Building Infrastructures of Solidarity and Care in the City

In response to the theme “The Infraordinary,” which pays reference to the art term introduced by Georges Perec, L’infra-ordinaire, which focuses on what is really happening, “the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary,” this paper embarks on a quest for the quotidian in architecture during times of crisis. The paper explores the everyday prosaic spaces of collective care –for food, medical, and childcare provision– that emerged as a collective response to a convergence of extraordinary crises (the pandemic, austerity, refugee crisis, and climate crisis, among others). It addresses how, in the context of architecture, this term describes the everyday uses and everyday elements like a barrier-free threshold that reconfigures the relationship between inside and outside, to utterly banal architectures which negotiate different spatial scenarios of appropriating the city and that only recently have undergone revaluation or upgrading.