Geography students from the University of Bayreuth visit Care Revolution Rhein-Main

A report by Elfriede Harth (Care Revolution Rhein-Main)

Together with their lecturer, Eva Isselstein, a group of geography students from the University of Bayreuth met with some activists from the Care Revolution Rhein-Main regional group to discuss care and the city, using the metropolis of Frankfurt as a concrete example. The group spent a few days in Frankfurt to explore the topic. They visited the exhibition "Yes, We Care - the New Frankfurt and the Question of the Common Good " currently taking place at the Museum of Applied Arts - the pioneering urban planning in Frankfurt in the 1920s, spoke to various municipal authorities and also sought dialogue with civil society activists on care.

What are the issues that concern care activists in a city, what actions do they carry out, who do they network with, what obstacles do they encounter.....We explored these and other questions over a shared buffet.

The Frankfurt outpatient children's hospice kindly made its premises available to us for the meeting. A facility in the city that provides advice and support to families with children in need of special care and enables them to meet in its rooms so that these affected people can get to know each other, exchange ideas and support each other. Cohesion and a sense of belonging are particularly important in our extremely individualised society. Amira, one of our active members, is a member of this non-profit organisation. Her eldest child has a life-shortening, severely disabling illness.

Her specific situation could be used as an example of how important decidedly inclusive urban planning would be, which unfortunately does not exist in the financial metropolis. Although land and funds are available for prestigious buildings such as the European Central Bank, there are also two public housing associations, ABG, which is owned by the City of Frankfurt, and Nassauische Heimstätte, which is majority-owned by the State of Hesse and 30% by the City of Frankfurt, the city has a huge deficit of social housing and even more so of disabled-friendly flats, disabled-friendly public toilets, disabled-friendly public transport, etc. Her son, who is dependent on residential care, now lives in Wiesbaden because there are no facilities for people like him in Frankfurt. People with a great deal of caring responsibility, even if they are not among the financially privileged who can delegate this responsibility to (often migrant) paid care workers, are particularly burdened in this way.

Housing is of central importance for people's reproduction. And housing is not just about having a roof over your head. It is well known that time is a central resource for good care work that cannot be increased at will, and so the geographical proximity of all public service infrastructures is another important condition in order to avoid wasting this precious resource of time with long journeys that are then lacking for the actual care work.Many more cities should become "cities of a quarter of an hour", i.e. everything that someone needs for everyday life should be within 15 minutes walking or cycling distance, as some cities such as Paris are trying to realise. This would be an important step towards a care-centred economy and society. This is also one of the reasons why our regional group is committed to the issue of housing and has founded the Mietenwahnsinn Hessen alliance with other organisations.

The fight against climate change was mentioned as another important care topic for life in the city. With increasing global warming, life in a sealed city is becoming increasingly unhealthy. Here, too, support from Fridays For Future, networking with the Transition Town movement, but also campaigning for an unconditional basic income are important to us. Gainful employment should not be a necessity to secure one's own livelihood, but should only be performed if it makes a meaningful contribution to living together in a society based on the division of labour. First and foremost, people should have time for the activities that are essential to life and a prerequisite for everything else in society, namely care work. As this is all about human relationships, many of these activities cannot always be organised in the form of goods.

With a basic income and the freedom to decide for oneself how to spend one's lifetime, the production of goods and services, which is the main cause of the consumption of energy and raw materials, could be reduced. Society could then decide collectively which products are really necessary and desirable.

The question arose as to who would carry out necessary but undesirable activities if people were no longer forced to earn a living through gainful employment. How would these activities be organised by society? In response, one student remarked that such questions were a symptom of the extreme individualisation that characterises our neoliberal society, where each person does not feel responsible for the community, but only for their own, very personal interests. This can indeed be seen, for example, in the way we deal with public space, which many people do not regard as a commons that belongs to everyone and in which people behave with care and consideration, but as "not mine", and which can be littered without hesitation, for example.

The issue of property, which is so central to capitalism, and the problems of our political system, which is often too far removed from people's reality, were discussed. Another topic was that closeness, relationships, togetherness and interdependence are so central to care.

We reported that Care Revolution propagates the idea of care councils, where both those responsible for care and the people they care for decide together how care relationships should be organised, what is needed, what is desirable, etc., and argued that grassroots democracy is important.

The objection was raised that the current shift to the right makes it clear that important political decisions should not be left to citizens, as history has shown that they are too easily seduced. It is sensible to rely on experts. However, even if (scientific and other) expertise should not be ignored, it is important in a democracy that structures are created in which everyone can participate in decision-making.

The two hours of the meeting passed far too quickly. We could have gone on discussing for a long time. We hope that the group and every single student was infected by the desire to work for a care-centred society.