Kin City: Paula Mikat and Cléo Mieulet

Towards an Eco-Feminist Urban Metabolism: Turning Shopping Malls into Care Centers Today, we are challenged to combine anti-capitalist approaches with eco-feminist approaches to enable the development of the caring city we so desperately need on this deeply troubled planet. A collective political consciousness (and thus a unifying class politics) could emerge if those of us in struggle (1) reclaimed the infrastructure of human life, including collective public systems such as mass transit, along with food and healthcare and affordable housing; (2) appropriated the ruins left by capital for post-capitalist and eco-feminist purposes (e.g., by converting shopping malls into care centers); and (3) understood this process as the basis and expression of new forms of social coexistence and politics, indeed an urban politics from below that can simultaneously develop a sense of kinship with other-than-human life and thus drive a truly sustainable urban metabolism. In their “Kin City” talk, Paula Mikat and Cléo Mieulet zoom in on a specific case in Berlin: the Sorge ins ParkCenter initiative, which is working on the socialization of a shopping mall and its transformation into a care center. The third panel of the conference at the “Kin City” festival took place on October 17, 2024 at the ZK/U – Center for Arts and Urbanistics. You can listen to the recording by clicking on the play button above.