Reproductive commons and political infrastructures: Care and collective Life making in the urban polycrisis

Labor migrant housing is a site where the crisis of care is rendered structurally invisible. Drawing on the feminist notion of "life's work" (Mitchell, Marston, and Katz), this paper asks whether the reproductive labor of migrant workers is fully recuperated by capital under conditions of neoliberal restructuring and increasing precarity — or whether everyday domestic practices within labor migrant housing environments constitute a reproductive commons that exceeds institutional and economic attempts to organise migrant life through regimes of control and managed dependency. The paper argues that shared cooking, care networks, and the negotiation of thresholds operate as socio-spatial practices that reorganise space beyond the formal logics of labor management. These are acts of maintenance and repair — the unglamorous, ongoing labor of keeping collective life going against institutional neglect and material depletion. Drawing on feminist STS scholarship on care and maintenance (Puig de la Bellacasa), and from an architectural perspective centred on domesticity, this contribution proposes labor migrant housing as an infrastructure of care rather than merely a site of labor reproduction. The contribution places in dialogue two contexts of labor migrant housing: agricultural settlements in the Piana di Gioia Tauro in Southern Italy and logistical housing systems along the Rotterdam–Venlo corridor in the Netherlands. Although embedded in different labor regimes, both contexts reveal a shared structural condition in which the right to domesticity is suspended by the very systems that house labor migrants — and both reveal forms of self-organisation and spatial production that exceed this suspension. Attending to everyday practices of spatial solidarity, this contribution makes visible the reproductive commons already emerging within conditions of urban precarity. At the same time, it asks how these practices can be recognized politically without romanticizing the conditions of exhaustion, neglect, and deprivation that make such forms of collective labor necessary.

The contribution explores how reproductive commons emerge as socio-material infrastructures capable of sustaining collective mental wellbeing within conditions of urban precarity. Drawing on the case of the Community of Squatted Prosfygika — a self-organised community occupying a 1930s social housing complex in central Athens — I examine how place-based practices of care, mutual aid, and commoning constitute an assemblage (McFarlane, 2011) that reconfigures the relationship between social reproduction, mental wellbeing, and urban space. In a context shaped by polycrisis — austerity, housing and commons dispossession and a deepening crisis of care (Fraser, 2016) — the community has developed twenty-two collectively managed structures, including a healthcare structure, a self-organised school, spaces for women and gender non-conforming subjects, and an oncology patient hosting facility. I read these not as service provisions but as infrastructures of care-in-common: spatially embedded socio-material arrangements through which reproductive labour is collectivised, interdependence is practised, and psycho-physical wellbeing is sustained beyond individualised frameworks of health. These infrastructures operate as sites where mental wellbeing emerges as a collective capacity cultivated through everyday relational and affective labour. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork — participation in community assemblies, situated conversations, and spatial mapping — and engaging feminist social reproduction theory (Fraser, 2016; Katz, 2001) alongside critical urban infrastructure thinking (McFarlane, 2011; Marvin, McFarlane and Rutherford, 2026; Simone, 2004), I argue that the Prosfygika assemblage produces a political imaginary of reproductive commons grounded in embodied, place-based practice — forging commoning subjectivities through the material reworking of shared space. Yet this imaginary remains under threat: institutional plans for restoration-through-eviction enact a form of slow violence (Nixon, 2011) that renders inhabitants unaccountable and their care labour invisible. The paper asks what is at stake — materially, affectively, politically — when place-embedded infrastructures of collective wellbeing are dismantled in the name of urban regeneration.

