Caring: Making Commons, Making Connections – Kim Trogal

Caring: Making Commons, Making Connections is a chapter in the book The Social (Re)Production of Architecture. Politics, Values and Actions in Contemporary Practice co- written by Kim Trogal and Doina Petrescu. The author of the chapter, Kim Trogal, studied architecture at the University of Sheffield, including a PhD in Architecture. Additionally, she was part of the research team of the “Building Local Resilience Research Platform” at the Sheffield School of Architecture (2012-15), which is concerned with bottom-up social, ecological practices across the field of architecture. (1)

Her chapter is divided in four sub-chapters, but with an overall goal to further explore the connection between care and the production of architecture and space and furthermore underline the importance of including care in our basic understanding of architecture. She defines “care” as something that can be an emotion, an everyday activity as well as a form of labour. The text especially focuses on the practices of collective care and its influence on various spatial concepts. Furthermore she discusses the concepts of “circles of care”/”circles of proximity” and “care chains”, but additionally tries to push us to go beyond the proximate and aim for more transversal connection, thus connection across different social and cultural groups.

In her first sub-chapter Trogal focus on how spacial dynamics of care are developing unevenly around the world. Care is happening on multiple scales (global, regional, neighbourhood). Troll calls this contrast between the global North/South, city/country, public/private, home/work dichotomies. Characterised by exploitative divisions of labour, shown in care and in reproduction. An other possible example could be: how we deal with climate change, our ecological footprint being too high, but we are doing nothing about it.

We are not as much affected by it as people in Africa for example, that is why we do not care about it. It is too far away, out of our minds. The spatialities of care are also apparent in our health care system. Those kind of care chains (negative) characterised by the migration of skilled workers (nurses, carers, teachers..) which are then absent in their country. This truly is a crisis of care which is happening globally and a demonstration of how “we cannot actually reproduce and maintain the society in which we live”. Our requirements for it to function creates problems, our problems are then becoming problems of a global scale. This is not just unsustainable, but also without giving a thought to the people keeping our system alive. The author concludes this with the fact that, once we are part of society, we are automatically interdependent. It is a common myth that we are an independent individual. But her point is not that we should become isolated beings, only requiring theirselves, but rather be aware of the fact that we are never fully independent and closely linked to the world care structure.

Secondly, the author discusses the concept of commons and collective care. Commons are shared spaces, not private nor public. Ownership of those spaces is made through use. They can be material or immaterial. Sharing is caring, the latter corresponding to commons. At this point, Trogal makes a reference to Dolores Hayden, talking about kitchen less houses, cooperative laundries, daycare centres being the solution to fighting against the isolation of women doing housework. Architecture and design are there a part of the movement, but how can it be social? Trogal criticises that those places are becoming a site of low paid work for women outside society (shadow work). Those examples of new types of organisations and spatial organisations.

Today the new movement is the ecological movement (urban agriculture and gardening). It is not the feminist movement anymore, it is less of a focus in the society and becomes in a way forgotten.
The third point she makes is linking mutual aid, meaning the act of people wanting to voluntarily work together and gather resources for communal use, to the practice of care. By quoting Kropotkin, Trogal points toward how in history people have always organized themselves in groups and provided mutual aid. She then links this phenoma to object and event rather than space, meaning that a task or an object forms network of people rather than the space where people gather. To underline her point, she uses the example of French vineyard associations who has a steam-powered water pump in common ownerships, thus a network of people is creating through an object. Due to that disconnect to space, it’s rather difficult to link mutual aid and therefore care to architecture. Nevertheless, Trogal suggest that design and architecture could help working against hyper-individuality and the loss of public space based on the ongoing trend of individual living and isolation.

In her forth subchapter she discusses care though transversal connections based on Marilyn Friedman’s (1993) concept of circle of proximity, meaning we tend to only care for those close to us thus there being a limit to care in a way. Trogal’s point is to go beyond that limit and create new more transversal and trans-local connection and let current structures become more inclusive, whilst not losing trust and sustainability, which she then tries to underline with two examples. The first one being that of the Blue House in Ijburg, Amsterdam, where artist have to engage with the locality and to create new models of sociality, meaning that each intervention and object they produce, must have a community of people attached to it in order for it to work. In her second example, the Rhyzom project,

people are setting up transcultural field trips and workshops to help explore some of the questions they had emerging from their own local cultural practices, which creates a network of friendship connection one local group to another. This network can then extend to other part of the world and creates more transversality, meaning to overcome the structures and routines that are rooted in our society and make new kinds of connection and produce new assemblages and alliances. Trogal concludes this subchapter by posing the questions of sustainability due to the fact that the projects mentioned are in a way linked to a certain time period, yet we need something than can sustain in the long term. She therefore stresses that it’s not only important to create more transversal connections but also to take care of them in order to make them last as long as possible.

In conclusion, we agree with Trogal to a certain extend especially in terms of transforming our current “circles of care” into sustainable care chains, which clearly have to be looked after, yet this isn’t directly linked to architecture. Additionally, there was a lack of further development of each point she made, which added to the difficulty of grasping the link to architecture. Adding to that is the fact, that the architectural solutions she or the mentioned examples offered, didn’t primarily come from an architectural concept but more so from a socially based structure. Therefore, she misses her goal to reveal the unseen connection between architecture, space and care.