This paper examines the immediate aftermath of the Grenfell Tower fire through the perspectives of those who experienced it. Drawing on twenty-four interviews with survivors, bereaved family members, local residents, and early responders, alongside Public Inquiry evidence and media reports, the analysis identifies three interlinked processes structuring the state’s response: abandonment, stigmatisation, and securitisation. The local authority and other statutory bodies were largely absent in providing coordinated care, leaving residents, families, and community organisations to organise relief. At the same time, racialised, classed, and territorial stigmas shaped how the community was understood and treated, while policing and security operations intensified. These dynamics reflect not only the uneven presence of the state but also broader neoliberal policies that devalue social housing estates and marginalised communities. By foregrounding first-hand accounts of the immediate aftermath of the fire, this paper offers original qualitative evidence on a period that remains under-documented in academic research.

This framing article introduces the City Special Feature Coastal commons: Afro-Indigenous urbanisms in small coastal cities. Centring the coastal towns of Guerrero and Oaxaca, it argues that small coastal cities are not margins but vantage points from which to rethink urban theory and justice. We conceptualise the littoral not as a thin edge where land meets sea but as a field of relations where Afrodescendant, Indigenous, and Afro-Indigenous lifeways shape urbanisation through water, work, ritual, and refusal. Building on the colonial grammar of calidad and its afterlives, we theorise ‘ethnoracial capitalisms’ to capture how contemporary forms of recognition and extraction remain braided together. Three thematic braids organise the essays: water as commons and labour as care, ritual and refusal as spectral commons, and governance, recognition, and the price of being seen. Across case studies of Ometepec, Azoyú, Xochistlahuaca, San Isidro Labrador, Acapulco, and the Oaxaca coast, visual and narrative methods make visible everyday practices of survival, repair, and commoning that exceed metropolitan frameworks of scale. The Special Feature situates Afro-Indigenous urbanisms as primary and generative, unsettling the urban canon and proposing littoral cities as critical sites for reimagining urban life, memory, and justice.

What kind of thing is an everyday crisis? This paper poses this question in the context of a range of attempts to challenge and rework the geohistorically specific distinction between crisis and everyday life. After placing the term ‘everyday crisis’ in the context of contemporary reconfigurations of everyday life theory, this afterword to the Special Feature ‘Critical geographies of everyday crisis’ draws out two partially connected versions of ‘everyday crisis’ across the Special Feature and in the broader literature, and poses a series of questions about each version—first, everyday crisis as an orientation to all crises and, second, everyday crisis as a distinctive condition defined by open-endedness, an indistinction between crisis and everyday life, and a particular form of harm. The paper concludes by reflecting on questions of form in relation to crisis theorising.

This text explores the intertwined efforts of Ecosta Yutu Cuii and the Afro-Mexican movement on the coast of Oaxaca to confront the environmental, social, and cultural challenges posed by rapid urbanisation. Founded in 1994, Ecosta has implemented sustainable agricultural practices, created forest reserves, and promoted community-based economies to harmonise urban development with environmental stewardship. Simultaneously, the Afro-Mexican movement has fought for social recognition and institutional support, culminating in the creation of the Afrouniversidad Politécnica Intercultural, an educational project addressing local needs through culturally grounded programmes. Despite bureaucratic and financial obstacles, the university began operations in 2024, offering degrees focused on sustainable development and cultural preservation. Together, these initiatives highlight the power of grassroots organisation, education, and global collaboration in shaping inclusive and sustainable urban futures rooted in community identity and resilience.

This article explores everyday pressures, as experienced by sex worker community paralegals in Nairobi. Community paralegals are important in national HIV response efforts, as they help to reduce the pressures on state structures, be it the justice system, where their mediation efforts help reduce the number of cases that go to courts, or in the healthcare system where their provision of HIV education and signposting sex workers to special clinics and services alleviates the pressure on health services. However, the design of this volunteer role contains limitations that produce multiple individual pressures and expose role holders to gendered harms. Focusing on social reproduction, this article explores community social reproduction work that the community paralegal role entails, alongside women’s income generating and familiar labours to demonstrate their intertwined nature and the set of numerous demands that they create on women’s time, energy, emotions and financial resources. Using the Space, Time, Violence framework, the article reveals the spatial and temporal dimensions of gendered harms that constitute the everyday lives of community paralegals in Nairobi. These harms are not fully recognised in the formal role design, and thus support to replenish community paralegals’ resources is very limited, so contributing to their struggles. Community paralegals’ attempts to bring justice to their communities are lived then as a daily expose to harms which cause them pressures and deplete them.

