My talk at this year's AAG annual conference drew together emerging themes in my Unequal Lives project. Speaking to the session theme of 'affective geographies of care in the neoliberal city,' I drew specifically on the relationship between inequality and the Grenfell Tower disaster in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, London.
The particular affective geography I discussed was grief. I approached it as an explicitly relational emotion that must be understood beyond the boundaries of traditional biomedical models. I argued that grief must be understood through its relationship with care as performed in urban space - a performative process that is integral to how urban space is lived, felt and produced in Kensington and Chelsea today.