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After COVID-19 was characterised as a pandemic in spring 2020, care and care work became very dominant topics in public discourse in Western Europe. Against this backdrop, the paper turns to the underlying social structures and conditions of caring relations and aims to go before and beyond the pandemic. The serious occasion of the COVID-19 pandemic and its unjust social effects will be taken as a starting point to engage with social theory to discuss pre-existing uneven ‘geographies of caring relations’ in capitalist societies, which pandemic-related measures are built on. For this, the paper draws on Joan Tronto’s extended thoughts on critical feminist care ethics, emphasising her notion of caring-with as the possibility to trust in caring relations based on interdependencies and solidarity, and argues for explicitly linking caring relations to questions of social justice. This framework stresses the foundations of social injustice and shifts the perspective from individual caring subjects and places (‘who and where’) to unjust social structures (‘how’). Moreover, it challenges dominant biopolitics and care economies by way of an insourcing of caring relationships. By conceiving care as part of social theory and not only social analyses, care ethics provide a normative framework for geography and beyond to imagine and practise social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The long-prevailing image of a clear delimitation between core city and suburbs has been increasingly questioned in research. New qualitative approaches are necessary to describe the urban-suburban relationship based on a sociocultural heterogenization of suburbs and the spread of suburban lifestyles into inner cities. The concept of inner-city suburbanization is one approach to define spaces as urban or suburban regardless of geographical location. Drawing upon this concept, the present paper explores suburban lifestyles in the inner-city area of Leipzig and their role in the sociospatial urban transformation. For this purpose, we identify and map owner-occupied middle-class family housing estates in central urban locations. Using qualitative individual and focus group interviews with the residents, complemented by site observation, we explore to what extent these single-family houses resemble traditional suburbs in terms of morphology and social structure in four different case studies. All of the cases show how suburban qualities, such as homeownership and socio-economical homogeneity, go hand in hand with the benefits of their urban locations. This hybrid character reflects the dissolution of the classical place-specific distinctions between urban and suburban environments and patterns. Simultaneously, dynamics of upgrading and social exclusion from housing unfold in the residential areas, where middle-class family housing estates emerge. Thus, we raise the question of the interrelation between inner-city suburbanization processes and gentrification trends in Leipzig. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]