Diverse infrastructures of care: community food provisioning in Sydney

There is burgeoning interest in the role of infrastructures as performative socio-technical systems that shape urban life. In this paper, we make visible an often-hidden and diverse infrastructure of care, the Community Food Provisioning Initiative (CFPI) sector. We discuss CFPIs as often hidden, yet vital infrastructures of care. Drawing on research on the CFPI sector in Sydney, Australia, we attend to the diverse ways in which CFPIs are governed, the materialities that constitute them and the diverse economic practices that support them. Our work makes visible the spatial extensiveness of CFPIs across the city, the ways in which caring practice is made possible by ‘things’, and the diverse enterprises, transactions, labour, property and finance that constitute the diverse economies of CFPIs. We couple our work developing a typology of community food provisioning, GIS mapping and an overview of the diverse economy of CFPIs with empirical examples from three CFPIs. Throughout the paper we highlight how CFPIs are diverse and vital infrastructures of care that contribute to people’s ability to survival well in the city.