Nurturing Infrastructures of Care: Centering Healing, Imagination and Solidarity in Polycrisis Response

On March 26 Dr. Chiara Camponeschi, Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at the Dahdaleh Institute, convened a two-part session at the 2025 Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers in Detroit, MI in collaboration with Dr. Natalie Gulsrud of Copenhagen University, in Denmark.

A key theme of Dr. Camponeschi’s postdoctoral project titled Turning Moments of Crisis into Moments of Care, ‘infrastructures of care’ are those systems and programs that most support a thriving, healthy, and equitable society at all times––not just during a crisis.

The session was an opportunity to bring academics and practitioners in conversation to explore pathways for putting healing, imagination and solidarity at the heart of polycrisis response. Drawing on diverse disciplines such as planetary health, community psychology and feminist and decolonial perspectives on care and resilience, Dr. Camponeschi opened the session with a presentation that explored traditional understandings of infrastructure as well as emerging approaches that realize its transformative potential. The conversation continued with a presentation by Dr. Gulsrud, who unpacked the concepts of ‘polycrisis’ and ‘caring cities’ before opening up a discussion of housing as an infrastructure of care. Her presentation was complemented by Dr. Christine Benna Skytt-Larsen and Dr. Heidi Svenningsen Kajita, also from Copenhagen University, who offered a critical perspective on Denmark’s social housing programs. Dr. Skytt-Larsen shed light on the controversial Parallel Society Act, a Danish social housing law that categorizes neighbourhoods on the basis of unemployment, crime, education, income and immigrant population. Dr. Svenningsen Kajita then offered an arts-based reflection through an excerpt of her “Complaints in Practice” film, which collects stories from people who collect grievances and complaints from the public, taking inspiration from Sarah Ahmed’s 2021 book, Complaint!

The session continued with an exploration of ‘infrastructures of care’ from a range of other vantage points, from the multilateral and systems-level down to the grassroots. PhD Candidate Keavy McAbee of the University of Victoria shared preliminary findings from a metanarrative study conducted in partnership with the Uya’am Gaak Cultural Society in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver. Her presentation, titled Health Research & Care: Dismantling Damage-Based Knowledge Systems, supports Uya’am Gaak’s advocacy against colonial knowledge production systems and for an Indigenous-informed approach to research. With care being an inherent component of Indigenous knowledge systems, theirs is an approach that puts co-production and strength-based methodologies at the heart of inquiry, in the process advancing claims for data sovereignty and leveraging desire-based frameworks in the delivery of services and programs.

Javier Vergara Petrescu, Founder and Executive Director of Ciudad Emergente, complemented the discussion with an introduction to a range of co-design methodologies and place-based interventions––from ‘tactical urbanism’ to the ‘proximity of care’ model–that have been deployed in 30 cities across 10 countries to foster a sense of belonging, improve access to services, rebuild collective trust, and co-create more sustainable, livable, and accessible urban spaces. With a special focus on his native Santiago de Chile, his examples made evident the centrality of care in shaping the daily experience of young and elderly populations alike, as well as the importance of having inclusive meeting spaces in which to come together to enjoy the city and solve collective problems.

Dr. Aryana Soliz of Concordia University, a member of the Disability-Inclusive Climate Action Research Programme (DICARP), built on this place-based and community-centric perspective to examine the role that care plays in shared spaces with a discussion of a case study on the decarbonization of transportation in Montreal, Canada. In exploring the concept of ‘active transportation’, she provided an overview of the physical, social, economic and political barriers that must be considered when planning anti-ableist interventions for a more just and inclusive green transition in times of rampant climate change.

Iron & Earth is an organization that delivers programs that enable community-driven climate solutions and reduce barriers for those seeking a future in the green economy. Ana Guerra Marin, a native of Colombia and Communities Director & Just Transition Lead for Canada’s Iron & Earth, built on these themes by exploring why care is foundational to facilitating a transition from fossil-based to renewable energy systems. Her presentation, titled A Look into the Community Talks Initiative in So-Called Canada, unpacked their ‘care-full’ approach to a series of community talks ‘by and for the community’ that use non-polarizing language to discuss sensitive topics such as ‘climate change’ and ‘green transition’ according to the principles of trauma-informed care and the desire-based framework.

Dr. Jesper Christiansen, Director of Programs at Denmark’s Bikuben Foundation and Co-Founder of States of Change, concluded the session by sharing insights from almost two decades of work designing transformative policy structures across sectors, countries and cultures. By creating a culture of shared values and infusing a care ethic in the (co)design of interventions at the transnational and multilateral level, Dr. Christiansen offered reflections and prompts for how to move away from a ‘business as usual’ approach to policy design towards a future-oriented perspective that is capable of meaningfully responding to the interconnected challenges of the polycrisis.

A lively discussion with participants attending in person and on Zoom followed.

Overall, the “infrastructures of care” lens prompts us to examine how cultural attitudes, norms, and policies shape programmatic priorities and built environments and how these, in turn, impact personal and collective experiences of crisis and healing. This is work that requires an expansive and inclusive understanding of how governance and social systems work at different levels—from (trans)national policies to local institutions and homes—and, in turn, how care is conceived, provided and ‘resourced’ both  in acute situations and in the everyday.

Rather than succumbing to hopelessness, burnout and a passive acceptance of crisis as inevitable and predetermined, the two sessions brought to life the many values, visions and practices that are opening up spaces for resisting, reworking and actively reimagining alternatives to neoliberalism-fuelled polycrisis along distinctly ‘integrative’ (Camponeschi, 2021), ‘care-full’ (Williams, 2020; Sultana, 2022) and relational lines.

Together, these examples not only provide a blueprint for the design of ‘infrastructures of care’ and stimulate a more collaborative, ‘caring’ approach to research, but equip the public with the kind of ‘next generation’ concepts and approaches we need in order to encourage more responsive problem-solving, inform more equitable policy-making, and grow the capacity of diverse actors and leaders to imagine, and thus enact, collective visions of meaningful change.

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Additional collaborations in Canada and abroad will continue to explore the potential of ‘infrastructures of care’ in centering healing, solidarity and imagination in polycrisis response. Among these is the organization of a special journal issue on the topic to be published later this year as well as the recent panel held at the Dahdaleh Institute on the same topic.

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