Climate Change and Ordinary Cities: A Comparative Analysis of Climate Change and Livelihoods in Mediterranean and Indian Coastal Communities.

The world over, extreme events due to climate change are responsible for destruction of lives, livelihoods, and property, especially acute in urban centers. In addition, the rapid climate change combined with growing inequality poses an existential threat to human well-being and jeopardizes the prospects of communities and future generations. However, what happens when extreme events such as flash floods, forest fires, landslides occur in smaller coastal towns? How do these small towns deal with extreme events and the displacement of populations? What kinds of actors and institutions are involved in the fishing or tourist sector in these smaller towns? How do different groups of people in the town grow support networks, collectivize, develop strategies against risks, adapt to help them tide over these situations? Through case studies in small urban coastal communities, the paper examines the implications of climate change on the economy of such coastal towns in both the Global North (Greece) and the Global South (India). The paper focuses on the ways in which fishing communities are being impacted and in turn responding to extreme events and what kinds of local knowledge and practices they are following to do so. Furthermore, what are the governance arrangements in dealing with the fallout of these extreme events and the impact on the transformation of coastal communities. In methodological terms, the article based on ethnographic fieldwork in different socio-economic and cultural contexts, considers case studies, to identify the different institutional and policy responses to climate change and extreme events, giving rise to different paths and forms of informal practices, community innovation and institutional responses. Reading climate urbanism both within formal institutions and people’s everyday actions in urban coastal communities, the paper seeks to rethink how we understand urban transformations in a climate-change world and the heterogeneous character of climate-changed urban futures.