tan, 1992; cf. Cairns et al., 2014). Similar dynamics are observed in UK parks, where accessible benches foster casual companionship (Moulaert and Wanka, 2019), or through age-friendly seating interventions designed to cultivate both rest and incidental contact (Barron, 2015). Across such third places, recognition and companionship become possible, with small gestures of support arising as extensions of being-together rather than as directional acts of care.

In fact, evidence already exists to suggest that spatial design shapes the likelihood of such support, though it is often relegated to the social rather than integrated into care conceptualisations. Whyte's (1980) observations of plazas, for example, demonstrate how seating orientation, access to sun and shade, and sightlines shaped patterns of gathering, lingering, and social interaction. Lager et al. (2015) show that opportunities for social capital among older adults were not evenly distributed across the neighbourhood, but depended on place-specific features such as lively squares, the design of housing blocks, and the rhythms of everyday life. Liu and Marx (2020) similarly emphasise how micro-geographic arrangements contour everyday interaction, pointing to findings that stairwells and apartment door placement shaped friendship networks in housing (Festinger et al., 1950). Likewise, void decks in Singapore can be read as ‘pass-through nodes’; spaces conceived for movement but frequently appropriated as social junctures (Douglass, 2009; To and Nakaseko, 2017). These cases suggest that the encounter affordances of a place (e.g. visibility, proximity, stall points, exits) shape how care can also emerge as a form of mutual exchange, without a designated giver or recipient.

In this sense, third places may be understood as social infrastructures (Ho et al., 2023; Lane et al., 2020; Oldenburg, 1999) of care, where informal gathering affordances (e.g. shade, water, power, flexible micro-zones) matter as much as formal service provision. For policy and design, this perspective reframes investment and evaluation: shifting from throughput targets to creating conditions that make encounters and companionship possible. For research, it suggests an analytical reorientation: attending not only to participation rates or service use but to how spatial arrangements afford recognition, lingering, and small assists; conditions through which care-with can emerge.

Temporalising care-with

Temporal structure matters as much as spatial layout. Appointment slots, visiting hours, and registration procedures create temporal asymmetries, where professionals have control over time and its ordering, while care recipients and visitors have to adjust their time and often wait, concealing the hidden labour of timekeeping (Auyero, 2012; Bourdieu, 2000). Waiting is far from an empty act, but a highly socialised and organised practice that is imposed and demanded unequally, and which imposes its own toll of attention, presence, and patience (ibid). Care-with, by contrast, emerges from the shared, socio-temporal rhythms of conviviality: lightly synchronised routines such as morning walks to avoid the heat, grocery shopping at the same time of day, or routine tea sessions at the void deck. These regularities do not pre-ascribe ‘giver’ and ‘receiver’ roles but instead maintain a field of expectation and predictable interstices in which companionship can be practised.

Yet, the existing rhythm literature on ageing and later life tends to focus on the individual's internal tempo and their adjustment to institutional or social timetables in order to stay ‘in sync’ (Lager et al., 2015; Quinn et al., 2015; Riley, 2020). By centring on time as a factor of self-regulation, there is less attention on the ways that older adults co-construct time with other people in everyday life. Socio-temporal rhythms instead direct our attention towards older adults’ strategies of maintaining agency, not so much through autonomous individual regulation, but through coordination with significant others, including peers, spouses, friends, and neighbours. In this way, eurhythmia (alignment of rhythms) can extend the reach of older adults’ participation in social life, while arrhythmia (dissonance of rhythms) can cause exclusion, but both concepts point to the fundamentally relational character of time (Lefebvre, 2004).

Empirical investigations of older adults’ routine activities can make this clearer. Qualitative GIS-mapping methods in Singapore show how older adults’ daily spatial paths and times shape when and where they are available to provide or receive care from others (Ho et al., 2021b). In Japan, synchronous shopping and resting rhythms in Tokyo's traditional shopping streets (shotengai) facilitate mutual recognition and low-key monitoring, producing ageing-friendly public space without requiring formal scheduling or design (To and Chong, 2017). It is not individual efficiency or productivity that is valued here, but a collective tempo that maintains support in accessible and non-intrusive ways, allowing it to emerge by choice instead of by assigned necessity or role obligation. Recent work on crip time offers a further lens for temporalising care-with. This scholarship attends to non-normative temporalities: the pauses, delays, and unpredictable rhythms of bodies that do not conform to institutionalised schedules (Kafer, 2013; Samuels, 2017). Though centred on individual experience, care-with adds a socio-relational register: where peers share such temporal disruptions, mutual accommodation of one another's rhythms may itself enable companionship.

