CARE INFRASTRUCTURES IN CHILE DURING THE PANDEMIC: Communitarian Weavings, Spaces and the Production of Common Goods

Introduction

The Covid-19 pandemic presented challenges for public policies, especially around regulating physical contact and its effects on daily life and resolving collective needs. In Chile, despite alternative proposals such as that of the Municipality of Valparaíso (Municipalidad de Valparaíso, 2020) based on archipelagos or territorial bubbles that proposed maintaining a certain degree of regulated community interaction, a centralized model was imposed that emphasized individual responsibility and the establishment of strict quarantines. This latter measure, which sought to minimize contact, ignored the consequences of isolation on mental health and broke the collaborative networks essential for daily life. Furthermore, the inability of many households to follow quarantines—owing to economic needs, overcrowding and other problems—showed the limitations of an approach that omitted the community dimension and local networks in the pandemic's management.

Despite the deployment of confinement policies, the areas of physical proximity—such as the street, the passage, the neighborhood, the houses and their inhabitants, which Muñoz et al. (2023) call ‘care infrastructures’—were instrumental in addressing the challenges of everyday life. Previous studies show that the immediate environment is essential in people's daily activities, such as taking children to school, shopping and walking to recreation places (Rasse, 2015). Furthermore, several studies indicate that, during the pandemic, people saw their immediate environments and neighbors as a source of help and security (Anigstein et al., 2021). For example, according to the results of the 2020 National Bicentenary Survey in Chile (Encuesta Nacional Bicentenario, Centro de Políticas Públicas UC, 2020), 46% of the people surveyed said they had high or broad confidence in ‘the ability of their neighbors to take care of themselves and act responsibly towards other people.’ This percentage is higher than the confidence expressed in the capacity of other entities, such as ‘the capacity of hospitals and health services to provide intensive care to all who need it’ (37%), ‘the competence of the police and armed forces to enforce the quarantine’ (33%), ‘the ability of health authorities to control the pandemic in the country’ (26%) and trust ‘in the media to provide reliable information about what is happening’ (13%).

Other studies have underscored the remarkable resilience of community organizations and initiatives in Chile, which have given rise to initiatives of solidarity, care and vindication of rights (Anigstein et al., 2021; Tapia et al., 2021). The study ‘Community Practices, Local Policies and Governance for Crisis Management’ (Departamento de Sociología, Universidad Católica del Maule, 2020) identified over 300 community experiences solely in the cities of Talca, Rancagua and Chillán. The common thread running through all these experiences was the social, material, emotional or symbolic reproduction of life. Each played a role in sustaining concrete, individual and collective lives, from temporary communal cooking pots to local-level participation, spiritual practices, care activities and feminist efforts (Letelier et al., 2021a). The social networks that emerged during the October 2019 insurrection in Chile, initially used to coordinate demonstrations and resist repression, swiftly transformed into support networks that aided local communities in managing the impacts of the pandemic (Guzmán-Concha, 2020).

The stark contrast between the absence of public policies that recognized and supported the invaluable role of communities in managing the social and health crisis and the undeniable evidence of their actual contributions is a call to action. Therefore, empirical study of the links and relationships that allowed the maintenance of life in proximity spaces (mainly the neighborhood) during the pandemic crisis becomes relevant and urgent. The findings in this study contribute to underscoring the role of communities during crises and the state's responsibility in generating territorial social and place-based policies that provide wellbeing and care.

The case of Chile is particularly interesting owing to its intense and prolonged mobility restriction measures. On 26 March 2020, generalized confinement was declared. Free movement was restricted, except for shopping for food or work related to health and emergency services. A control mechanism was established for leaving the home, which was limited to twice per week through a permit granted by the police. The schools remained without face-to-face activity for 18 months, the longest period of all Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries (OECD, 2022). Only on 19 July 2020, did the ‘Step by Step’ plan begin, which differentiated the types of restrictions according to the epidemiological characteristics of each territory (Zúñiga, 2021).

We have structured the article into six sections. The first contextualizes the social confinement policy decreed in Chile in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Then it addresses the conceptual framework, discussing communitarian weavings and care infrastructures. The third section describes the case studies and the methodology, subsequently reporting and discussing the findings. The article closes with reflections on the importance of communitarian weavings in constructing care infrastructures.

