Presentation short abstract

This research develops the concept of territoriality of care as a feminist, material, and embodied practice of mending relations between bodies and places. Grounded in situated research in a São Paulo (Brazil) community garden, it frames care as resistance, interdependence, and territorial becoming.

Presentation long abstract

This research develops territoriality of care as a conceptual and political lens to understand how communities produce life-sustaining relations through everyday resistance, repair, and embodied inhabitation of territory. Drawing from feminist and Latin-American political ecology, I approach care not as sentiment or service but as a material, relational, and contested practice through which people and places are continually remade. Territoriality of care emerges through the interplay of interdependence and autonomy, not oppositional forces, but mutually constitutive orientations that shape how communities negotiate vulnerability, collective action, and the right to inhabit space otherwise.

As a situated researcher working alongside a housing movement’s community garden in São Paulo - the Gera Juncal Community Garden - I ground this theoretical proposal in practices of cultivating, cooking, learning, and maintaining shared spaces. These practices exemplify how care mends fractured urban ecologies and creates conditions for territorial belonging amidst precarity, dispossession, and the ongoing labor of reproduction. Yet they also reveal tensions: unequal workloads, asymmetries of recognition, and the risk of care being co-opted into state or market agendas.

Thinking with the panel’s metaphor of patchwork, I conceptualize territoriality of care as a form of mending: a work of stitching together bodies, territories, and knowledges in ways that resist disposability and cultivate autonomy-in-relation. By foregrounding lived experiences, embodied attachments, and the quotidian labor of sustaining life, this contribution invites a rethinking of care as both political ecology and territorial praxis, capable of opening transformative horizons in times of fracture.