The Cities That Raise Men
Following the MenCare Changemakers Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Holly Milburn-Smith explores how cities help shape caring manhood
27 July 2026
When I traveled to Rio for the MenCare Changemakers Summit, convened by our friends at Equimundo and Women of the World, I expected conversations about men: from fatherhood to violence prevention and loneliness. Those conversations certainly happened. But they were part of a larger discussion. More than one hundred researchers, activists, policymakers, artists, and practitioners from over thirty countries gathered to explore a deceptively simple question: What would it take to build a more caring world – one where caring manhood is the norm?
At some point during the week, I realized that question had quietly reshaped one of my own.
Not just: How do we invite men into care? But: What kind of city makes care easier to choose?
As Co-Executive Director of CHANGE, I spend my days working with local governments around the world to build cities that work better for women and girls. That often means investing in childcare, transportation, housing, and neighborhood services.
But it also means something less tangible: helping local leaders reconsider what government is for. When municipalities recognize care as a public responsibility—not simply a private, family matter—they begin making different decisions about budgets, policies, services, and political priorities.
Until Rio, I had mostly understood those choices in terms of what they meant for women and girls. For generations, cities have relied on an invisible subsidy: the unpaid time, labor, and emotional energy that women provide every day. When governments fail to invest in care, women fill the gaps—lending a hand where there ought to be a handrail, as they say.
The reverse is also true. When cities invest in care, they don’t simply make life easier for caregivers. They redistribute responsibility. Care becomes less likely to fall to women by default and more likely to be understood as something families, communities, employers, and governments all help sustain. That shift gives women greater freedom to pursue work, leadership, rest, and the many other parts of a full life.
It also changes what boys and men come to see as ordinary. When they grow up in places where caregiving is visible and shared, they learn that care isn’t women’s work. It’s part of being a good neighbor, an engaged parent, a dependable friend, and an active citizen.
Those connections came into sharper focus in Rio through conversations about caring masculinities—a vision of manhood rooted not in dominance or stoicism, but in compassion, interdependence, and accountability. Too often, conversations about masculinity begin by telling men what they should stop doing. It’s true that men should stop dominating, exploiting, and attacking women and each other.
But caring masculinity goes beyond just preventing harm. It asks what boys and men are for. And it offers a different answer: that purpose is found not in dominance or status, but in caring for others and being cared for in return. It reminded me that building cities that work for women and girls has never been a separate project from building healthier communities for everyone.
Listening to the rich contributions of my colleagues, I found myself thinking about Ruth Whippman’s 2024 book BoyMom. Whippman observes that, within traditional masculinity, “men get everything except the thing that’s most worth having—human intimacy.”
It also brought to mind a question Gary Barker posed during the opening panel of the Men and Boys Festival: “Where do boys learn about love?” The answer, I suspect, is not only at home, but in the neighborhoods where they grow up and the public spaces they share—in the everyday life of a city that quietly teaches what, and who, matters.
If boys learn about love through the relationships they see and the behavior they observe, then cities are not just the backdrop to those lessons. They are among their teachers. They teach us through the choices they make about everyday life.
A city that requires parents to spend hours commuting each day signals that productivity matters more than presence. A neighborhood without eldercare makes the work of caregiving more difficult to share. And when neighborhoods lack welcoming places to gather, families are left to shoulder care in isolation.
These choices aren’t neutral. When cities are organized predominantly around paid work, caregiving is treated as something families—still overwhelmingly women—will somehow absorb.
Organizing cities around care, on the other hand, looks like paid parental leave, affordable home care, and neighborhoods where checking in on an older neighbor, accompanying a friend to a medical appointment, or helping someone navigate public transit are ordinary parts of community life. None of this happens by accident. It reflects political choices.
Throughout the CHANGE network, I see leaders making these types of choices. Though they lead in very different contexts, each has reached the same conclusion: Government should make caring for one another easier, not harder.
Former Mayor Claudia López helped position Bogotá as a global leader in care, redesigning mobility and public space around the daily realities of caregivers.
Building on that model, Mayor Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr and the Freetown City Council have adapted Bogotá’s Care Blocks in Sierra Leone, bringing essential services closer to families in one of the capital city’s most underserved communities. In Quezon City, Mayor Joy Belmonte has made care a defining pillar of urban policy.
These cities are pursuing different strategies, but they share a common conviction that when governments invest in care, they don’t just support caregivers—they reshape the kind of society people experience every day.
Care as Resilience
At the Festival of Boys and Men, I had the privilege of sharing the stage with Ailton Krenak—Indigenous leader and one of Brazil’s most influential public intellectuals— as well as City of Melbourne’s Nancy Pierorazio and Equimundo’s Wessel van den Berg, both close CHANGE collaborators.
Our conversation explored how the overlapping crises of climate change, inequality, and disconnection call for a different ethic of care. I spoke about how CHANGE’s project Rebuilding LA with Care, developed in response to the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires, transformed my own thinking. Watching childcare providers step into the role of first responders made clear that care infrastructure isn’t simply part of recovery. It is what makes recovery possible.
The feminist economist (and CHANGE Advisor) Caren Grown has argued that care services should be understood as climate adaptation because they enable families and communities to withstand, respond to, and recover from increasingly frequent shocks. If we want resilient cities, we cannot think only about seawalls and cooling centers. We must also invest in the people and institutions that make communities resilient in the first place.
The summit felt unusually intimate for a global gathering. People arrived from different countries, disciplines, and corners of the movement, yet quickly found common ground. It felt less like a conference than the beginning of something—a glimpse of another way of living together already taking shape.
Like every parent, I want my sons to grow into adults who are kind, emotionally secure, and connected to the people around them. I want them to understand that caregiving isn’t something they do for women. It’s part of being fully human. But I can only teach so much at home. Every child is also shaped by the world beyond their front door—by the neighborhoods they inhabit, the institutions they trust, and the examples they encounter every day.
The city we live in, Los Angeles, won’t decide who my sons become. But every day it will teach them something about what it means to be a man. If they see men reading to toddlers, caring for aging parents, and gathering together in parks, they’ll learn that care belongs in public—and that it is a responsibility we all share. Cities don’t just shape behavior. They shape expectations.
I went to Rio convinced that care was essential infrastructure for women. I came home convinced that it is also the social infrastructure that shapes how we live together. In an economy and an age that prize independence above almost everything else, perhaps the real promise of cities is that they remind us our lives are bound up with one another—and that those relationships are not a burden, but one of the deepest sources of meaning we have.
Cities are already raising the next generation of men. The question is whether they’ll raise them to believe that care belongs to women—or that it belongs to all of us.
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