This research focuses on the spatial clarification of the architectural type known as the panigyróspito, approached as a fragile yet enduring collective expression of dwelling, still in continuous use across the islands of the Aegean. The panigyróspito, a collectively produced and shared space, forms part of church complexes, accommodating the communal meal and acting as a “vessel” that brings together the spiritual and the secular. Communal dining within a religious context constitutes an archaic condition, traceable to early Christian traditions and monastic refectories. As a distinct architectural type within anonymous vernacular heritage, the panigyróspito exhibits significant diversity in its spatial configuration. Its capacity for transformation—depending on construction systems, available materials, environmental and social conditions—reveals it as a highly adaptable spatial type. This spectrum, ranging from ephemeral to more permanent or even naturally formed structures, reflects not only morphological variation but also the function it serves within each specific social context. The research is grounded in in-situ architectural survey and the production of original measured drawings of structures that majority of which had not been previously recorded, conducted across five islands—Chios, Tinos, Mykonos, Kea, and Santorini—— as case studies, where through critical observation and discussions with local inhabitants, church complexes across different places and time periods were documented. Although rooted in insular contexts, the panigyróspito offers insights into how small-scale spatial infrastructures can sustain collective life through shared practices of care. Within these constructions the fundamental human need to “assemble” (ἀγείρειν) is expressed. In the societies of the Aegean, harmonious coexistence constitutes a core element of social structure. Therefore, the panigyróspito should not be understood solely as a vernacular architectural form, but as a living spatial condition of collective life. Based on this broader research, the presentation focuses on a selected case study: Saint Antonios in Santorini.

This paper examines how an outdoor market in Tor Bella Monaca, Rome, becomes a place of care through mundane, routine interactions. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, it focuses on small, often overlooked acts—such as conversation, repeated encounters, informal exchanges, and gift-giving—that shape the market as a space where people feel recognised, connected, and momentarily relieved from the pressures of everyday life. A specific combination of material and social practices over time produces a situated place of care that is generally overlooked by researchers, policymakers, and even non-market users in the neighbourhood itself. Building on feminist work on social reproduction, the paper argues that these practices constitute a form of uncoordinated cooperation through which individual acts of sociability accumulate into a collectively sustained infrastructure of care. In this sense, the market can be understood as a reproductive commons in practice: a shared resource that emerges through everyday relational labour. At the same time, these forms of care remain fragile and limited. The market itself is a precarious infrastructure based on human labour and thus vulnerable to change and external pressures, such as declining profits and limited institutional support for vendors. Moreover, as a temporary and periodic space, its caring functions are confined to specific times and rhythms. While the market provides meaningful moments of care and connection, it does not offer a solution to the broader, ongoing crises shaping everyday life in the urban margins. By foregrounding both the generative and limited nature of mundane social relations, the paper contributes to debates on reproductive commons by showing how care is enacted through low-intensity, informal practices that sustain urban life while remaining inherently unstable and incomplete.

This paper explores how everyday care practices are inscribed in public space, focusing on the historic center of Thessaloniki and, more specifically, the axis of Dimitriou Gounari Street. Drawing on feminist urban geography and the concept of “geographies of care,” the study approaches care not as a private or individual matter, but as a spatially and socially embedded practice that actively shapes urban space. The research is guided by two main questions: (a) how are women’s everyday care practices expressed and dispersed within public space, and (b) which spatial and social mechanisms render these practices often invisible? Within this framework, care is understood as a form of reproductive labour that extends beyond the household, permeates public space, and is closely linked to issues of access, mobility, safety, and urban infrastructure. Methodologically, the study adopts a qualitative, feminist approach, employing time-use diaries completed by women living or working in the area and relevant mappings. Through the recording of daily routes and routines, micro-practices, and lived experiences, the research highlights the fragmented, non-linear, and often invisible forms of mobility that constitute care within the urban tissue. The analysis focuses on spatial trajectories as well as on obstacles, disturbances, and other difficulties, coping strategies, and relationships with both material and social infrastructures. The paper contributes to ongoing debates on “reproductive commons” by foregrounding care as a critical yet under-recognised urban infrastructure and as a site of political claim-making, particularly in the context of the contemporary urban polycrisis, in the Greek socio spatial context.

