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This paper addresses Jem Bendell’s concept of “deep adaptation” in the Anthropocene through the lens of everyday urban practices in contemporary Northern Europe. It proposes that this “deep adaptation” should be defined less in relation to a socio-ecological “collapse” and more through everyday occurrences in presentday urban environments. Entering into a critical conversation with Bendell’s conceptual “4 Rs” framework, the paper draws on primary data from several cities in Sweden and Germany to show how, in practice, resilience can be found in the “quiet activism” of leisure gardeners; how ingrained notions of restricted land use may be relinquished through “commoning” urban space; how novel constellations of co-living restores old ideas of intragenerational urban cohabitation; and, finally, how a path to reconciliation may be articulated through an ontological shift away from an anthropocentric urban planning, towards one that recognises other-thanhuman beings as legitimate dwellers in the urban landscape. Accounting for urbanities of enmeshed societal, ecological, and spatial trajectories, the paper reveals an inhibiting anthropocentrism in Bendell’s framework and ultimately points to how his “creatively constructed hope” for the future may be found, not in an impending global collapse, but in everyday adaptations and embodied acts that stretch far beyond the human.

Not only do infrastructures put matter in motion, they also provide salient accounts of political struggles and everyday accommodations. Today, many municipalities promote them as part of “green” and “sustainable” solutions for the future. Concurrently, the more-than-human social sciences are going through their own “infrastructural turn,” with an impetus to acknowledge actors beyond the human – that is, the ecologies of plants, animals, and fungi. This paper joins the call to include the ontic-epistemic realities of lively, other-than-human beings. Homing in on one ecological actor, the white willow (Salix alba), in Malmö and Scania, Sweden, I show that more-than-human infrastructural relations are far from novel occurrences. By adopting a ligneous, relational dialectic of agency, I account for the willow’s shifting spatiotemporal positions and how the tree connects Scania’s and Malmö’s infrastructural past, present, and potential futures to wider discourses of sustainability and urban change. In Malmö, such discourses reflect the current implementation of a “green” infrastructure of “eco-pathways” (Ekostråket). Focusing on the willow, I question the municipal promise of “green” infrastructure as a panacea for humanity’s challenges in the Anthropocene., Historical Social Research Vol. 47, No. 4 (2022): Special Issue: Ruptures, Transformations, Continuities. Rethinking Infrastructures and Ecology. Starting Point and Frequency: Year: 1979, Issues per volume: 4, Volumes per year: 1