Foreclosed spaces,care networks,and interventions in infrastructural labour

Abstract

Austerity policies increased the dependence of young adults on their families and informal networks. Both housing and social welfare reforms have geographical consequences that shape capabilities for informal care. This commentary argues that austerity resulted in foreclosed spaces and reshaped the geographies of informal care. Foreclosed spaces occur when young households can no longer afford to live in places that provide easy access to care services and facilities. The geography of informal support concerns the relational geography of accessibility and mobility required for the delivery of informal care. Finally, I briefly present two avenues geographers could explore to reduce the ‘infrastructural labour’ necessary for care: social infrastructure and social work.

Introduction

…collective action is necessary to eventually free us up as individuals to live the way we like (Harvey, 2020, par. 59).

The article ‘austere life-courses and foreclosed futures’ by Santiago del Rio et al. (2025) discusses the impact of austerity on young adults. In particular, it highlights how the state's retreat from collective public provision of welfare forces young adults without the means to guarantee stability for their households into dependence on their families. It describes an individualisation of welfare (austerity) and the forms of collective provision that emerge from this process: the turn towards family and informal networks. It thus shows that individual and collective welfare are not opposites, but rather individual and collective care provisions co-constitute each other. In this commentary, I discuss the geography of this individual-collective dyad and the potential for geographic contributions to this interdependent relationship that can diminish rather than reinforce care inequalities.

Foreclosed spaces

Del Rio et al. (2025) argue that austerity policies and post-GFC economics foreclose stable futures for young adults in Europe. In my response, I want to further ‘geographise’ this observation by extending foreclosed futures into foreclosed spaces. It is clear that the absence of financial security both limits access to stable housing – a situation where Del Rio et al.'s observations on housing, work, and family intersect – and restricts where someone can live (Tiznado-Aitken et al., 2022; van Lanen, 2023). While segregation is traditionally more modest in European cities (Musterd et al., 2017), it still exists as a result of uneven distributions in housing prices, tenure types, and rental regulations. Income and wealth inequalities affect access to places (Arundel and Hochstenbach, 2020), thereby influencing the absolute and relative accessibility of essential amenities, including healthcare, food, green spaces, and public transportation. Widespread and multifaceted precarisation and inequality foreclose stable futures for particular groups of young adults; they also foreclose access to specific spaces that enable certain qualities of life.

In the Netherlands, for example, this has resulted in the ‘suburbanisation of poverty’ (Hochstenbach and Musterd, 2018). First, developments in housing markets and policy reduce access to central locations by inflating house prices and private rents, reducing the availability of centrally located social housing, and narrowing social housing access (Hochstenbach, 2024). Second, urban renewal programmes often reduced social housing in favour of homeownership and private rentals in social-housing-dominated neighbourhoods (Musterd and Ostendorf, 2023). A special law expressly excludes households without specific sorts of income and a short residential history in Rotterdam from particular neighbourhoods in the city (Van Gent et al., 2018). The accessibility of areas to live in is thus increasingly restricted for low-income households.

When economic and residential opportunities shrink due to austerity, this shapes what people's futures might look like and where they can unfold. The foreclosed futures of austere life courses are also shaped by foreclosed spaces – regions, cities, or neighbourhoods that become inaccessible to young adults without familial wealth or high incomes. Foreclosed spaces matter because access to various services, facilities, or networks that enable households to meet their needs depends on place. Under austerity, for example, services were centralised, and public transport services were reduced or cut (Peck, 2012; van Lanen, 2017). Living in certain places can increase the time and effort necessary to access schools, daycare, supermarkets, and other places that support life's needs (Jupp, 2017). The overlapping geographies of such ‘infrastructural labour’ (Binet et al., 2023) and housing affordability can exacerbate the economic and spatial disadvantages of less-affluent households. Foreclosed futures and foreclosed spaces are thus mutually reinforcing.