Throughout months of ethnographic observation in a residential neighbourhood in Beijing, I repeatedly encountered a familiar yet under-theorised urban phenomenology: elderly guardians—most often grandparents—occupying urban streets adjacent to residential compounds to take care of their grandchildren. In Chinese, everyday childcare is commonly described by the phrase dài háizi—literally “to carry children.” The practice of dài (carrying), understood in my research as a feminist spatial practice, foregrounds the embodied and relational labour of care that enacts and sustains intergenerational relationships in public space. Tracing these carrying practices, the paper discusses how intergenerational childcare on urban streets materialises and spatialises the contemporary configuration and struggles of social reproduction in urban China. It raises critical questions: whose bodies carry the burdens of social reproduction, and where is this labour spatially performed? While such arrangements enable urban households to cope with intensifying economic pressures, they remain informal, unpaid, and marginalised both socially and spatially. The paper positions the urban street as a key infrastructure of social reproduction. Engaging feminist and critical geographic debates, it conceptualises these practices as emergent forms of reproductive commons: socio-material and embodied arrangements through which care is collectively organised and urban life made liveable under conditions of precarity. These commons are not formalised or explicitly politicised; rather, they are fragile, everyday achievements sustained through routine co-presence, mutual recognition, and shared rhythms of care. They are embedded within longer trajectories of Chinese feminist thought and struggle, in which the visibility, valuation, and distribution of care have been continually negotiated across socialist legacies, market reforms, and contemporary gender politics. Integrating the notion of carrying, the paper reconceptualises urban infrastructure as a gendered, relational process, foregrounding how social reproduction is continually produced through embodied care practices.

The suggested article centres the care crisis from within the spatial-temporal infrastructures of urban institutionalized childcare by focusing on the struggles and contradictions, but also the potential of Viennese parent-led nurseries. Since 1969 parents collectively rent spaces, hire educators, and organize childcare in their free time. These groups can be considered childcare commons (Zechner 2022), striving to collectively rework and sustain the material, physical and emotional work involved in early childhood education and care in the urban environment of Vienna. Understanding cities as both, reproducing neoliberal capitalist structures, as well as a potential lever for social-ecological transformations (Dengler et al. 2025), the suggested article links the cyclical, situated and relational concepts of temporalities for generative social-ecological processes (“timescapes”, Adam 1998) with the becomings of childcare commons (García-López et al. 2021). An intersectional feminist ecological economics perspective is used to investigate the research question how parent-led nurseries reproduce and persist capitalist logics in their daily social-ecological provisioning of childcare. A qualitative empirical analysis foregrounds the perspective of parents, educators and children of selected parent-led nurseries, as well as the broader institutional context of childcare provisioning in Vienna. Adam, B. (1998): Timescapes of Modernity. The environment and invisible hazards. Routledge. Dengler, C.; Völkle, H.; Ware, S. (2025). Time and space for social-ecological transformation: Care-full commoning in and beyond the ecofeminist city, Environmental Politics, 34(5), 861-881. García-López, G.A.; Lang, U.; Singh, N. (2021). Commons, Commoning and Co-Becoming: Nurturing Life-in-Common and Post-Capitalist Futures. EPE: Nature and Space, 4(4); 1199-1216. Zechner, M. (2022). Childcare commons: Of feminist subversions of community and commune in Barcelona. Ephemera, 22(2), 19-50.

This paper examines the collectivization of care within diverse care and housing constellations across Nairobi, Istanbul, and Berlin, positioning children as central actors in reproductive commoning under conditions of urban housing crises. Challenging dominant framings of children as either care recipients or passive victims of neglect, the paper advances an adult-critical perspective that foregrounds children’s active participation in shaping, sustaining, and contesting everyday practices of care. Drawing on feminist and critical geographical scholarship on social reproduction and care ethics, the paper conceptualizes housing as an intergenerational site of care and a socio-material infrastructure through which commoning practices are constituted beyond the nuclear family. It interrogates the role of children as commoners across varied socio-spatial arrangements, including extended family households in lower-middle-class housing estates in Nairobi, precarious housing conditions among minority groups in Istanbul, and care relations extending beyond single-parent households through neighbourhood-based kinship networks in Berlin. Through these cases, the paper asks how specific configurations enable or constrain children’s capacities to act as caring subjects, and how children’s practices, in turn, actively reconfigure forms of living-in-common. By situating children as solidaristic contemporaries rather than future urban subjects in different urban housing crises, the paper intervenes in debates on urban commons, social reproduction, and the right to the city. It argues for a reconceptualization of urban care infrastructures and relations as intergenerational, contested, and co-produced by young actors often marginalized in urban debate.

