Caring neighbourhoods: maintaining collective care under neoliberal care reforms

Abstract

Welfare decentralisations have increased the importance of local neighbourhoods as context for care. As welfare reforms largely rely on increased citizen participation, local infrastructures facilitating participation, especially in disadvantaged neighbourhoods, become a focal point for understanding neighbourhood care. We studied professional and citizen led forms of care in two low-income neighbourhoods in the Netherlands. Our analysis of collective care as practices of repair and maintenance highlights the collective losses that neighbourhoods suffer within an institutional context of care as self-management and individual responsibility. The sustenance of collective neighbourhood care as a context and practice of social work requires recognition of the epistemic and relational work carried out by citizens and professionals in maintaining and repairing local care infrastructures.