Accounting for care in everyday mobility: an exploration of care-related trips and their sociospatial correlates

Since care is an essential part of our individual and collective survival, there is the challenge to explore how care operates through daily mobility patterns in urban settings. This paper utilizes the concept of 'mobility of care' to quantitatively assess care-related trips in the Barcelona Metropolitan Region (BMR) using an official household travel survey. We analyse the factors linked to care-related trips at the individual, household, and territorial levels and examine their correlation with transportation modes. Our results reveal that care-related trips form a significant portion of everyday mobility in a Mediterranean metropolis such as Barcelona. Notably, mobility of care is more relevant among women, increases with age and the presence of dependents in the household, particularly minors. Active modes of transportation, primarily in densely populated urban areas, dominate care-related mobility in Barcelona. Finally, our findings suggests that while the concept of mobility of care helps to conceptualizing a key part of our daily reality and helps identifying possible social inequalities, it is still necessary to account and understand specific care-related purposes. The study's findings will contribute to advancing research on the mobility of care and informing urban policymakers in their pursuit of sustainable and equitable cities.