Shadow care infrastructures: sustaining life in post-welfare cities

Economic restructuring and welfare reform are driving new forms of urban poverty in the global north. <i>Shadow care infrastructures</i> is a new frame for conceptualising the complex and interconnected practices through which marginalised people seek survival in this context. It remaps welfare landscapes across a continuum that includes formal and informal, established and improvised practice, the not-for-profit sector, informal community networks and exchange and the black market. Conceptually, it centres the <i>care</i> practices that sustain life and the <i>infrastructures</i> that sustain them. Activating a ‘shadow geographies’ tradition it foregrounds care infrastructures that are necessary, but rarely visible within, welfare discourse.