Care mobility

Shifting urban mobility to build caring cities

Abstract

The worsening of socio-spatial, gender, and racial inequalities has demanded a profound theoretical and practical revision in the field of mobility planning. Critical debate reveals the marginalization of social groups, territories, and everyday spatial practices, rooted in patriarchal, racist, and Eurocentric values. In Latin America, care-related mobility is predominantly carried out by marginalized women, whose primary mode of transportation is walking, often combined with public transit. However, the lack of understanding of how the differentiated daily mobility experiences of this specific group are shaped, alongside positivist and technocratic assumptions, devalues non-hegemonic ways of being and existing in space. In this article, I present the characteristics of caregivers and pedestrians in the peripheries of Brazil, highlighting the material aspects of walkability involved in care mobility. I propose a discussion on the invisibility of care-related travel in origin-destination surveys and seek to explore alternative planning tools and methods that can contribute to ethical, political, and theoretical-methodological advancements by adopting perspectives centered on everyday walking mobility. This approach aims toward a feminist, situated, and transformative urbanism that promotes caring cities committed to sustaining life.