The contemporary care crisis has prompted a surge of scholarly attention to urban care commons and bottom-up care infrastructures, with particular emphasis on their socio-spatial dynamics. By contrast, the temporal dynamics through which such formations are sustained have received limited attention. While previous research has engaged urban and institutional temporalities in relation to processes of commoning, the commoning of time itself remains underexplored as a pathway toward care-full urban transformation. This article turns to the urban co-production of time, focusing on the temporal patterns that sustain one of the largest self-organised collective kitchens in crisis-ridden central Athens. The kitchen mobilises dozens of residents in daily food provisioning and redistribution, preparing and sharing hundreds of warm meals six days a week. The scale and continuity of the initiative provide a unique empirical lens for understanding the organisational and meaning-making practices, at the temporal level, that make informal urban care infrastructures possible. Drawing on ten months of ethnographic fieldwork, the article illuminates both the temporal resources (clock-time hours) and the temporal orientations (valuations of time beyond clock-time) that underpin alternative arrangements of social reproduction. The findings introduce the concept of collective time work to describe how otherwise temporally fragmented urban communities pool time and remake temporal norms to create cohesive community care. Conceptually, the article advances time as a relational, co-produced good, rather than an individually managed resource, to foreground the politics of time as a vital vector for transforming how care is organised and sustained in cities.

Drawing on archival and empirical research into feminist and LGBTQI+ activism against gender-based violence in Athens and Crete, this paper explores the mapping of genealogies, practices, and political infrastructures within distinct urban contexts. Our intervention highlights the articulations and tensions between trans-locality and emplacedness in contemporary Greek movements. In doing so, we critically engage with the politics of knowledge by acknowledging the inherent multiplicities within the feminist “archive.” This research is situated within a conjuncture defined by an escalation of GBV, increasingly normalized by “anti-gender” ideologies targeting decades of feminist struggle. The rise of far-right and authoritarian politics—reintroducing white supremacism as a dominant sociopolitical technology—has rendered public space a “danger zone” for femininities, LGBTQI+ communities, racialized groups, and those standing in solidarity. Simultaneously, feminist and queer initiatives have gained significant momentum, functioning as a vital counter-response to the encroachment on rights and safety. Our research identifies distinct activist dynamics in each location. Athens functions, materially and symbolically, as a "metropolis" of activism—a site of convergence where diverse voices, practices, and political trajectories intersect, and where precarity and intersectional discrimination are highly visible. Crete, conversely, is characterized by a cultural divide between a progressive urban milieu and a staunchly patriarchal hinterland where GBV remains deeply normalized. Consequently, the impact of feminist and queer mobilizations in Crete is often more pronounced, representing a direct rupture with the status quo. These smaller-scale urban collectivities exhibit greater long-term continuity, relying on close-knit social networks that serve as both a political base and a vital source of personal support. By attending to these diverse histories, we emphasize the situated nature of the politics of care. We argue that activists draw on specific socio-cultural resources and political infrastructures unique to each context; these form shifting yet sustained webs of affective and material resistance and solidarity.

From homelessness criminalisation to hostile immigration environments, urban governance consistently produces the very marginalisation it claims to address. Placing critical urban geography in dialogue with debates on care, democracy, and infrastructure, this paper interrogates the governance of care as an urgent yet undertheorised site of democratic struggle in the crisis city. Drawing on qualitative research conducted across Manchester, Athens, and Santiago with communities experiencing homelessness, problematic drug use, and extreme poverty, I contend that who holds decision-making power over care infrastructure: who designs it, funds it, and is consulted in its making, has profound material and democratic consequences for making space for those whose lives are rendered liveable. This paper analyses questions of authority, accountability, and exclusion, recognising how care governance becomes entangled with the material realities of urban precarity. For example, service architectures built around the traditional single homeless man can render women's homelessness structurally invisible. Criminalisation of drug use compounds vulnerability rather than enable treatment. Hostile border regimes layer onto already fragile care entitlements for refugees and migrants increasingly constituting the urban homeless population. These are not policy failures at the margins but diagnostic of how democratic governance reproduces the socio-spatial inequalities it purports to resolve. Care governance can be situated within intersecting crises as the unravelling of formal welfare infrastructures under austerity intersects with deepening crises of housing, health, and belonging. In light of this, this paper asks whether mutual aid networks, harm-reduction collectives, and commoning practices can constitute insurgent democratic forms: place-based challenges to the terms on which care is made available, and to the question of who gets to decide?

