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Paper Short Abstract:

This presentation delves into experts' perceptions of urban settings as (un)secure for children, exploring their visions of children's future ties with these spaces and the potential for transformation through collaborative acts of response-ability, fostering care for mutual co-existence

Paper Abstract:

How is our co-existence with children imagined and incorporated into adults' and experts' imaginations about current and future cities? City planning in developing countries should be more noticed, as cities sprawl as a result of multiple interacting resistances rather than as the result of mutual acts of response-ability. While participative approaches have become vital in city planning, much still needs to be added to understanding how urban spaces are produced and inhabited by children and to what extent our world(s) collide or include their world(s). Amidst these tensions, care emerges as a critical concept to foster a gathering purpose to produce more complex and heterogeneous realities, reflecting upon urban spaces differently, incentivizing and encompassing (non)human diversity and interdependence. This proposal presents the result of ongoing research in Chile about the production and maintenance of urban spaces concerning their (un)caring potential regarding children's well-being. Wondering how care is enacted, experienced, sustained, and neglected as a relational outcome of socio-material entanglements between children and other human and non-human actors in urban spaces, we present the views of different experts linked to the design and the construction of Chilean cities. Following an STS approach, we explore how experts reflect upon these urban spaces, their caring potential, and the extent to which children are part of their present and imagined scenarios while wondering what portraits of children are produced in the city and their potential unfolding for the future.