The research arrives at a moment when “caring communities” have become a buzzword in social policy across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, often invoked as a vision for aging societies in which family, market, and state provision all fall short. Saltiel and Strüver argue that most of this debate focuses on top-down, formally organized local care networks, while overlooking the countless self-organized initiatives — community kitchens, homeless support, refugee hosting, shared childcare — that emerge from below out of sheer necessity. These “shadow care infrastructures,” as other scholars have termed them, respond to the unequal distribution of care resources, yet they are rarely treated as more than stopgaps for failed welfare regimes.

To build their framework, the authors bring two theoretical traditions into dialogue that rarely speak to each other. From Judith Butler they take the distinction between precariousness and precarity: the insight that all humans are fundamentally interdependent and vulnerable — a shared existential condition — while political and economic structures distribute that vulnerability unequally, exposing particular groups to violence, exclusion, and abandonment. From Joan Tronto they draw the ethics of care and the concept of “caring with,” the idea that because everyone begins and ends life dependent on others, the allocation of care responsibilities must be negotiated collectively rather than left to families, markets, or institutions. Situated within a post-structural materialist framework, this synthesis links macro-level inequality to micropolitical practices of everyday life.

The empirical heart of the study comes from six years of qualitative and ethnographic fieldwork in Brussels, conducted by Saltiel between 2016 and 2022. She examined two initiatives coordinated by the Plateforme Citoyenne de Soutien aux Réfugiés, a civil society platform with more than 15,000 volunteers. The first was the informal camp in Maximilian Park, where asylum seekers, undocumented migrants, students, church groups, pensioners, and managers alike built and sustained a temporary settlement. The second was Hébergement, launched via Facebook in autumn 2017, which matched precarious migrants — many of them undocumented and therefore excluded from state reception — with private households willing to host them.

The scale of Hébergement is striking. More than 10,000 households have hosted homeless migrants since 2017, providing roughly 50,000 overnight stays in its first year and nearly 100,000 in the following one. What began as a one-night gesture frequently evolved into longer stays and durable personal relationships. Hosts and guests shopped, cooked, ate, and washed dishes together; they cared for each other during illness, looked after children, and took responsibility for homes, plants, and pets. Participants often described one another in familial terms — hosts addressed as “Mama,” or relationships described as sibling-like — a linguistic move that redefined what “family” and “stranger” could mean.

In the camp, meanwhile, the authors observed how care roles dissolved rather than reinforced the familiar dichotomy between “generous citizens” and “passive, grateful supplicants.” Volunteers were marked by yellow safety vests, and residents of the camp itself — including asylum seekers and undocumented migrants — became volunteers in their own right, running a kitchen and organizing food rescue. One collective of undocumented migrants wrote “Sans-Papiers” on their vests in black marker, a performative assertion of their presence and their role as care providers. Community membership, the authors argue, was produced through the act of caring itself rather than through any criteria of exclusion, forming what they call an “alliance of cohabitation.”

Language itself became a site of political intervention. In the Facebook groups of the Plateforme Citoyenne, volunteers coined the term VNOUS, fusing the French “vous” (you) and “nous” (we) into a single word that blurred the boundary between helper and helped. The neologism spread into the platform’s official communication and even became the title of a 2019 documentary. The authors read this as more than symbolism: naming practices, like the familial terms used in hosted households, are performative acts that rework belonging and challenge racist and nationalist constructions of “us” and “them,” even if such linguistic shifts alone cannot dismantle structural inequality.

The study is careful not to romanticize. The authors note that these communities remain ambivalent and fragile. The high visibility of the camp in a public park generated political pressure on local government, whereas Hébergement moved the problem of unprovided-for people into private homes, rendering it invisible and potentially relieving policymakers of responsibility — a dynamic that echoes critiques of the informalization and deprofessionalization of care work. Paternalistic patterns, in which helpers demand proof of “deservingness” from the helped, can also reappear within volunteer initiatives. The authors insist that such ambivalences are not arguments against these communities, but reminders that they operate within, and against, existing power relations.

What the Brussels cases ultimately demonstrate, Saltiel and Strüver argue, is that community is not a precondition for care but one of its products. These “other caring communities” define themselves not by boundary-drawing or homogenization but by the mutual recognition of shared precariousness and interdependence — what Butler calls a politics of alliance and what the activist collective Precarias a la Deriva termed an affective citizenship bound to care rather than to the nation-state. They are agile and fragile at once, temporary yet transformative, renegotiating social relations and experimenting with forms of togetherness beyond capitalist, familial, and institutional arrangements.

The authors close with a call to treat other caring communities not merely as a social policy concern but as an epistemic perspective — a lens that connects micro-practices of everyday care to macro-structural conditions and expands debates on welfare, provision, and socio-spatial justice. Key open questions remain: whether such improvised arrangements will harden into lasting care infrastructures or remain temporary responses to acute crises, and how gendered, racialized, and classed power relations are reproduced or disrupted within them. In a world of deepening care crises, the everyday practice of strangers caring with one another may be less a utopia than a live experiment in how societies could be organized differently.

Subject of Research: The formation of self-organized caring communities among refugees and volunteers in Brussels

Article Title: Sorgende Gemeinschaften: Performative Praxis des Miteinander-Sorgens

Article References: Saltiel, R., & Strüver, A. (2026). Sorgende Gemeinschaften: Performative Praxis des Miteinander-Sorgens. Geographica Helvetica, 81(3), 481-496. https://doi.org/10.5194/gh-81-481-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/gh-81-481-2026

Keywords: caring communities, ethics of care, precarity, refugee support, Brussels, volunteering, social reproduction, care crisis, performativity, feminist geography, mutual aid, informal care