This study examines how gendered inequalities manifest in the spatial experience of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki campus and investigates how feminist spatial planning can effectively address them, contributing to geographical debates on spatial justice and inclusive urban environments. Grounded in a socio-spatial approach, the research explores the interplay between gender, everyday mobility, and the organization of space, emphasizing how built environments reproduce or challenge social inequalities. The study adopts a mixed-methods methodology, combining qualitative and quantitative tools, including interviews, on-site experimental observation, map analysis, and a survey of approximately 400 participants. This methodological triangulation enables a comprehensive understanding of how different users perceive, navigate, and appropriate campus space in their daily routines. Findings highlight pronounced disparities in perceived safety, accessibility, and belonging, with women and other marginalized groups reporting heightened insecurity, exclusion, and reduced autonomy, particularly in poorly lit or transitional areas and during nighttime use. These patterns demonstrate that spatial inequalities are both socially constructed and materially embedded in the physical and institutional configuration of the campus. The results reveal structural and institutional gaps in managing gender-based discrimination, highlighting the limited integration of gender-sensitive planning within existing governance frameworks. Importantly, the study emphasizes the critical role of lived experience in shaping spatial justice and everyday campus life, uncovering hidden geographies of exclusion often overlooked in conventional planning practices. The study concludes with design guidelines grounded in feminist principles, including care, inclusivity, accessibility, and participation, demonstrating how such approaches can create safer, more vibrant, and socially cohesive university environments and contribute to contemporary debates on embedding gender perspectives into urban planning and reimagining public spaces through equitable, community-centered strategies.

The paper examines the notion of crisis as a process, in relation to the production of public space. During period of crisis, public space is reconfigured not only through the formal institutional framework –invoked by emergency governance- but also through new methods devised by the local residents, who experience the crisis in question. The paper reviews the spatial and social dimensions of successive and overlapping crises in Thessaly, as a way for residents to reclaim and redefine public space. Thessaly is a Greek region that during the last decade has been severely affected by successive crises such as the financial crisis, Covid-19, successive floods and the social crisis raised by the fatal rail accident at Tempi. Public spaces in Thessaly have been heavily impacted by these events, leading residents to develop their own mechanisms and resume everyday life. Within this context, streets and squares have been served as sites of dissent and solidarity, fostering new urban qualities and establishing the conditions for reclaiming public space. This response to crisis is based, on the one hand, on the residents themselves -their lived experience and empirical local knowledge- and on the other hand, on the necessity created by the crisis itself, which frequently disrupts “normality” and necessitates a “state of exception”. The paper argues that residents are not merely passive recipients of a crisis but they constitute key actors in the production of space. Their empirical knowledge and understanding of their everyday public space and their direct engagement with this are crucial factors in the production of space before, during and in the aftermath of a crisis.

This paper examines the role of movements for the defense of public open spaces in shaping the electoral results of the 2010 municipal elections. The research focuses on two distinct fields of study that highlight the significance of environmental stakes in the local political arena: the Municipality of Athens and the Municipality of Elliniko-Argyroupoli. In the case of the Municipality of Athens, the analysis focuses on the importance of local-level resistances (with the Cyprus & Patision Park as a characteristic example), where the claim for public space was directly linked to changes in electoral geography. In the Municipality of Elliniko-Argyroupoli, the mobilization for the creation of a Metropolitan Park on the site of the former airport is examined—an issue that polarized the local community and served as a central axis of the pre-electoral debate. Through the spatial analysis of the results, this study documents how environmental demands were transformed into political action at the ballot box. The findings demonstrate that in both cases, despite their differences, the environmental movement functioned as a decisive factor for the political activation of citizens, establishing the protection of open spaces as a dominant demand of the period.

