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This paper contributes to the debate on the Caring city by analyzing how the local and national states managed the pandemic in Mexico City and the lived and material effects on women. Based on a series of participatory mapping workshops carried out with two groups of women: those who worked from home during the lockdown in 2020–2021 and those forced to seek work outside the home, as well as interviews with civil servants, the paper shows how the so-called 'caring' state misunderstood the material and embodied conditions of social inequalities. While the state narrative of care and protection was premised on the isolation of a 'healthy inside' from a 'contagious outside', women's experience of COVID measures would be better described as a series of thresholds assembling a body-domestic-city experience. The paper concludes that it is necessary to adjust our geographical lenses and consider the domestic space as more than unit of resolution (grain), giving it instead the necessary attention to understand its relation with urban space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this short comment on Beveridge and Koch's intervention on radical democracy and urbanization, I wish to take their idea of democratic engagement and push it towards epistemological reflections. Democratic engagement is a form of anticipation of urban futures – futures characterized by caring democracy. Adjusting our analytical lens to better see these everyday practices requires rebalancing critical versus generative epistemologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A neighborhood bazaar run by a community organization in Saint-Denis in the Greater Paris region, an 'informal' cultural street market in downtown Mexico City run by the oldest members of the Punk-Rock community... Two spaces that have in common the circulation of objects and a dense web of affective interactions between people and commodities. This article shows how the circulation of objects creates interstitial spaces between the public and the domestic. But it goes further by demonstrating that these interstitial spaces also challenge market and gender norms. Through a participatory methodology involving photography and comparative dialog, the article analyzes the place of objects in the creation of interstitial spaces and their subversive potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]