At the Intersection of Urban and Care Policy: The Invisibility of Eldercare Workers in the Global City

Abstract

Demographic aging can alter physical and social infrastructures in cities, and reshape the broader dynamic processes that theories of urbanization seek to describe and analyze. We argue that both urban and eldercare policy often render paid reproductive labor and the workers who do it invisible. They are invisiblized in both policy and urban space. A neoliberal bias in urban policies, reconstructed in the rhetoric of global cities/creative cities, denies care needs. Normative approaches exacerbate this issue, as in gendered ideologies of home, care and familial responsibility. These approaches too often detach the delicate social problem of eldercare in itself from its feasibility and desirability as a site for paid labor. In that separation, the paid workforce typically disappears from the spotlight. We use comparative case studies and the concept of territorialization to refocus on the urban context of paid eldercare work in two “aspiring” global cities, Shanghai and Vancouver.