Climate adaptation under austerity: Declining everyday infrastructures amid extreme heat

This paper shifts the analytical lens “downward” to examine how austerity effects individual’s everyday adaptation to extreme heat, contributing to a multi-scalar understanding of austerity and adaptation. Through five months of ethnography in a neighbourhood in Manchester, UK, the paper first identifies how individuals have low ‘value adaptation’, which underpins their engagement in short-term, reactive and low-cost everyday adaptation strategies. Second, austerity’s erosion of everyday infrastructures—water systems, libraries, swimming pools, parks, street furniture and shade infrastructure—has directly diminished everyday adaptive capacity rendering people more vulnerable to extreme heat.

And by understanding austerity as a personal condition the paper argues that extreme heat will feel more physically unbearable for people at the sharpest end of the austerity cuts. By bridging debates across austerity and climate adaptation, austerity and everyday lives, and adaptation politics the paper argues that local authorities must reframe everyday infrastructures as essential climate adaptation systems. And everyday infrastructures must be (re)built after austerity if they are to serve as integrated climate adaptation infrastructures at the individual, neighbourhood, and city scales as temperatures continue to rise.