Deconstructing Hospitality. Postcolonial Care in the Built Environment

Abstract

Our hyper-individualized capitalist society has forgotten, perhaps intentionally, the revolutionary potential of care. Care brings order to entropy: tending to a wound, patching a hole, or dusting a countertop; but it also disrupts the prescriptive: striking against unfair labor conditions, de-installing hostile infrastructure, or advocating for mixed-use zoning. In all instances, care meets immediate social and material needs through investment in the future. This is fundamentally at odds with neoliberal policies, which relegate the responsibility of care to service industries and product lines for instant consumer gratification, or even weaponize narratives of care to obfuscate more devious agen- das (The Care Collective 2020). The true restorative power of care comes from a perceptive gaze that identifies conditions of extreme imbalance, and the autonomy to respond sensitively yet urgently.