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Paper short abstract

This presentation explores how limitations to care and well-being result from the gradual deterioration of urban infrastructure. Drawing from ethnographic research in Chile, it demonstrates how families work to maintain care and create sustainable, livable moments despite declining urban conditions.

Paper long abstract

Urban environments increasingly shape the conditions that enable care and health. In cities struggling with infrastructural inequality, environmental neglect, and fragmented public services, caring practices often operate on the margins of what urban life permits. But these limits are not only spatial or institutional—they are also temporal. Urban infrastructure ages, deteriorates, and falls into disrepair; public spaces become unsafe or unusable; and systems that once circulated care gradually lose their capacity to support daily life.

Based on ethnographic research with children and caregivers in Chilean cities, we examine how limits to urban well-being develop through the temporal dynamics of urban environments. Using walking interviews, workshops, and creative activities with children, the research shows how deteriorating infrastructure, unsafe public spaces, pollution, and overcrowded transportation create low-level stress and strain that shape children’s everyday emotional experiences.

Instead of viewing these conditions merely as failures of care, the analysis explores how families and communities develop localized practices to live with and around these limits. I describe these delicate arrangements as greenhouses of care: small, carefully maintained spaces—material, relational, and temporal—where care can temporarily flourish despite hostile surroundings. These spaces do not eliminate urban limits; instead, they slow the deterioration of livable environments and sustain existing ways of life as uncertain futures unfold.

By highlighting the temporal boundaries of infrastructures and care practices, the paper contributes to STS debates on health, care, and temporality. It suggests that caring for limits may involve maintaining livable moments within gradually declining urban environments.