The neighborhood of La Florida, in the Barcelona metropolitan area, has been subjected to processes of urban dispossession since its development in the 1950s to host migrant workers. As a result, La Florida is currently enmeshed in a chronic crisis of social reproduction exacerbated by several intersecting factors such as recent attempts to “sanitize” the neighborhood, restrictive migration policies and stigmatization of the area. These and other processes intersect with climate change to make La Florida one of the areas with the highest climate-vulnerability index of the whole Barcelona metropolitan area. In this context, and after more than a decade of organizing and building popular power, neighbors have built what they call a “neighborhood ecosystem”: a network of projects, organizations and spaces that seek to collectivize social reproduction. The ecosystem includes a daily-functioning community kitchen, an editorial lab, a seed bank, a popular school and a housing cooperative among many other initiatives; and is driven by mutual care and collective commitment. We characterize the neighborhood ecosystem in La Florida as an ecology of popular infrastructures weaved together through commoning practices and relations sustained by the everyday involvement of hundreds of people. In this presentation we explore the potentialities and challenges of the neighborhood ecosystem in La Florida to bring about just climate adaptation from below. We look at everyday commoning practices and heat-coping strategies in La Florida to argue that, by collectivizing reproductive activities and infrastructures, neighbors are building adaptive capacity. In opposition to municipal plans that reproduce marginalization processes, heat adaptation through commoning responds directly to the immediate needs of the community and challenges the stigmatization of the neighborhood. In this way, commoning for climate adaptation builds popular power and collective autonomy in a daily prefiguration of emancipatory social relations from the margins in a heating world.

Geographical scholarship foregrounds infrastructures as the socio-material systems through which social reproduction is secured unevenly across classed, gendered, and racialised lines and becomes politically contested. This paper develops infrastructural labour as a lens for rethinking reproductive commons. By infrastructural labour, we refer to both the formal, paid, acknowledged and the informal, unpaid, unacknowledged work through which people access, use, repair, improvise, bypass, and rework the infrastructures necessary for sustaining life. Infrastructural labour allows us to follow reproductive work across sites and practices and foreground the devalued relations and work that make life possible and worth living. Drawing on our work in Thessaloniki over the past decade, we trace infrastructural labour in the everyday work of stretching bills, sharing food, organising education, managing debt, and securing access to warmth, shelter, and electricity. We also trace it in repairing pipes, reconnecting water or electricity, maintaining squats and collective kitchens, or sharing bureaucratic knowledge. In this sense, we argue, infrastructural labour brings reproductive commons into life and use: it is the work through which shared resources, spaces, and capacities are maintained, contested, and made available for collective life-making. Our focus on infrastructural labour allows us to foreground mutual aid as a material and relational praxis through which reproductive commons are produced, organised, and politically imagined. We, thus, rethink mutual aid through reproductive labour and recentre it as a practice of infrastructuring: a way of collectively securing access to housing, food, water, electricity, shelter, and knowledge when dominant infrastructures exclude, extract, or fail. In reorganising the material conditions of reproduction, mutual aid carries a collective desire for different ways of living in common. It works as a form of political translation, connecting struggles often treated separately — around housing, utilities, migration, food, debt, and education — and making alternative reproductive futures thinkable and realisable.

Within an environment of recurring and overlapping crises, the reproduction of everyday life is increasingly organized beyond and in tension with state and market provision. This paper explores how urban commons of various legal forms and sectors of activity in Athens and Berlin assemble urban solidarity infrastructures, namely socio-material configurations through which horizontal practices and relations of production and social reproduction (i.e. housing, food networks, care, media and culture, digital tools and infrastructure) are collectively organized and embedded in urban environments and circuits. Drwaing on 54 interviews across a diverse set of initiatives operating in the highly differentiated contexts of Athens and Berlin, this presentation approaches the commons not as bounded entities and institutional forms, but as constantly becoming assemblages constituted through heterogenous relations between human and non-human actors, resources and organizational practices. In this frame, production and social reproduction are understood as overlapping, ongoing processes through which labour, care, solidarity and democratic governance models are coninously negotiated and provisionally stratified under conditions of urban precarity. Through bringing together the Deleuzoguattarian concepts of assemblage, desire, and molar/molecular formations with the autonomist lens of the commons theory, I argue i) that these initiatives do not operate in isolation but, rather, they constitute broader infrastructural assemblages by sharing people, infrastructures, material and immaterial resources, and collective desires and ii) they continuously adapt their repertoires of action to fluid and contested urban conditions, assuming multiple and shifting roles, from protest and resistance to the creation of alternative economies and egalitarian forms of social reproduction. By foregrounding the infrastructural and processual dimensions of (re)production, the paper contributes to debates on social reproduction as a terrain of urban struggle and repositions the commons as a dynamic and contested field of assembling life-sustaining relations in the city.

