Caring Communities and Urban Cultures of Care for Older People in Austria, Hungary, and The Netherlands

While a wide range of community‐based civic initiatives and collective practices have emerged in urban settings in recent years, the intersection of spatiality, care, and communities is a relatively little‐discussed topic. In the examination of urban life, the concept of social infrastructures may be a useful tool, that refers to spaces, facilities, institutions, and communities that enable social connections in the urban environment and contributes to the operation of the city with regards to well‐being, inclusiveness, autonomy, accessibility, and mobility for potentially vulnerable social groups like older people. The article applies the concept as a starting point and presents three case studies of caring communities in Austria, Hungary, and the Netherlands. Caring communities are thereby understood as heterogeneous and dynamic ensembles of caring relations involving different actors, practices, and socio‐material dimensions. Drawing on theoretical and empirical work that critically assesses care, caring communities and urban life, we ask the following questions: (a) How are the analysed cases embedded into the respective (country‐specific and local) care regimes?; (b) how do community initiatives (re‐)appropriate urban spaces?; and (c) how do community initiatives implement new urban cultures of care and constitute social infrastructures? By analysing distinct care regimes, we first examine specific characteristics of the socio‐spatial embedding of caring communities in urban regions. Building on qualitative research, in the second step, we present different attempts at organising community‐based care in the three selected countries.