Everyday care encompasses the labour that sustains individuals, families and communities. It is the often invisible acts that underpin healthy communities and economies. In the UK, informal and unpaid care is often narrowly defined as support for people with long-term physical or mental health conditions, illnesses or age-related needs. This definition excludes childcare and housework and obscures the full scale of unpaid care and the gender inequalities that characterise it.

Care work therefore remains largely invisible and rarely shapes how cities are planned, financed and governed. Making this hidden labour explicit is a precondition for valuing and supporting it. However, substantial geographic variation in unpaid care across the UK highlights how local policies and infrastructure can help address these inequalities.

Towards a Caring City was developed in collaboration with the City Hub and Network for Gender Equity (CHANGE) as part of Equimundo’s MenCare Cities Initiative. This latest phase of Publica’s collaboration with CHANGE invited the Greater Manchester Combined Authority and City of Melbourne to examine how their services and public spaces can better support the everyday realities of care and identify practical opportunities for cities to act.

A Caring City is one where everyday care is valued, visible and shared — recognised as essential scaffolding that sustains people, communities and societies as a whole. At its heart, a Caring City shifts care from being an individual or private responsibility to a collective endeavour between families, friends, neighbours, communities, civil society, government and the private sector.

Publica’s research in Greater Manchester explores how local authorities and voluntary sector organisations can design and manage community spaces and support services to address the challenges faced by caregivers and by those who need support from someone else to access services. The project explores how community spaces can embed the principles of a Caring City in practice and rethink how everyday support is planned, coordinated and designed at a local level to remove barriers that caregivers may face.

Methodology

Between February and May 2026, Publica ran a focused, multi-stage research programme to understand how community spaces can become more inclusive and accessible. The research combined desk-based analysis, stakeholder engagement and fieldwork. This process resulted in a set of recommendations for designing more flexible community spaces, drawing on international precedents from Bogotá, Melbourne, Tokyo, Barcelona, and Buenos Aires to deliver services and support in ways that meet the needs of caregivers.

To ground these ideas, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 29 people, including policymakers, local government officers, voluntary sector organisations, community leaders, facility managers and equality panel members to understand the barriers marginalised groups face to accessing support. We also carried out place audits at three community centres: the Stockroom in Stockport; the Sale West Community Centre; and the Coppice Library and Wellbeing Centre in Sale to explore opportunities for these spaces to consider caregivers and their needs more explicitly when designing their services and spaces.

This report begins from a simple proposition: if Melbourne were to systematically apply a “caring cities” lens to its existing strategies, neighbourhoods and services, it could meaningfully improve caregivers’ lives while advancing priorities the city already cares about—liveability, economic participation, equity, safety and belonging.

Unequal responsibility for unpaid care remains one of the most persistent drivers of gender inequality in Australia and globally. A 2025 HILDA survey shows that in couple families in Australia, 78% of the mental load is always or usually carried by the mother, with women taking on around 50% more unpaid domestic labour than their male partners. This imbalance constrains women’s access to secure, well‑paid work. Over 44% of employed women work part‑time compared with 16% of men, and among parents with children under six, 61% of mothers work part‑time versus 7.9% of fathers.

Addressing this imbalance requires not only reducing women’s load, but actively engaging men in care — an area where significant gaps remain.

The purpose of this report is to explore how a co-responsibility lens could be applied in practice, and to set out a series of practical recommendations that can be taken forward.

Methodology

Publica and CHANGE employed a mixed-method, participatory approach to examine the conditions of care and caregiving in Melbourne, combining desk-based research, stakeholder engagement, spatial engagement, and targeted interviews, followed by a validation phase with local stakeholders.

We mapped existing Melbourne policies, strategies, and programmes related to care, alongside a review of data and secondary literature on caregivers’ needs, constraints, and existing support structures. This established the evidence baseline for subsequent research activities.

Our team also facilitated an exploratory workshop with local government, service providers, and community organisations to explore how caregiving is locally understood, how it manifests in current policies and practices, and to prioritise key thematic areas for further investigation.

We undertook two neighbourhood walks, in Kensington and the Central Business District (CBD), to identify and assess local care services and infrastructures, the quality and accessibility of the public realm, and the extent to which these environments meet a diversity of caregiver needs.

We also conducted semi-structured interviews with service providers and community organisations, including Dadfit, Travellers Aid, and RMIT to discuss their Working Together with Men programme. These interviews sought to deepen understandings of the specific challenges these organisations are addressing in relation to care and caregiving, and capture practitioners’ perspectives on systemic barriers, promising practices, and emerging needs.