Queering Urban Infrastructures of Care

In this seminar, we will learn about various theoretical and activist approaches to what infrastructures of care can mean in urban neighborhoods and tourist centers. It follows on from the DFG project by Lorey, Jiménez, and Salvini on care infrastructures, which seeks to further develop a form of citizenship based on care, a cuidadanía. Dr. Kike España, whose book Die sanfte Stadt has already inspired many artistic projects at KHM, will take us on a journey through his new book project Communizing the City. On the Way to a Rebellious Neighborhood: How can we live in cities where we can no longer live amid the ruins of financial brutalism? How can tenant movements be organized in the midst of overtourism creeping into neighborhoods? How do collective practices of listening and sonic production give rise to urban aural infrastructures of care (Sara Jiménez)? How can they be understood as queer? And finally: Which infrastructures of care emerge not only as self-organized, but as alternative health policy infrastructures? We learn about such alternative infrastructures of care from various locations in Málaga and near Barcelona, and we learn from the radical democratic psychiatric practices of Franco Basaglia’s milieu in Trieste, dating back to the 1970s (Pantxo Ramas/Salvini PhD).

First literature:

Kike España, Die sanfte Stadt, Wien u.a.: transversal texts, 2021.

Sara Jiménez, Kike España, “Insurgent Neighborhoods: Between Holey Space and Molecular Feminism”, in: transversal. multilingual webjournal: Molecular revolts in Europe, March 2025, https://transversal.at/transversal/0325/jimenez-espana/en

Franceso Salvini, “Caring ecologies”, transversal.blog, April 2019,

https://transversal.at/transversal/0318/salvini/en