Community confinement policies in Chile

The Covid-19 pandemic imposed challenges in various areas of public policies in governments around the world. A significant challenge was regulating physical contact between people through multiple measures restricting freedom of movement and assembly. The nature and intensity of these restrictions affected people's daily relationships and their abilities to solve collective problems and needs in various ways (Anigstein et al., 2021; Irazábal, 2021).

In March 2020, the first case of Covid infection was detected in Chile. In the same month, the municipality of Valparaíso proposed the Community Confinement Model to confront the pandemic, a testament to the resilience and adaptability of the Chilean community. Recognizing that people depend on each other to meet their needs and that total isolation was unsustainable, the approach was based on the idea of territorial ‘archipelagos’ or ‘bubbles’, as it implied ‘dividing the commune into a set of territorial units of community and municipal action that sought to isolate themselves and simultaneously interact in a regulated manner’ (Municipalidad de Valparaíso, 2020: 2).

The national authorities should have appreciated the proposal. However, they had imposed a different centralized model, a decision that had far-reaching negative consequences. Based exclusively on individual responsibility and regulated quarantines: ‘Quarantine … limits people's movements, allowing citizens to leave home only for specifically authorized essential activities. This measure is imposed to minimize interaction between people’ (Gobierno de Chile, 2020). These measures included restrictions on people's mobility, mandatory quarantines in specific regions or communes with high infection rates, limitations on public and private gatherings, and the closure of non-essential establishments, among others.

On 26 March 2020, total confinement was declared in several communes in the country with a high rate of infections. On 19 July 2020, the Chilean government announced on national television the Step-by-Step Plan, which sought gradualness in the terms of the quarantines in the different areas of the country in which this measure was decreed, to avoid regrowth. The plan included five stages: restriction, transition, preparation, initial opening and advanced opening. The first two were the most restrictive. Stage 1—Restriction implied total confinement; only essential activities were allowed. Stage 2—Transition allowed people to go out from Monday to Friday, while total confinement remained on Saturdays, Sundays and holidays. Outdoor sports activities involving more than 10 people could not be carried out, sports activities were not allowed in closed spaces and meetings of more than five people in closed spaces and more than 10 in open spaces were not allowed (Gobierno de Chile, 2020).

The preceding restrictions strongly affected public life and led to a retreat into private and proximity spaces. At the same time, they led to an interruption of existing community life, affecting meetings in neighborhood headquarters, churches and public squares. Added to this was the closure of schools throughout the country, which, according to the ‘Education Panorama 2022’ (OECD, 2022) report, was the most widespread of all OECD member countries: more than 250 school days without available establishments. As Quinteros-Urquieta and Cortés-Mancilla (2022) point out, the pandemic and prolonged measures led to greater precariousness of life in terms of work, education, economics and wellbeing.

Communitarian weavings and care infrastructures

Human life is fragile, and we rely on others to survive (Benhabib, 1992; Gilligan, 1993; Butler, 2004). Fragility is present in intrinsic and extrinsic ways: as an existential condition, as people are vulnerable in physical, material, psychological and emotional terms; and also, there are external sociopolitical factors that cause vulnerabilities in people's lives and uncertainty about the future (Butler, 2004; Standing, 2011; Sales, 2016). Understanding human life as vulnerable owing to existential and socially constructed conditions allows us to recognize the centrality of the reproductive dimension of existence and value care and relationships of mutual responsibility, for they allow individual autonomy, the reproduction of society and social wellbeing (Butler, 2004; Carrasco, 2013; Sales, 2016; Sanchís, 2020). Communities enact a ‘natural way’ of reproducing life based on ‘reproductive rationality’ focused on satisfying people's needs (Hinkelammert and Mora, 2013 in Cendejas, 2017) and oriented to their ‘use value’ (Gutiérrez and Salazar, 2019). Such rationality offers an alternative to the instrumental rationality of capital accumulation (Irazábal, 2009; Cubillos et al., 2022).

