We’ve linked before to articles by Reimagining the Civic Commons, a group that does important en interesting work. In this case, they share some of the work being done around socioeconomic mixing and introduce a longer report on the topic.

A few months back we posted about the idea of a Department of Care which would be a cross departmental effort to take better care of the people and places in a city. The idea was originally proposed by urban designer Justin Garrett Moore.

Although this visualization of the accumulation of human-made mass on Earth is not specifically related to cities, one has to recognize that the 549 gigatons of concrete, 65 gigatons of asphalt, the 92 gigatons of bricks, and the 386 gigatons of aggregates are evidently concentrated in large part in cities.

Care and maintenance have been part of many discussions over the last few years, and for good reason. During the pandemic, many realized the importance of essential workers, many of which work in one form of care or another. Even before that, personal care and personal time were gaining importance for a growing number of people, and even though more often than not we refer to them as annoyances or “construction,” what are street work, building renovations, and new infrastructure but maintenance of cities and homes? So it’s no surprise that the concept of care as a driver for city planning is already gaining traction.