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Floating risk and individual responsibility: The restructuring of urban climate adaptation in China under population urbanization
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DOI：10.1016/j.pce.2026.104423.png)
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Abstract
En 中文
Current research on urban climate resilience largely follows a spatial-technical paradigm, emphasizing physical exposure assessment and infrastructure reinforcement while often overlooking the dynamic role of population mobility and social stratification in shaping the distribution of climate risk. Addressing this theoretical gap, this study adopts a conceptual and theory-building approach to develop an analytical framework centered on population processes within the context of China's highly institutionalized urbanization, with the aim of revealing the social production of urban climate risk. The findings show that population urbanization is not merely a process of spatial concentration, but one through which climate risks are differentially allocated across social groups via housing selection, institutional embeddedness, and governance exclusion. The study identifies the exclusionary consequences of the stable citizen assumption embedded in climate governance and demonstrates that mobile populations face a pronounced climate citizenship gap. Under conditions of insufficient formal governance provision, population mobility is compelled to function as an informal adaptation strategy, thereby reinforcing the trend toward the individualization of adaptation responsibility, whereby systemic risks are transformed into survival costs borne by individuals. The study concludes that enhancing the publicness and equity of urban climate adaptation requires moving beyond spatial-technical governance logic and incorporating the mobility and political nature of population processes into the core agenda of resilience-building.
Keywords:
Urban climate resilience
Population processes
Social stratification
Urban inequality
Population urbanization
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