Makerspaces As a Care Spaces. Looking for a Self and Community Care through Vernacular Creativity.

Our presentation explores Polish maker spaces as emergent care places and “third spaces,” where care, collaboration, and sustainability intersect with urban development. Makerspaces, often community-driven and non-commercial, function as “urban labs”—experimental environments that foster alternative urban futures. These spaces provide physical and social infrastructures that nurture relationships between people, materials, and their environments. Drawing from ongoing anthropological field research, including participant observation and video diaries, we investigate how makerspaces act as socio-material hubs fostering care practices, shaping both individual identities and contributing to broader urban and ecological sustainability.

By situating makerspaces within the discourse on care-based urban governance, we analyze their role in reimagining cities as spaces that prioritize community well-being and collective work. Makerspaces embody “care-full” relationships, where individuals engage in knowledge-sharing, mutual aid, and environmentally conscious tinkering. These third spaces challenge market-driven urban landscapes by exemplifying care as a transformative ethic, offering a collaborative ethos that prioritizes social and ecological well-being.

We examine makerspaces as care infrastructures through two lenses: first, as spaces providing tools and resources that foster social and material connections; second, as sites of care work where individuals come together to build, repair, and innovate with attention to sustainability and community resilience. These urban labs offer alternatives to dominant capitalist economies by fostering care economies rooted in solidarity, shared materials stewardship, and collective support.

This research enriches debates on care in urban studies by highlighting the role of informal care economies and their potential to shape alternative urban futures in the Anthropocene. Makerspaces, as sites of collective reproduction, socio-ecological empathy, and experimental urban labs, challenge traditional urban governance frameworks and position care as central to sustainable and just urban development.