The Caring Capacity of the City. Examining the Experiences of Polish Homeless Migrants with Care in Berlin

This paper discusses how the city prefigures possibilities for care. Drawing on insights from an ethnographic study of Polish homeless migrants in Berlin and their experiences with care in the city, it outlines a complex ecology of social practices and material arrangements that, in acting infrastructurally to sustain precarious urban lives, generatively shape the city's caring capacity. Polish migrants make up the majority of Berlin's non-German homeless population. Since most of them are either not entitled or practically unable to claim state benefits, they rely on care that operates in the city beyond the local welfare system, mainly through non-state emergency services, the city’s material infrastructure, and people’s care-full non/engagement. Taken together, these care infrastructures form a life-sustaining web that interweaves multiple and diverse sites of care and extends throughout the city. Prefiguring the everyday work of caretaking, maintenance, and repair, this web sustains Polish migrants throughout their experience of homelessness in Berlin.