Geographies of Care and Voluntarism

This is the final chapter on the foundations and structures that underpin the field of social geography. It applies a critical geographical lens to consider the geographies of care and voluntarism that is taking up increasing space in shaping the everyday lives of people in the Global North (and has always been crucial in the Global East and Global South), and thus the larger fabric of society. Our focus on care is especially on the neighbourhood scale via concepts such as social infrastructure. We focus on the voluntary sector as a more formal mechanism to fill the gaps of the welfare state, although at the same time being integral to it. Together, care and voluntarism have emerged as important components of the post-welfare state, sometimes even aligning with the remnants of older forms of assistance from the pre-welfare state. Some of our discussion will connect back to the material on symbiosis from Chapter 4, including the following relationships between neighbourhoods, care, and the voluntary sector, or between individuals, care and the voluntary sector: mutually beneficial (both sides win), parasitic (one side wins, one loses), mutually detrimental (both sides lose), or even commensal (one side wins, while the other is not inconvenienced).