For policy and design, this reorientation suggests that time itself should be conceived as part of the social infrastructures of care: not simply as a scheduling problem to be imposed, but a medium through which participation is either sustained or disrupted. Metrics would, accordingly, shift from tabulating service hours to more open-ended considerations of when rhythms overlap, synchronise, or strain, and under what conditions this makes the emergence of companionship more or less possible. For research, the task is to move past narratives of individual coping or resilience vis-à-vis institutional tempo, towards inquiries into the collective composition of socio-temporal rhythms with other peers, neighbours, and more-than-human companions. Temporalising care-with, in this way, refigures time as a shared commons through which support and companionship are practised and sustained.

More-than-human dimensions of care-with

The third trajectory extends care-with beyond human-only practices. Assemblage approaches remind us that animals, plants, objects, and digital technologies are not only mediators of social encounters, but also sources of company and care in their own right (Haraway, 2003; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). This widens the remit of care from something humans provide for one another to something that is co-constituted with non-human actants.

Animals are not only co-constituents of care; they can also be catalysts for companionship, creating cultures of care (Greenhough et al., 2022). Park ethnographies find dogs inspiring contact, conversation, and confidence among strangers who might have otherwise not spoken (Robins et al., 1991: 23). Dogs can operate as ‘avatars’ for negotiating owners’ sociability, producing ‘weak ties’ and small circuits of support (Graham and Glover, 2014). Fletcher and Platt (2018) show how the dog's needs and behaviours shape when and where such encounters occur. A lost cat can also occasion neighbourly encounter, as the search draws unacquainted residents into mutual assistance (Laurier et al., 2002). However, dogs’ behaviour can produce gatekeeping, stigma and exclusion (Graham and Glover, 2014); O’Hare (2024) shows how dogs’ more ‘beastly’ agency may foreclose the very sociability that dog walking is thought to enable, cautioning us that pet-mediated social capital can be instrumental, but also obstructive (Lin, 2001). Small livestock can also structure neighbourly exchange: community garden chickens circulate compost, seedlings, and conversation from the surrounding street into an ecology of mutual aid (Local Food Connect, n.d.). Therapeutic relations between humans and animals are reframed through symbiosis rather than one-way provision (Gorman, 2019). More broadly, companion-pet ownership, regardless of species, is found to be associated with social capital (Wood et al., 2017). In each case, the routines of animal lives draw more-than-human rhythms into practices of care and companionship.

Objects likewise sustain companionship through material continuity. Miller's (2008) ethnography on household possessions demonstrates that furniture, photographs, and familiar walking routes are material anchors that can steady lives through times of change and adaptation. Attachments to such material things have also been likened to the idea of continuing bonds (Klass et al., 1996), in which relationships with the deceased are maintained through objects, routines, and practices. These bonds to the deceased exemplify Bennett's (2010) vibrant matter: objects that operate not as passive reminders of the absent but as practices of everyday care. In this way, the materiality of artefacts – whether held, displayed or walked – can offer some degree of companionship and continuity in extending the reaches of care beyond human relations.

Digital infrastructures, too, can be read as more-than-human actants. Boyd (2010) theorises ‘networked publics’ as spaces and collectives produced by the affordances of digital infrastructures. Profiles, comment systems, and algorithmic feeds create spaces where minimal but affectively charged cues – emoji reactions, read receipts, threaded exchanges – signal presence without requiring reply. Even transactional interfaces may obscure a service-care distinction: Price and Arnould's (1999) work on ‘commercial friendships’ illustrates how service encounters may slip into companionship, showing how everyday commerce can take on caring dimensions.

In all these cases, more-than-human others (animals, objects, digital infrastructures) play a role in the possibilities for care-with. They remind us that care-with in everyday life is not only about what people do for others. It is also about what infrastructures, technologies, and non-human presences enable in terms of recognition, companionship, and light gestures of support. They also raise questions of over-governance: How do rules about pet defecation, acoustic regulation, or platform moderation enable or constrain such encounters? Whether it is the timing of dog-walks which produces encounters, or platform affordances that enable checking in, care-with is afforded through careful noticing of what it takes to connect.

We have thus elaborated three trajectories for operationalising care-with: spatial, temporal, and more-than-human. Each points to ways in which care comes from attending to environments and rhythms to allow for companionship forms of support to emerge. The emphasis is not so much on creating new systems of care, but on being able to notice care-with where it already exists, and allowing for that to become easier for people – and their more-than-human companions – to be there for each other.