Congruently, we propose approaching the relationships in the territory1 through the concept of communitarian weavings (Gutiérrez and Shokooh, 2021; Gutiérrez and Salazar, 2014). Communitarian weavings refer to the links between entities (individuals, groups, institutions and things such as food or money) connected by activity nodes (places or digital platforms) that create a changing infrastructure. They result from a complex network of weak and strong ties built and reconstructed between people to satisfy various shared needs that allow the production and reproduction of situated human and social life forms. They are based on ‘respect, collaboration, dignity, affection and reciprocity’ (Gutiérrez, 2011: 35) and are not necessarily guided by the logic of capital accumulation (Gutiérrez et al., 2016). Formal organizations are not the only agents that shape communitarian weavings. There are other manifestations of weavings such as informal networks of relationships between neighbors or family members, spaces of sociability linked to indigenous peoples (ayllus, lofs), networks of women and migrants, affinity and mutual support groups, and councils and assemblies, among others (Gutiérrez, 2011; 2017). The communitarian weavings operate cooperatively with multiple objectives to cover and expand the satisfaction of basic needs for individual and social existence. They establish, organize and coordinate links and shared practices within a framework of dynamic balances. They are not exempt from tensions and conflicts and are always subject to the possibility of renewal and self-regeneration (Gutiérrez and Salazar, 2019).

Communitarian weavings are qualitatively different from capitalist and state relations since they privilege spaces that encourage meeting, sharing, being and doing together. They cultivate closeness, not only in physical terms but fundamentally in terms of personal relationships (Linsalata, 2019). Thus, as Navarro (2019) argues, the city is not only the epicenter of capital accumulation but also a strategic space for the experimentation of community alternatives capable of reproducing life and regenerating it in the context of socio-environmental crises. Communitarian weavings use, appropriate or redefine various urban spaces: the street, the plaza, the warehouse, the neighborhood headquarters, etc., constituting what Muñoz et al. (2023) call an ‘infrastructure of care’. Care infrastructures are practices, relationships, spaces and community services that are organized and emerge in response to crises and the immediate needs of affected people and communities (García-Santesmases et al., 2022; Muñoz et al., 2023). Care infrastructures are understood not only in material terms (such as the distribution of food and basic supplies) but also through social and emotional practices (such as mutual support and community activities) that help people manage uncertainty, isolation and difficulties derived from crises such as the pandemic and its ensued confinement. Caring is a practice of inhabiting, which occurs not in isolation but as relationships that are interwoven between people, other species and the environment, recognizing care as a daily practice inseparable from the socio-material contexts in which it takes place (Jirón Martínez et al., 2022).

Although various works highlight the practices of mutual aid and solidarity that had a community substrate during the pandemic (Lima et al., 2021; Castañeda-Meneses, 2022; Cabrera and Pérez-Mercado, 2023), fewer studies explore the connection between relationships and spaces. Link et al. (2021) argued that in the context of the decline in the activity and functions of the central spaces of the city, especially during the quarantines, the neighborhood acquired greater centrality. They articulated the infrastructures of care and daily life. The authors illustrate, for example, the importance that local commerce acquired as a space for supply and sociability. Another notable work is the book Ciudad Confinada, which highlights the importance of public spaces during the pandemic. The book describes various cases in which the uses of squares and parks are reconfigured, increasing their value as safe spaces that encourage encounters (Marcus, 2023).

The importance of socio-material contexts in the pandemic allows us to raise awareness about their relevance to produce fairer territories. Ana Falú and Eva Colombo (2022) maintain that care infrastructures can be instruments of social redistribution in the territories. Through an analysis of the city of Córdoba in Argentina, they demonstrate how care infrastructures are unequally distributed, especially in areas of greater vulnerability, evidencing a clear relationship between the availability of infrastructures and socio-economic and territorial conditions. Based on this, the authors appeal for urban planning and public policies to recognize and strengthen the role of care infrastructures, especially in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods.

This article explores the daily life of community ties and relationships spatialized in the neighborhood in the context of the multifaceted public health crisis produced by the Covid-19 pandemic. We emphasize the relationship between communitarian weavings, spaces and the production of common goods. This relationship is structured on two analytical axes: (1) how relationships and community spaces were reconfigured in the context of the pandemic and confinement; and (2) how these reconfigured relationships and spaces contributed to the satisfaction of individual and collective needs.