Geographies of family and informal care

As austerity reduced the available formal support of welfare states, families and informal networks often took over the resulting care gaps. Governments in various countries have stated that households should turn to family, friends, and communities before seeking support from the state (Scott, 2011). This dynamic results in the ‘familialisation of the life course’ as central to Del Rio et al.'s (2025) article, alongside volunteer-based assistance and informal networks (Alves de Matos, 2021). Privatisation is another option, which involves buying goods and services at market rates, such as hiring a cleaner, ordering easy-to-prepare meals, or renting an apartment with old-age care facilities.

Family and others upon which households rely need to be capable and available to provide their support. This means that family members need to have the time, energy, and resources to provide assistance and that family members should be able to reach each other (Hall, 2019; Rutigliano, 2020). Again, this requires taking (urban) geography seriously. Both the distance between the residences of informal care supporters and receivers, and the mobility capabilities between these places, influence the time, energy, and costs required before informal care can even begin (Doherty, 2021; Power and Mee, 2020). Binet et al.'s (2023) concept of ‘infrastructural labour’ thus also applies to informal care, where ‘care mobility labour’ denotes the work required before informal care can take place. The organisation of housing systems, mobility planning, and service distribution shapes the costs involved in informal care and their contribution to the depletion of care capacities (Madden, 2025; Rai et al., 2014).

Where access to public and informal care declines, private care providers may fill the gap left by the decline of public services, changes in income and housing dynamics, and the geographical distribution of potential informal care providers. In the words of Nancy Fraser (2016: 112), the organisation of social reproduction is ‘commodified for those who can pay for it and privatized for those who cannot’. Households with more resources can service their needs through private, market-rate facilities, an option not (or less) available to those without resources. This reinforces not only the consequences of income inequalities for care disparities but also the potential impact of spatial networks of familial and informal care provision. The result is a tripartite, self-reinforcing dynamic between low income, limited residential choice, and access to care.

Social infrastructure & social work

How can geographers make a meaningful contribution to not just understand foreclosed futures and places but also provide input for meaningful interventions? In their conclusion, Del Rio et al. (2025) argue that place-based austerity regimes, housing systems, and social institutions shape contemporary and future reproductive strategies. Two fields of study may provide answers to intervene in these systems to enable collective care: social infrastructure and social work.

Social infrastructure is ‘the networks of spaces, institutions, and groups that create affordances for social connection’ and can thus facilitate informal care networks (Latham and Layton, 2019: 3). Social infrastructure has been a booming concept over the past few years (Enneking et al., 2025). While social infrastructure is not a generic cure to all sorts of social issues (Billingham et al., 2024; Horton and Penny, 2023), fruitful applications arise in combination with infrastructural labour (Binet et al., 2023). Geographers can identify which households in which places undertake extensive infrastructural labour and combine this with the types of social infrastructure that can reduce this infrastructural labour. This requires the politicisation of social infrastructure, identifying what kind of social infrastructure supports which people and places (Horton and Penny, 2023). This means accepting that social infrastructure does not always support the most vulnerable, nor does it always serve all population groups equally and simultaneously. Investigating the social and geographic affordances that social infrastructure creates can provide arguments to intervene in austerity regimes and social institutions with an intent to reduce infrastructural labour and enable care practices.

Second, examining the geographies of social work offers opportunities to investigate how social work can address spatial inequalities in care capacities. Even though the discipline of social work is undergoing a ‘spatial turn’ (Kessl et al., 2023; Saravia et al., 2024), the engagement of geographers with social work is relatively absent (for example, Andrews, 2020; Disney and Lloyd, 2020; Van Lanen and Meij, 2025). While urban planning or social infrastructure tends to focus on the physical infrastructure that can reduce infrastructural labour, geographic engagements with social work can provide perspectives on the collective or public organisation of infrastructural labour. Geographic engagements with social work could reimagine social work as a potential form of collective social reproduction, a public service that contributes to reducing care inequalities, whether these follow from income, geography, or other causes of inequality. Geographic studies of social work can thus illuminate its role as a social institution that might collectivise infrastructural labour and thereby care.

Social infrastructure and social work thus have the potential to reduce infrastructural labour and create time, energy, and capacity for individuals to live the way they like. Both can minimise the necessary labour to care and increase the choices and capabilities of individuals, households, and families.