Prefiguring the caring city: Everyday practices and postcapitalist possibility

This paper frames self-organized collective spaces as prefigurative practices and provisional infrastructures of care in the neoliberal city. Drawing on ethnographic research in four *buurthuiskamers* (neighborhood living rooms) in the Netherlands, it explores the everyday practices, social relations and personal motivations that activate and sustain these spaces, seeing them as prefigurative of what everyday postcapitalist urban life might look like, based around values such as mutual care, conviviality and entanglement with others. Existing outside of the conventions of market, state, institution and private home, neighborhood living rooms allow participants to 'act otherwise' in the present, expressing their needs and desires around how to live together in the future - needs grounded in interpersonal lived experience and counter to the commodified offerings of the market or the paternalistic norms of the welfare state. Beyond mitigating current shortcomings, they iteratively prefigure what urban life beyond capitalism, and 'the good life' beyond consumerism, might look and feel like at the scale of the everyday. These tangible, embodied practices demonstrate the possibility and viability of alternatives, generate new imaginaries for collective urban life, and cultivate the social relationships and infrastructures necessary for sustaining resilient, caring and pleasurable community life amid and beyond capitalist pressures and concerns.