“We began operating, as they say, with four bricks and a mat as a roof.”

That’s how my mother describes the first day the Santa María communal kitchen opened in Huáscar, a peripheral neighborhood of Lima, Peru. It was the 1980s. Fifteen women, my mother among them, had arrived in the city as internal migrants, fleeing terrorism, violence and poverty. Faced with the absence of basic services, they didn’t wait for help. They built a collective kitchen, brick by brick, pot by pot.

Santa María was about food, yes, but it was also caring infrastructure. It nourished families, built solidarity and represented a quiet act of resistance by women who refused to wait for state intervention.

Decades later, as I prepare to begin my degree in planning at Cornell, I return to this origin story to ask: What does care-centered urban planning mean? What can we learn from the invisible labor that sustains life in cities, especially in places that the formal state often overlooks?

This story is as collective as it is personal. Growing up, I saw how community care (often unrecognized, unpaid and feminized) made our neighborhood livable. It shaped my path toward becoming a planner focused on care systems and social infrastructure. And now, as Lima and other Latin American cities face renewed crises — from pandemics to economic or climatic collapse — I believe these everyday practices of care must become central to how we imagine and build cities.

Pandemic lessons from Lima

When Covid-19 hit in 2020, Peru responded with strict lockdowns. But in neighborhoods like mine, these measures were unworkable. Social distancing? Most families lived in overcrowded homes. Online schooling? Many households lacked electricity, let alone internet connection. Government food relief? It arrived inconsistently, if at all.

So, once again, women stepped in.

They revived the ollas comunes, the grassroots communal kitchens first created during Peru’s economic and political turmoil in the 1980s. These kitchens quickly multiplied across Lima’s hillsides. Women led them, organized donations, coordinated supplies and created cross-district networks. They weren’t just feeding people; they were managing public health and rebuilding social resilience.

In 2021, I began researching these leaders to document how care practices were evolving during the crisis. We relied on interviews and followed their activities through social media and WhatsApp groups to document not just what was being done, but how: women using borrowed kitchens, teenagers delivering meals to elders, entire blocks rotating childcare duties.

Caregiving was more than a set of tasks. It was a practice of building networks, cultivating trust and strengthening collective capacity.

A call for care as urban infrastructure

Many may see these grassroots responses as mere emergency stopgaps. In fact, they are forms of urban infrastructure, the social and material systems that sustain daily life. Feminist urban scholars like Tom Gillespie and Kate Hardy call them the “infrastructures of social reproduction”: the spaces, practices and relationships that make city life possible.

Yet these systems remain invisible in mainstream planning. Traditional urban development focuses on roads, transit and utilities. Care is seen as private, domestic and apolitical. But when no one is watching children or caring for elders, cities collapse.

Read more: An Innovative Program in Bogotá Cares for the Caregivers

In 2021, the Peruvian government proposed a National Care System. So far, it has focused narrowly on formal services: childcare centers and elder care facilities. What’s missing is recognition that care already occurs informally, collectively and often precariously in neighborhoods like Huáscar.

What would it mean to build cities around care as a public, shared responsibility? It would mean recognizing and funding informal systems and integrating them into urban planning. It would also mean shifting power: investing in women’s leadership, supporting community organizations, and expanding the very definition of infrastructure to include kitchens, plazas, communal laundries, collective breastfeeding centers and time banks.

Planning with, not for

My trajectory has been shaped by these questions through my work on disaster-risk mitigation in Lima’s peripheries, participatory design workshops and collaborations with citizen labs across Latin America to rethink public policy through digital innovation.

In each case, I’ve learned the same lessons: The most effective interventions are those rooted in community knowledge and experience. Often, the biggest gaps aren’t technical, they’re political. Care is marginalized because it is feminized. Informality is neglected because it is racialized. And solutions are too often imported instead of grown from local roots.

If planning is to serve the majority of urban residents — especially in the Global South — it must be decolonial and feminist. That means planning with the people who do the everyday work of sustaining cities. It means recognizing care not just as work, but as critical infrastructure.

From subsistence to flourishing

Political theorist Joan Tronto reminds us: “The standard of living of each society determines the amount of care provided by each society.” But if we want to move beyond subsistence, we must transform how care is valued. That means not only paying for care labor, but also investing in the systems and spaces that make it possible; with safety, dignity, and consistency.

Ultimately, this is a question of what kind of cities we want. Cities centered on speed, capital and extraction – or cities built on interdependence, solidarity and life?

Care cannot remain a private burden or an improvised response during a crisis; it must be made visible, valued and built into how we govern urban life. In Lima, that work is already underway; built slowly, through joined hands and shared pots.

This post was originally published on Next City.