A review of everyday urban adaptations: What they are and how they can advance progress in adaptation

Everyday practices are increasingly recognised as key to adapting to climate change. They emerge as especially important in cities where the complexity and uncertainty of the compound effects of crises and socio-economic contexts are a cradle for individual and community action. However, little is known regarding what constitutes everyday adaptation and how everyday urban adaptations help to effectively reduce climate risks. We conducted a systematic and thematic review and analysis to take stock of scientific publications. We retrieved 632 documented everyday adaptations in urban contexts from 45 relevant publications. We offer two important reflections that challenge prevailing approaches to the conceptualisation and assessment of everyday adaptations. First, our analysis highlights a high diversity of everyday adaptations and emphasises the importance of actions that encompass social relations and cooperative action and connect individual with collective well-being. Second, the study reveals a lack of methodological and data-driven consideration of the impacts and outcomes of everyday adaptations, resulting in a limited understanding of the contribution of these adaptations to overall progress in urban adaptation. To advance towards more comprehensive and nuanced assessments, we identify three key needs: (I) considering the interconnected and cumulative effects of everyday adaptation across scales, (II) exploring everyday imaginaries, and (III) accounting for justice and equity issues. Overall, our review underscores the need for more capacious conceptualisations of urban adaptation to account for the wide array of practices and multiple objectives it encompasses for urban dwellers, and highlights the importance of further work in the area of evaluation.