7. Community

Healy, Stephen
Kleinberg, Eric
Legacy, Crystal
Mellick Lopes, Abby

This article is an interview with four researchers about the role of community and community-based initiatives in climate adaptation in urban contexts

Infrastructures of Care: Opening up “Home” as Commons in a Hot City

Abby Mellick Lopes
Stephen Healy
Emma Powers
Louise Crabtree
Katherine Gibson
Human Ecology Review

What does it mean to be at home in a hot city? One response is to shut our doors and close ourselves in a cocoon of air-conditioned thermal comfort. As the climate warms, indoor environments facilitated by technical infrastructures of cooling are fast becoming the condition around which urban life is shaped. The price we pay for this response is high: our bodies have become sedentary, patterns of consumption individualized, and spaces of comfortable mobility and sociality in the city, termed in this paper as “infrastructures of care,” have declined.

Infrastructures of care: opening up ‘home’ as commons in a hot city

Abby Mellick Lopes
Stephen Healy
Emma Power
Louise Crabtree
Katherine Gibson

What does it mean to be at home in a hot city? One response is to shut our doors
and close ourselves in a cocoon of air-conditioned thermal comfort. As the climate
warms, indoor environments facilitated by technical infrastructures of cooling are
fast becoming the condition around which urban life is shaped. The price we pay for
this response is high: our bodies have become sedentary, patterns of consumption
individualized, and spaces of comfortable mobility and sociality in the city, termed