In January 2025, an in-person conversation took place between singer/songwriter/urban researcher Mayssa Jallad and director/screenwriter/artist Ely Dagher at his apartment in Beirut. The two collaborators have been trying to meet in person for months, but their lives have been upended: after a year of fire-exchange at the border, Israel’s assault on Lebanon escalated in September 2024, plunging the country into devastation and uncertainty. The conversation documents the process of collaborating on visuals for Jallad’s album Marjaa: The Battle of the Hotels, for which Dagher has been producing videos and most recently performance graphics which premiered in France in December 2024 and in Beirut in January 2025. Jallad and Dagher had set out to write about their collaboration, but words—structured, deliberate—felt inadequate in a context of genocide and war, where nothing made sense. Instead, the only thing they could do—without forcing coherence—was to sit together and talk. A conversation, immediate, unburdened by the need for clarity. They allowed their thoughts to unfold in real-time, shaped by memory, uncertainty, and the weight of the present. The conversation became an unguarded space where thoughts surfaced freely, without the pressure to shape or justify. The exchange became a drifting reflection on art, memory, and the weight of creating against a backdrop of violence. To further document the process of writing and editing, an editorial addendum accompanies the piece.

This visual essay examines the colonia of San Isidro Labrador, located on the urban margins of Acapulco, Mexico—a territory shaped by Afro-descendant heritages and enduring conditions of socio-environmental marginalization. Drawing on an ethnographic and more-than-human approach, the article explores how urban space is co-produced through a hybrid geography in which nonhuman actors—such as the creek—operate simultaneously as sources of livelihood and as agents of risk and destruction, particularly after extreme events such as Hurricane Otis (October 2023). The essay shows how state abandonment and institutional precarity intensify persistent forms of territorial injustice, compelling residents to develop local strategies of care, repair, and resistance amid a prolonged crisis. Through situated observations of everyday practices, collective memories, and fragile materialities—homes built on unstable ground and improvised infrastructures—the piece offers a critical reading of unequal urbanization, recognizing the agency of the nonhuman and the political force of local ways of inhabiting, rebuilding, and repairing the territory.

This commentary reads City’s Special Feature on everyday crisis through the problem of urgency. It argues that urgency is not simply the intensified form of crisis, but a politics of tempo that shapes how crisis is named, paced, governed, and lived. In conversation with the Special Feature’s contributions, the commentary suggests that the littoral matters because it makes especially clear how event and condition fold into one another: what appears as rupture persists as uneven repair, chronic pressure, and ordinary life reorganised. Turning to Acapulco and Hurricane Otis, it shows how the shore brings everyday crisis into focus as a question of recognition, infrastructure, and afterlife. The commentary closes by reframing response not as heroic resolution, but as coalition, care, and collective witness under recurring urban urgencies.

This visual essay traces how the Nn’aⁿnncue Ñomdaa (Amuzgo) communities of Suljaa’ (Xochistlahuaca) in Guerrero are experiencing uneven urbanisation from what often appears, at a distance, as rural periphery. Writing from within Suljaa’, the essay follows paths, looms, and everyday routines to show how mobility, weaving, language, and naming practices remain active forms of world making, even as migration, platform visibility, and infrastructural precarity reorder daily life. Rather than narrating identity as a fixed essence, the essay attends to how markers of belonging, including textiles, hairstyles, and speech, are narrowed, deferred, relocated, and made conditional across movements between localities, the municipal capital (cabecera municipal), and digital spaces. Photographs anchor these reflections in ordinary textures, walking routes, huipiles, shared meals, and moments of disruption such as apagones, where sociality regathers and different temporalities return.

In light of global movements targeting contested monuments, this study explores the management of colonial-era statues in Flanders, Belgium, through the lens of Evolutionary Governance Theory (EGT). While international ‘urban fallism’ has catalyzed public debate and policy shifts, Flemish municipalities display a notably restrained approach towards contested statues. This paper investigates whether societal discussions on colonial heritage and urban fallism translate into institutional change in heritage management at the municipal level. Based on a qualitative case analysis of Flemish municipalities and interviews with local policy actors, the research reveals a largely reactive, ad-hoc governance approach. Most local governments exhibit reluctance to address colonial statues unless provoked by external pressure or public unrest, with only a few urban municipalities showing signs of adaptive and participatory heritage policies. A co-evolutionary perspective uncovers the complex interdependencies between societal discourse, political steering and institutional inertia, offering insights into the challenges of effectuating heritage policy change. While debates may serve as catalysts, they seldom result in structural policy transformation. Based on our data set collected up to 2022, the paper concludes by arguing for more adaptive, participatory governance frameworks that acknowledge both local contingencies and broader sociopolitical dynamics, thereby shifting the conversation beyond the binary of whether statues should simply ‘stay or go’.