What was your motivation to join the course?
I was particularly excited to join this course to not only present my final master thesis, which focused on the experiences of intense caregivers (of whom most are women) in the urban environments of Vilnius, but also to gain new knowledge on feminism and urban planning, which is decentered from the perspectives of the Global North.
What are the most memorable moments from the trip?
Having spent two weeks not only learning the course material but immersed in a totally different culture and meeting new people, it becomes difficult to single out the main highlights of the study trip. We have spent considerable time visiting different urban spots in Lima and learning about Peru’s urban planning priorities and also gained a better understanding of the wider history of Peru, including Spanish colonisation and the modern complexity of politics. These were paramount to shaping our awareness on the emerging social issues and how the city (and the country) has been organised.
Could you tell some words about your visit to Asentamientos humanos and Ollas Comunes?
A whole new experience for me, were visits to informal settlements (asentamientos humanos). Lima’s population has quadrupled in the last 60 years or so. Many new residents came to the city to look for work and have settled at the peripheries of the city centre – occupying the surrounding hills. The informal settlements have appeared with new residents building their houses with what they can – using their own resources and sometimes the help of their neighbours. It is reported that around 68% of Lima’s housing is “informal” and usually these districts lack paved roads, sewerage, drinking water, streetlights and community services.
We have visited one of these informal settlements with Alto Perú, a community organisation and IntuyLab, an organisation working for sustainable urban practices in Lima. What struck me the most during this visit were not the aforementioned urban deficiencies or the rates of crime and poverty, but the intuitive appearance of collective practices, which improve neighbourhoods for all the residents. We saw and were told that neighbours are helping each other to do minor fixtures of the houses or to put up new buildings. In many cases, such neighbourhoods would also see the appearance of Ollas Comunes (common pots), which seek to solve the issue of food insecurity.
To comprehend how Ollas Comunes work, I arranged to meet with researcher Lia Alarcón, who introduced us to the pivotal role Ollas Comunes played during COVID-19. The collective kitchens function as neighbourhood infrastructures, mostly run by women, who pool residents’ money together to buy food cheaper. In 2021, there were already around 2,700 of such kitchens dotted across the informal neighbourhoods of Lima, feeding over 250,000 families. Ollas Comunes represent not only an infrastructure of solidarity and commoning but can empower women to take on community leadership roles. On the other hand, the work in the kitchens and organising community care is still not financially recognised and is problematised from the feminist point of view.
How was the experience of visiting the Landscapes of Care?
Together with IntuyLab we have also visited several urban areas, which were turned to “urban landscapes of care” with the help of the local residents and involvement of the municipality. In often cases, these areas were run down, serving as parking lots or as explained by the residents, as “spaces breeding criminality”. We have met with one of the neighbourhood leaders, who has been actively involved in turning a space behind Lima’s hospital to a welcoming childrens’ and adults’ playground – Espacio vecinal Pasaje Paiva.
We found that the landscapes of care concept was critical to our understanding of what are feminist cities. This did not only mean creating space for children and mothers, but creating nourishing areas which work for everyone – the elderly, people with disabilities, migrants, teenagers, workers, men and other social groups. We have considered care as a fundamental quality when preparing our final urban intervention – reclaiming space in Lima’s one of the richer neighbourhoods of La Molina, full of gated communities and severely lacking public pathways or squares. Here, we took into account the needs of paid caregivers, who travel to La Molina everyday by public transport, to nourish and maintain the neighbourhood – look after the kids, cut grass, clean streets and water the plants. By reclaiming a piece of the street, we created a “footpath” next to the wall of one of the gated communities. Although small, this urban intervention served as an imaginary of transforming La Molina’s public, yet non-walkable, streets into small islands of comfort, which take into account the needs of paid caregivers.
Mainstreaming care, commoning and participation into Lithuanian context?
After engaging in the works of Silvia Federici, I have found that the intersection between commoning and feminism is profoundly important, when considering how urban planning can develop private and public care infrastructures within the city. While my masters research reflected that caregivers in Lithuania look upon the state institutions and policies to integrate care into urban planning, in Lima I have faced a different reality – residents in the visited neighbourhoods have built and developed the landscapes of care and common buildings themselves, often out of necessity. As such, the visits brought new fresh questions in the Lithuanian context: how communities engage with the urban planning processes and what agency and willingness do they have to produce common infrastructures of care themselves?
What did this course give you?
The course has provided me with many more valuable insights that could not fit into this text. However, it is important to reflect at least on the question of participation – if the commoning practices are lacking within the neighbourhood and the city is planned by others, it is at least important to mainstream care and collaboration into the urban planning processes. To discuss these questions, we have met with urban planners from Peru (Sara Casiano) and Finland (Efe Ogbeide), who talked about the importance of well designed participatory planning methods. Such methods aim to activate participation of various stakeholders and take into account cultural differences or the time restraints they may be facing. Sara has provided us with successful examples of planning whole cities and regions, especially when working with indigenous communities, while Efe explained how they take care to engage migrant communities in various urban projects of Helsinki. Presented approaches were inherently feminist, considering the complex and intersectional nature of the society and the diverse ways we use city spaces.
While we haven’t (yet) found a feminist city, the two weeks have doubtless provided a lot of critical questions for further urban research in Lithuania. And while care, commoning and in-depth participation remain almost non-existent within the formal institutional urban planning practices I could only hope that some of these learnings will reach urban practitioners and artists, as well as neighbourhood community groups.
