Care at the center

Neighborhoods like the Siedlung am Lerchenauer See, with car-oriented planning and functional separation, lack infrastructure for equitable caregiving, evident in the neglected store center. The focus on domestic care leads to its isolation, despite its importance. As caregiving and work-care balance issues intensify, women continue to shoulder most caregiving responsibilities, often unpaid and unrecognized, negatively impacting their life trajectories. This caregiving crisis also contributes to growing loneliness, childcare shortages, and insufficient eldercare.

The crisis of care can be addressed through a care center, following examples like Barcelona, which fosters egalitarian neighborhood caregiving networks, making caregiving a collective, fair, and sustainable communal responsibility. To integrate care into the neighborhood during our thesis, we established a research pavilion as a tool for concept development through dialogue with residents. Set up for nine days at the shop center, the pavilion engaged passersby with communal caregiving, facilitating socializing, workshops, film screenings, and discussions and serving as an exhibition. These activities sparked imagination and collected insights into the spatial and functional needs of a care center. The developed concept is based on: proximity, accessibility, adaptability, being the right point of contact, inclusivity, and wider neighbourhood impact. It emphasizes integration with daily life, offering basic services like a food market or leisure activities to foster informal connections. The center’s spaces must be flexible, open to all, and adaptable to community needs. The proposed program includes open neighborhood spaces, a central kitchen with a café, a “caring heart” as a point of contact, and spaces for repairs and workshops. Located in dilapidated parts of the shopping center, it will offer caregiving services, career counseling, and educational programs while driving neighborhood development. We propose a care-centered social cooperative to manage the center, uniting institutional actors and residents into a collaborative caregiving network. Operating on the concept of time, care hours will be accumulated and redeemed, recognizing care work ideologically and materially. Our findings, presented to the district committee, initiate ongoing dialogue.