Cases and methodology

This research used qualitative methods, participant observation techniques and interviews with key actors in two cases in Chile, a neighborhood in the city of Talca and another in Concepción, to address the everyday nature of community care ties and infrastructures. The semi-structured interviews with key actors in the territory aimed to understand their experiences and perspectives (Taylor and Bogdan, 1987) on the neighborhood's daily life during the pandemic, paying particular attention to community relationships and the spaces in which they happened. We carried out the analysis using the qualitative content analysis software Nvivo, which allowed the development and use of analysis categories that, in turn, allowed a higher level of abstraction in the study of the textual material (Flick, 2018) around the two analytical axes identified at the end of the section above, ‘Communitarian weavings and care infrastructures’.

Talca is an intermediate city and Concepción is a central city within a larger metropolitan area. However, both cities share characteristics relevant to this research: a defined territorial identity and similar socio-economic characteristics, community trajectories and neighborhood articulations. Our previous research experience and knowledge of the organizational trajectories in both neighborhoods and the links already developed with each community by the research team facilitated identification, contact with the interviewees and the conducting of the interviews.

The first case study, in Talca, corresponds to the 22 Arturo Prat Neighborhood Association (also called Zone 5; see Figure 1). In the last Census (Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas, Chile, 2017), this neighborhood had a population of 10,565 inhabitants and 2467 homes. Despite a heterogeneous socio-economic composition, more than 60% of families belong to the lowest socio-economic level (Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas, Chile, 2002). With the support of the Territory and Collective Action Program (Programa Territorio y Acción Colectiva, 2013–17), the research team led a cooperative training process on territorial analysis, territorial diagnosis and participatory planning in this neighborhood. Based on this diagnosis, territorial roundtables2 were established as a new way of managing the territory. This experience gave the research team access to the existing neighborhood articulation and a nuanced understanding of the territory. It was possible to identify a fragmented and atomized neighborhood culture rooted in mistrust and competition, which privileges maintaining ‘good relations’ with the authorities over forging alliances with other organizations and residents of the territory (Letelier et al., 2021c). We conducted seven interviews at the Arturo Prat 22 Neighborhood Council in 2021. We selected an intentional sample (Flick, 2018) under the following criteria: the interviewees were leaders and neighbors, inhabitants of the territory and participants in activities linked to the neighborhood articulation process (see Table 1).

The second case study is the Nonguén sector in Gran Concepción, located in a valley crossed by the Nonguén stream at the foot of a peri-urban national park, which in turn forms part of the Andalién river basin on the western slope of the Coastal Mountain Range (see Figure 2). Its location in the valley and the delimitation caused by the river facilitated the development of a shared local identity (Solís, 2022). In this sector, a more complex social articulation process has occurred, a testament to the power of collective action, as it has been carried out mainly autonomously by local organizations. The community has created a platform for multiscalar action from the bottom up, connecting various local organizations and collectives. The residents define themselves as a cohesive territory and have established relationships with civil society and state organizations (León et al., 2018; Letelier et al., 2021c). We identified 11 neighborhood associations, community organizations, non-government organizations, educational units and small businesses in Nonguén. This diversity of organizations has built a network of around 160 local actors that address shared challenges in the territory through different strategies (Saavedra et al., 2019; Beltrán and Castillo, 2020). We conducted 10 semi-structured interviews in the Nonguén region in 2021. The main criteria for selecting the sample were: people who have lived in the area for at least three years and participate in a local community organization (see Table 2).

Findings: communitarian weavings during the pandemic in Chile

This study addressed the links and relationships within proximity spaces, mainly the neighborhood, during the Covid-19 pandemic. The findings focus on two aspects: (1) how relationships and community spaces were reconfigured during the pandemic and confinement; and (2) how these reconfigured relationships and spaces contributed to satisfying individual and collective needs.

Care infrastructures: summary

Based on the stories of people involved in community care practices in the neighborhoods of Talca and Concepción, we created the following matrix that summarizes the leading community practices developed in the context of pandemic confinement, the spaces in which they were created, main agents, dimensions and the common goods they produced (see Table 3). The effects and common goods we identified can be grouped into three broad categories: public familiarity (feeling comfortable in the inhabited space) and sense of belonging (feeling part of a group/place); emotional, spiritual and material support; and access to information or wellbeing and practices such as physical activity or access to nature.

