Compassionate urban geographies of transformative power

Urbanization has transformed many megacities, particularly in rapidly expanding urban regions like Delhi, India. Over the decades, Delhi’s urban growth has been characterized not only by physical expansion but also by deepening social and environmental inequalities. Patterns of land-use change, driven by population pressure, infrastructure, and development, has produced a highly uneven urban landscape in which access to environmental amenities and exposure to environmental stressors are distributed along socio-economic lines. This study will focus on more than three decades of urbanization in Delhi using multi-temporal Landsat satellite imagery. By employing the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and the Built-up Index (BU), the research will analyze long-term changes in vegetation cover and built-up areas at both city-wide and district levels. These indices enable a systematic assessment of how urban expansion has transformed green spaces and intensified built-up areas across different parts of the city, revealing spatial disparities that are closely intertwined with social vulnerability. Urban development in Delhi has largely prioritized commercial activity, elite residential zones, and infrastructure-led growth. As a result, marginalized and low-income populations are disproportionately concentrated in densely built-up neighborhoods, informal settlements, and peri-urban areas with limited access to green infrastructure. Such areas commonly experience higher land surface temperatures, poorer air quality, and increased exposure to climate-related stresses such as heatwaves and flooding. Reduced access to vegetation has significant implications for public health, including heightened heat stress and respiratory risks. High built-up density is often associated with overcrowding and inadequate urban services. At the same time, increases in built-up areas can reflect economic development and infrastructure provision, highlighting the dual role of urban expansion as both a developmental driver and a source of environmental stress when unevenly distributed.

This paper presents the key arguments of my forthcoming book with the same title (University of Toronto Press, 2027), which focuses on the everyday experiences of energy assistance professionals working for cash-strapped civil society and voluntary sector organisations across the Global North. I explore how such workers provide essential resources and advice to address the injustices faced by people who struggle to access adequate levels of energy in the home. I seek to capture the crucial but often overlooked role of third-sector intermediaries in promoting low-carbon energy access and public engagement in climate policies. Such actors perform infrastructural labour – care, empowerment, advocacy, and sociotechnical work – in shaping low-carbon transformations. Based on evidence from over 100 interviews, survey responses and observations, I explore the institutional nature of such intermediaries, in terms of their place-based impacts and organizational vulnerabilities. I am particularly interested in how third sector energy labour demands a constant negotiation between urgent hands-on action and enduring structural constraints. Amid overlapping pressures and complex trade-offs, frontline workers enact diverse forms of care and solidarity that offer politically powerful intimations of an alternative future beyond the confines of the present order. I build upon Harb’s (2025) notion of ‘crisis as infrastructure’ to explore how, against the dominant apparatus of vulnerabilization, one finds an extensive, albeit largely unrecognized, counter-infrastructure of public advocacy and practitioner care, primarily led by the third sector. However, efforts to tackle energy-related inequalities may help sustain the very frameworks that drive them. The centring of labour in debates on energy (in)justice and urban infrastructure (Bouzarovski 2022) allows for integrating the socio-political dynamics of energy systems, and unequal access to resources.

Approaching crisis as a sociospatially grounded, everyday-life experience that involves inequalities, politics of governance and resistance (Dimitrakou & Ren, 2025), we explore the interplay of crises, care, and politics of place (Massey, 1993) on a Greek carescape, a hosting shelter for unaccompanied minors that was severely affected by the 2023 Thessaly floods. The shelter is placed on Pelion mountain, 14 km away from the city of Volos, thus isolating unaccompanied minors and posing challenges to their access to education and socializing. Conceptualizing hosting centers as carescapes, where the practices of care are construed as intertwined with control and discipline (Ticktin, 2011; 2016), we approach ‘care’ as a discursive element produced at the intersection of different crises, humanitarian, health, and environmental. To shed light on this discourse of care, we draw on our ethnographic engagement with the shelter at Pelion mountain in the context of Rhizo-eduscapes project (HFRI, 2025-2028), and we analyze an assemblage of discourses, linguistic landscape elements and digital ethnographic data published in this specific shelter’s facebook page during the floods. The flood-affected linguistic landscape reveals that the politics of placing shelters in remote areas amplified the unaccompanied minors’ vulnerabilities and insecurity, since they were trapped inside the hosting center and were only saved by the locals’ solidarity. This solidarity breached the isolation and precarity imposed by the biopolitical governing of the multiple crises that feed the structure of institutionalized carescapes (Bowlby, 2012). Created to govern mobility as a humanitarian crisis they pathologize migration (proof of being a minor), thus exercising biopolitical control (Tazzioli, 2019) and integrating bordering dynamics (Angulo-Pasel, 2022). Finally, care in this context becomes a bordering practice that controls rather than protects unaccompanied minors. As a result, these carescapes reproduce them as people-in-need (Merlín-Escorza, Schapendonk, & Davids, 2023) redefining thus care as crisis.

Policies intended to support people experiencing homelessness (PEH) can, at times, reproduce or intensify the very vulnerabilities they seek to alleviate. This comparative study examines how homeless shelter environments shape everyday life and substance use among homeless shelter residents (HSRs) in Athens (Greece) and Santiago (Chile), two cities characterised by neoliberal policy reforms and constrained social welfare systems. Drawing on the risk environment framework and employing a mixed-methods design, the study analyses both public-sector and community-run shelters to explore how institutional models structure social relations between HSRs, interactions with staff, coping practices, and access to support. Policy mapping is used to assess how shelter design, regulatory intensity, and policy density influence the organisation and operation of temporary accommodation across the two contexts. The findings indicate that community-run shelters are more likely to foster interpersonal connection, participation, and a sense of belonging, whereas public-sector shelters are more commonly associated with social isolation and marginalisation. These institutional differences have tangible implications for substance use, which emerges both as a coping strategy and as a response to shelter governance and everyday conditions. By foregrounding the lived experiences of HSRs, the analysis demonstrates how shelter policies and practices can generate either harmful or protective social environments. The study concludes by arguing for community-oriented models of temporary accommodation, supported by sustainable funding structures that prioritise dignity, social connection, and wellbeing within homelessness services.