Reduce
What’s the issue?
Time is a scarce resource, especially for those juggling the demands of personal, family, and communal life. Across the world, women perform the bulk of care and domestic related tasks, from collecting water to washing clothes, collecting children from school, preparing food, tending to older persons’ medical needs, or taking on the mental workload of the household. This comes at a cost for caregivers’ own wellbeing, relationships, and opportunities.
Furthermore, when unpaid caregivers are overworked, under-supported and burnt-out, they are less able to provide quality care, with implications for the wellbeing of family members, children’s education, and community cohesion. Reducing the amount of unpaid care responsibilities women commonly take on is essential for the wellbeing of society as a whole.
City and metropolitan governments can reduce the amount of unpaid care work taken on by individuals by increasing access to care-relevant infrastructure, essential services and ensuring basic needs. One way to support care work in a resource efficient manner is to couple already-existing city services and infrastructure for caregivers and care receivers, thus offering caregivers the opportunity to further their education, explore employment options, or to simply have time to rest, play sports and socialise.
Ensure essential infrastructure
Local governments can support the work of caregivers by ensuring free, subsidised or affordable basic public infrastructure is available and meets the needs of communities. This includes piped water, affordable energy, fuel and electricity, taking into account safety and accessibility considerations with a gender perspective.
Expanded Social Package, Johannesburg (South Africa)
The City provides a basket of benefits, subsidies and essential services including water, electricity, sanitation, refuse-removal and subsidised rates, to identified households and ‘invisible’ groups, with priority given to women, pensioners and persons with disabilities. As women and older persons most commonly take on caregiver roles in South Africa, this policy serves to support often-invisible and unpaid care work while ensuring marginalised households have access to basic infrastructure and services.
Guarantee access to services and labour-saving technologies
Governments can further invest in smaller-scale time- and labour-saving technologies such as free public laundromats, community-kitchens, public meal programs, bread-making facilities in cooperatives, and free public Wi-Fi. Similarly, offering non-tangible services to caregivers, such as counselling support and trainings, is also essential for their own wellbeing.
Care Blocks, Bogotá (Colombia)
The city’s 23 ‘Manzanas del Cuidado’ combine essential care technologies like laundromats, with childcare and care for persons with disabilities, alongside educational and leisure opportunities for caregivers. Their design centres on a model of proximity, simultaneity and flexibility to ensure caregivers and care-receivers’ needs can be addressed together. Similar integrated care blocks can be found in Iztapalapa’s (Mexico) Utopias, while Freetown’s (Sierra Leone) first Care Block will be launched in early 2025.
Day care centres and temporary residences
Establishing free or affordable high-quality day care centres for children, older persons and persons with disabilities, can relieve care work from caregivers, thus promoting their active participation in economic activities and public decision-making. This can be achieved through public facilities or public-private partnerships and should consider strategic locations, such as within market places, educational and recreational spaces or employment hubs.
Developmental Disability Emergency Care Center, Seoul (South Korea)
A temporary care facility where persons with disabilities can reside while caregivers are indisposed, such as because of burnout, a social commitment or an emergency. This offers caregivers the respite they need, reducing their care responsibilities while offering quality services to those who need them.
Expand social protection and public information
Local government programs can be broadened to equitably protect the most vulnerable, by offering tailored services to those within the informal economy, as well as persons with disabilities, undocumented persons and migrant communities. This can be achieved through one-stop-shops, targeted social centres, home visits for older persons and persons with disabilities, or pop-up information booths in neighbourhoods of identified needs, to ensure communities are well-informed of the services available to them. Such services can be made more impactful by partnering with local community groups, non-profit organisations or the private sector where appropriate.
An impactful lever local governments have for promoting more caring cities is through urban, territorial and transport planning, to reduce unnecessary care work and ‘give back time’ to caregivers.
Urban and territorial planning
Incorporating the data from care services mapping and care needs mapping as a layer of territorial planning is an effective way to integrate a more systemic approach to building a more caring city. Implementing mixed-use zoning can ensure proximity between essential services such as schools, healthcare facilities, and community and religious centres, which in turn reduces time caregivers spend on care work. At the same time, designing public spaces that promote well-being and social integration, like parks with exercise facilities and community gardens, can provide the necessary facilities for ease of care work.
Play Master Plan, Istanbul (Türkiye)
The Istanbul Play Master Plan builds on research and benchmarking to integrate play and wellbeing into the city’s territorial planning, promoting children’s ‘right to play’, and offering safe spaces for caregivers to bring children to.
Transport planning
Cities can draw on gender-disaggregated data to better understand the transport needs of caregivers, including those from migrant backgrounds. This data can be utilised to tailor transport routes, schedules, services and tariffs to support the particular needs of caregivers and care receivers - which can be established through public participation processes and data collection. For example, in public transportation special tariffs can be offered to groups, such as persons with disabilities, unpaid caregivers, and large families. Roads and sidewalks should also be designed and maintained with consideration for pedestrians and wheelchair users, and special agreements can be made with private sector transport providers to provide subsidies or vouchers for caregivers.
Pink Slip program, New Delhi (India)
In 2019, the Delhi Government introduced the ‘pink slip program’, which provides free bus rides to all women in the city. As women are the majority of caregivers, this policy can have an important impact on making care more affordable and supporting caregivers’ work. Similarly approaches have been adopted by a number of local governments in India.
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