Although the first four practices in Table 3 (numbers 1–4) already existed before the health crisis, they acquired greater prominence and significance in a context where formal organizational spaces were unavailable and mobility was restricted. They demonstrated the vital role of informal interactions and virtual sociability in maintaining community ties, even in a situation of confinement that was not individual- or familial-based but communal and delimited (physically and virtually) in relation to infrastructure and the neighborhood environment.

The next four practices in Table 3 (numbers 5–8) did not exist before the Covid-19 pandemic. They arose from the crisis’ generated needs and its associated restrictions. They evidenced the remarkable resilience of communities, demonstrating that the confinement was experienced as a community and the agility of the community to adapt to new contexts and needs. Currently, virtual trading groups are maintained. Spiritual accompaniment returned to an in-person format. As has happened in most places, the collections and pots ended their operation after the families’ income generation capacity was normalized. These practices show that the forms adopted by community relations go beyond conventional configurations and procedures, including formal organizations, their usual face-to-face mode of operations and their emphasis on petitioning the state. The former relationships gained relevance when the latter lost prominence, and more flexible, relational and autonomous modalities emerged.

Final reflections: care infrastructures

The two case studies we discussed showed that the home confinement measures decreed and imposed by the state—with a strong individual and household focus—could not be sustained in daily life. People experienced the pandemic confinement in situated physical proximity, in the neighborhood, a space of public familiarity (Blokland, 2017; Di Virgilio and Serrati, 2023). There, the action of multiple communitarian weavings articulated with diverse daily spaces satisfied needs and sustained life in the context of the pandemic.

We observed four vital aspects related to these emerging care infrastructures. First, with the pandemic, there was a rupture in people's daily lives and their family and neighborhood environments (Ribeiro, 2021; Di Virgilio and Serrati, 2023) and a subsequent resignification of proximity and everyday relationships. People adapted to the new context, and their actions became flexible vis-à-vis spaces and infrastructures to respond to existing and new needs (Roig and Blanco, 2021).

Second, this process led to a resignification of physical spaces. The street became an essential space for interaction; local businesses continued to operate and served as spaces for exchanges. Neighbors prioritized public spaces for socializing, walking and recreation, among other activities. The pandemic and the demands of confinement reinforced the neighborhood as a space of public familiarity.

Third, the virtual sphere was also reconfigured. The social dimension of neighborhood communitarian weavings was partially (re)built virtually during the pandemic. Existing virtual spaces became more robust than before the pandemic. Local actors incorporated virtual interactions to (re)create links despite the physical barriers imposed by the quarantine. The objectives included coordinating actions for intangible purposes (spiritual activities) or practical purposes (such as trading products).

Fourth, the communitarian weavings, by appropriating or recreating the physical and virtual spaces of the neighborhood, acted to respond to and satisfy needs (Gutiérrez, 2011). The communitarian weavings adapted their configurations and actions to the context and its demands, generating new common goods that helped to address these needs. The common goods produced were material—such as provisional community kitchens, solidarity kitchens, collections and virtual markets—and immaterial—such as emotional and spiritual support, affection and access to information (Roig and Blanco, 2021).

Care infrastructures complemented or replaced the in/action of the state and the formal market. In the case of Arturo Prat NA in Talca, the municipality and the community complemented actions through the joint and articulated effort to operate the solidarity kitchen. On the other hand, in the operation of the provisional community kitchens in the Nonguén sector in Concepción, communitarian weavings replaced the inactions of the state and the private sector. The community appropriated and remodeled both neighborhoods’ physical and virtual market spaces to sell the neighbors’ products. This shows that the communitarian weavings had the plasticity to act in various scenarios, both when there were conditions to establish agreements with the state and when there were not.

Finally, during the pandemic in Chile, the state imposed a confinement ‘from above’ for individuals and households, assigning responsibility for infections and their consequences to people. However, most people did not have the resources or conditions to comply with these quarantines or survive under them adequately. Although public policies did not recognize it, the confinement was experienced and endured thanks to the community relationships in proximity, which emerged as a fundamental scale for human life. Thus, the community replaced an often absent, irrelevant and obstructive state through daily life.

Communities carry much of people's physical, emotional and mental health on their shoulders. The experiences in the neighborhoods of Talca and Concepción provide evidence of the fundamental role played by communitarian weavings and the care infrastructures they build, a critical lesson to heed if we want to build and sustain public policies that promote caring cities and generate social wellbeing in contexts of crises.