Rethinking climate adaptation: commons, care, and neighborhood-scale resilience

Abstract

Cities play a central role in the climate crisis: they are exposed to increasing risks such as heat waves, floods and heavy rainfall, while at the same time contributing significantly to ecological destruction. Beyond the material threats, urban areas also face a subtler yet critical challenge: a growing ecological disconnect, manifested as the loss of knowledge, belonging, and affective ties between urban dwellers and the ecosystems that sustain them (Kronenberg et al., 2024). Addressing these crises requires rethinking climate adaptation beyond techno-managerial and infrastructure-focused strategies. This paper offers an exploratory attempt to bring two debates—resilience and care—into conversation as a lens for looking at how climate adaptation is enacted at the neighbourhood scale. We conceptualize care as the everyday practices that maintain, repair, and transform human and more-than-human worlds (Tronto, 1993). While adaptation research increasingly acknowledges the importance of social capital and relational dimensions, a documented gap persists between technical adaptation and social uptake, along with a need for strategies rooted in local contexts and cultural practices. At the same time, scholarship on care has illuminated relational and affective practices but has rarely been systematically connected to climate adaptation or resilience. We begin to address this gap by identifying links between resilience and care, grounding our discussion in a case study in Tan Mai, Vietnam. By linking established resilience frameworks with practices of care, we explore how resilience is built at the neighbourhood scale through collective engagement with shared resources—such as monitoring, maintaining, and cleaning green areas and public spaces. This exploration provides a basis for outlining guiding questions for future research on the relationship between caring practices and neighbourhood-scale resilience. By situating care at the centre of adaptation, the paper calls for strategies that strengthen rather than displace existing practices of care, thereby reconnecting urban communities with ecological systems and contributing to more sustainable and resilient cities.