In recent years, the intensification of platformization has become a defining feature of contemporary capitalism, increasingly embedded within—and constitutive of—an ongoing urban polycrisis (Sequera et al., 2026). This process is both reshaping key domains of social reproduction—e.g. access to housing and labour—and also expanding into the very activities that sustain everyday life, including care, cleaning, and health services (Barrial et al., 2025). Despite their marginal position in dominant accounts of platform capitalism, these sectors have experienced some of the most rapid forms of platform expansion in recent years (Rodríguez-Modroño & Agenjo-Calderón, 2024; Huws, 2018). Situated within historically feminised and racialised labour markets, platform-mediated reproductive work relies structurally on migrant women, whose labour underpins multi-scalar care chains (Bhattacharya, 2024). Platforms operate not merely as intermediaries but as infrastructures of extraction, driving renewed processes of the recommodification of social reproduction (Strüver & Bauriedl, 2022). This reconfiguration intensifies existing regimes of exploitation through labour flexibilisation and fragmentation, the amplification of informality, the externalisation of risks, and the consolidation of on-demand temporalities, deepening precarity and exposure to intersecting forms of violence (Santamarina & Fernández-Trujillo, 2025). Drawing on qualitative fieldwork based on over 40 interviews with migrant women platform domestic workers in Madrid, Rome, and Buenos Aires, this paper moves beyond accounts that focus on how platformization restructures domestic labour markets and their socio-spatial organisation to engage with social reproduction as a contested terrain of agency, commoning, and collective organisation. Foregrounding workers’ experiences, the paper traces practices that challenge platform atomisation, from everyday survival strategies to collective forms of organising and mutual support, building collective infrastructures and logistics that help to navigate life in exclusionary urban contexts. These practices are deeply shaped by bordering regimes and migratory trajectories, highlighting social reproduction as a key site of struggle and a generative space for collective resistance.

This paper examines the contradictions that emerged within grassroots efforts to collectively reproduce everyday life under conditions of acute economic crisis, drawing on the experience of neighbourhood assemblies and solidarity initiatives in Greece during the debt crisis. It focuses on the structural tensions that shape attempts to construct collective infrastructures of care outside — or against — capitalist social relations. Self-organised initiatives for reproduction face a constitutive tension between two logics: one premised on formal equivalence and exchange, and one premised on solidarity understood as mutuality beyond equivalence. Alternative currency networks, time banks, and other exchange-based projects presuppose property and individual capacity as given while leaving underlying inequalities unaddressed. Where initiatives do exceed the logic of equivalence, however — in collective kitchens, solidarity health centres, or unmediated forms of mutual aid — they can remain circumscribed by the poverty they seek to alleviate, dependent on surplus labour-power rather than surplus wealth. The paper argues that the spatial form of neighbourhood-based organisation compounds these tensions. The presumption of a pre-existing community of equals, united by proximity, can obscure the class, racial, and gender hierarchies that traverse urban space and constitute its residents unequally. The democratic form, premised on the formal equality of participants, cannot address what it cannot recognise. Solidarity is thus not simply a moral disposition that can be declared, but a social relation whose possibility is structurally conditioned. Without directly confronting the social relations that make equivalence necessary, infrastructures of care risk reproducing — rather than contesting — the conditions of their own insufficiency. Yet the possibility of confronting such relations is there, in forms of collective action that expropriate infrastructures while simultaneously questioning the ways social relations penetrate group relations within movements.