A politics of urban crisis beyond despair and repair? A response

This response revisits and extends the concept of crisis urbanism, arguing that contemporary crises are not external shocks impacting cities but are increasingly produced, reproduced, governed, and contested in processes of urbanization itself. Building on our original intervention, we conceptualize crisis as an ongoing and relational urban process rather than an exceptional or temporary disruption. Through the lens of crisis urbanism, overlapping phenomena such as climate change, housing precarity, infrastructural decline, and public health emergencies are understood as interconnected and mutually constitutive formations. Responding to the commentaries, we clarify the value of poly- and perma-crisis as analytical frameworks for understanding how crises interact across temporal, spatial, political, and epistemological dimensions. While engaging critiques concerning political imagination, historical specificity, relational harm, repair, and scale, we maintain that cities are not merely sites of crisis management but also key arenas where crisis knowledge, politics, and alternatives are produced. Rather than offering a closed framework, crisis urbanism is presented as an evolving diagnostic and methodological orientation for analysing the entangled crisis formations that increasingly shape contemporary urban life.