The Caring City
The Caring City: Ethics of Urban Design is a book authored by Professor Juliet Davis and published by Bristol University Press in 2022.
This book examines how urban design can foster care within cities, addressing a gap in literature about the role of built environments and cities in shaping care practices and relationships. While earlier studies often focus on formal care-related building typologies, this work expands the scope to include everyday cityscapes and design practices.
Spanning eight chapters, the book sets out a range of ways of thinking about the caring potentials of urban design. It highlights diverse urban spaces—streets, cafés, museums, green spaces, and allotments—as critical arenas of care alongside formal care settings. It considers how caring is positioned within cities relative to other activities like living and working, and the significance of this for care practices, gender equality and inclusion. It explores how the materiality of the city, typically conceived as fixed and immutable, may be designed from the outset to adapt as care needs shift across the lifecourse. It examines how care can be shown and enacted through the repair of urban places affected by decline, conflict, or redevelopment, reinforcing collective memories and place attachments. Finally, informed by environmental studies and the climate crisis, it reflects on how architecture and urbanism can embody care for Earth's fragile resources and ecologies upon which all life depends.
Throughout, it shows how design can shape care practices between people and towards common resources. But it shows how urban design can operate and be interpreted as an ethical and relational practice.
The research for the book was made possible by funding from the Grosvenor Estate (2015–2020) and supported by a Research Leave Fellowship during 2017–2018.
