WECARE - Women building cities: overcoming violence and transforming the city with communities of care
On a global scale cities remain unequal, unjust, and unsafe, especially for women. These challenges are worsened by state withdrawal and growing social fragmentation. Current political shifts deprioritise urban safety, sustainability, and liveability, highlighting the urgent need for alternative, community driven approaches to urban transformation. In Latin America, these issues are intensified by violence from criminal groups and drug trafficking. Despite these challenges, urban peripheries have pioneered innovative grassroots urbanism and governance models that address violence, housing, access to public resources, environmental degradation and neoliberal individualism. These community-driven initiatives, mostly women-led, foster critical, creative, and collective urban transformations through reciprocal practices of care.
However, despite their impact, there remains limited understanding of how these communities are created, function daily, and drive lasting change toward more liveable, safe, sustainable, and democratic urban spaces, as well as women’s role in creating them. This raises the question:
How and why do ‘communities of care’ in Latin America create more liveable, safe, and sustainable urban transformations in contexts of violence, and what role do women play in their development and leadership?
To address this question, WECARE develops a theory of ‘communities of care’ by exploring how women in marginalised communities in Colombia and Peru transform their urban environments to become more liveable, sustainable, safe, and democratic. Empirically, the project will explore how communities of care are created and produce lasting change, by co-producing new data on the relationship between women-led grassroots urbanism and alternative governance. Through innovative qualitative participatory research methodologies, WECARE positions women as active knowledge producers rather than informants, integrating their struggles and everyday practices into academic engagement. This approach will generate knowledge that is both locally grounded and globally relevant, resulting in groundbreaking theory on how ‘communities of care’ can serve as models for urban transformation beyond the Latin American context.
