Abstract
Three hours ago in Madrid, Spain, the power went out. We lost telecommunications and internet after two hours. Each are vital infrastructures relied upon daily. Like many infrastructures, we are often unaware of their ongoing functioning until there is a glitch or rupture (Berlant, 2016). Today across Spain, Portugal, and parts of France, this was the case. We had limited information about the cause, and the extent of the issue was only shared by word of mouth. Those with a radio were able to find out more. I am particularly conscious of people trapped on trains, in lifts, and in places without ways to communicate for help due to the breakdown of electricity and communication systems.
As I walk through the streets close to my hostel, I hear the sounds of sirens. Whilst many are concerned, there are groups of people with picnic blankets, bottles of wine and food shared on pavements outside apartment buildings, listening to the radio and talking together. As a visitor here for a brief stint of research fieldwork, I do not have the support networks or the supplies that would be available to me at home. Here to research care-informed urban governance practices that emerged during the municipalist movement in Madrid, the book written by Greenfield is doubly relevant. Such experiences remind me how quickly everyday life can be thrown into an emergency, when the infrastructures that we are dependent upon break. They also remind me of the importance of care networks, formed by relational connections between neighbours and the infrastructures that arise in response to an emergency. I cannot help but think that access to a Lifehouse, as defined by Greenfield, would be very welcome.
Lifehouse, Taking Care of Ourselves in a world on fire by Alex Greenfield begins with a troubling story of what happened in New York City after Superstorm Sandy in 2012. Greenfield documents the inability of state-sponsored emergency relief efforts to respond rapidly in the aftermath. Instead, using the organising principals of the Occupy movement, Occupy Sandy was rapidly able to mobilise and meet the needs of people, be it food supplies, water or shelter. The book documents mutual care networks that emerge as a response to multiple contextual crises in particular locations including Superstorm Sandy and the Black Panther survival programs in the United States, the Muncipalist movements of Madrid and Barcelona in Spain, care solidarity networks providing health care in Greece, and the experiences of Rojava in Syria where the State collapsed. In each example, there is discussion of the different ways networks of citizens care for each other, and the failures of States, or how new ways of being the State, emerge.
The concept of the Long Emergency, defined by Greenfield as a time of impending and present societal struggle and the erosion of the support structures we require to meet our basic needs, is particularly persuasive. Greenfield claims that ‘for as long as it lasts, we will be compelled to take on a much greater share of the responsibility of caring for ourselves than most of us are accustomed to, as individuals and communities both’ (p. 26). He argues that ‘if we want to survive the hard times to come together, we need to stop investing our faith and energy in institutions that are demonstrably failing us…’ (p. 22). He goes on to say that ‘what we need, in other words, is to get beyond hope. We’ve got to stop waiting for someone else to do something and start doing for ourselves’ (p. 22). As we can see in the examples of the hundreds of community organisations in Barcelona, Spain, that have been central to campaigning for the recognition of the right to care by the Municipality, collective action through grassroots feminist alliances can be a significant catalyst for institutional transformations towards more caring futures (Barcelona City Council, 2025).
However, there is a tension here that is reflective of work charting the rise of community organisations filling the gaps left by the erosion of the welfare state (DeVerteuil, 2015). The expectation that communities look after themselves without state support is reflective of dominant neoliberal ideologies organising welfare systems (Tronto, 2017). In my own work I have noted the increasing reliance on voluntary, not-for-profit charity-run food relief initiatives, on the goodwill of individual donors who contribute to what Power et al. (2022) call shadow infrastructures of care (Williams et al., 2024). These initiatives respond to the increased difficulty people have in surviving well in precarious and unequal times. Some of these are professionalised services run by non-government organisations, but there have also been many autonomous groups operating without state support (Williams, 2017).
Where I want to push the conversation on the role of the state in these troubled times is by aligning with calls made by feminist scholars that there is indeed an alternative to state withdrawal from taking responsibility for care. Such an alternative would be the reconfiguration of infrastructures that can better support the work of care and caring in our worlds so that we might live in them ‘as well as possible’ (Power and Williams, 2020; Tronto, 2013). This may involve the establishment of Lifehouses, as Greenfield defines them, but it would also involve states taking responsibility to help all people meet their basic needs for survival.
To develop the concept of the Lifehouse, Greenfield adapts the knowledge and insights gathered about community-led mutual aid responses to crisis. He argues that to survive the long emergency each community requires a ‘Lifehouse’ which provides access to clean water, electricity, a place of repair, local manufacturing, food production, address local concerns and values, and be networked with other Lifehouses. However, rather than solely relying on mutual aid groups resourcing these Lifehouses why not require states to support them through providing funding, physical buildings, digital infrastructure, education and appropriate staffing? Such a requirement would attend to the unequal burden of care often carried by the core groups that run community organisations that are volunteer and/or grant dependent. Universal funding and resourcing from the state in collaboration with communities may assist ensuring the longevity and provide the physical infrastructure needed to ensure everyone has access to a Lifehouse. Writing from Australia, we have a universal health care system. It is not perfect, there are improvements that can be made, but it should not discriminate on age, ability, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, socio-economic status and gender. States can and should provide a safety net for groups that experience exclusion and have complex needs such as those who require disability support, aged care, childcare, education and complex health care such as cancer treatment. All of us at some time in our lives will require access to these care infrastructures and indeed we all have a universal need for care (Power and Williams, 2020).
Like the Care Manifesto, written by The Care Collective (2020), I see hope in having a vision of care-driven transformation, that responds to existing injustices, crises, inequalities, suffering and conflict and seeks to cultivate more hopeful futures within and beyond institutions (Williams, 2020). The Care Manifesto lays out a a queer–feminist–anti-racist– eco-socialist political vision of ‘universal care’. Universal care means we are all jointly responsible for hands-on care work, as well as engaging with and caring about the flourishing of other people and the planet. It means reclaiming forms of genuinely collective and communal life, adopting alternatives to capitalist markets, and reversing the marketisation of care infrastructures. It also means restoring and radically deepening our welfare states, both centrally and locally. And, finally, it means creating Green New Deals at the transnational level, caring international institutions and more porous borders, and cultivating everyday cosmopolitanism. (The Care Collective, 2020: 52)
