Caring for broken systems: Rethinking crisis with Indigenous relationality

Beveridge et al. (2025) tell us that ‘we live in an age of urban crisis’, which is at once politically produced and materially real. They acknowledge that this crisis is not entirely new but nevertheless assert: ‘we have entered a new conjuncture where interlocking polycrises (of climate, pandemic, politics, economy, social life) are engendering a permacrisis of political stasis and “hyperpolitics” (Jäger, 2023) […]’. Taking a plunge into crisis literature and its intersections with urban scholarship, Beveridge et al. offer a way for thinking about the current conjuncture by outlining four modalities of crisis urbanism – chrono-politics, spatial-politics, statal-politics, and Epistemological-politics. These modalities, they explain, are political and analytical tools for unpacking the specific mechanisms through which crisis urbanism is comprehended, governed, and addressed across space and time. Rather than a momentary event (or a set of events), Beveridge et al. frame crisis urbanism as procedural and ‘ever-present’, inviting us to think about ‘crisis as a method, as a moment demanding analytical invention and dexterity to capture the convergence of forces in the making of crisis’.

Engaging with this work, McFarlane (2026) discusses the growing influence of ‘crisis-thinking’ within urban research, and the new sense of urgency that situates (poly)crisis as an organising theme for theorising cities and how we live in them (cf. Beveridge and Davidson, 2025; Madden, 2023). This is an apt moment, McFarlane (2026) writes, for urban scholars to grapple with what crisis-thinking does – or indeed risks doing – to our understanding of the urban and our ability to imagine life amidst and beyond polycrisis. Heading McFarlane's point and Beveridge et al.'s invitation to engage with crisis as a method, I consider in this short commentary the limitations of crisis-thinking for grappling with brokenness, repair, and change in the specific urban context of settler colonial cities.

Settler colonial urbanism refers to urban spaces and realities that are structurally and infrastructurally organised around and survived by the ongoing dispossession and displacement of Indigenous life and sovereignties (Blatman-Thomas & Porter, 2019; Hugill, 2017; McClintock & Guimont, 2023). I suggest that to understand crisis in its settler colonial urban expressions – where the doctrine of urbs nullius (Coulthard, 2014) remains a palpable epistemology and political orientation – requires engaging carefully, respectfully, and fearlessly with Indigenous knowledges and relationalities. This is partly due to the co-constitutive nature of Indigeneity and urbanity in settler cities, where, as Heather Dorries (2023: 114) writes: ‘Indigeneity is mobilized and transformed by urban processes’ at the same time that ‘Indigeneity transforms what constitutes “the urban”’. Below, I bring Indigenous writings into conversation with crisis thinking. While this conversation is particularly relevant to settler cities, it has broader implications for how we understand urban life in a polycrisis world.

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This is not unprecedented

Not the presence of a new disease. Not the enforced social measures that fragment how we interact, and who with. Not the laying to waste of the environment. Not the strategies of triage, and stratified disposability of human lives.

This is how Gomeroi poet and legal scholar, Alison Whittaker (2020), opens her piece for The Guardian in April 2020, the height of the Covid-19 measures in Australia. ‘Why start a piece about poetry like this?’, Whittaker asks: ‘Well, in part because every piece published right now has to acknowledge the crisis happening around us as a foundational anxiety of its audience. But also because, in our enduring foundation of trauma as First Nations people, I feel compelled to remind readers that we have faced moments like this before […]’. Whittaker's is a crucial reminder that for First Nations, polycrisis is not an abstraction (Davis, 2025) but an enduring lived experience that they have extensively reckoned with (Carlson, 2022). This is not only because polycrisis in the settler colony is pervasive and ongoing but also because crisis thinking and crisis politics have been used against First Nations for centuries to tighten the grip over their lives, livelihoods, and lands (Carlson, 2022; Watson, 2009). As Carlson (2023) shows, crisis is a key instrument in the repertoire of colonial oppression since it enables the regime to repackage and reinvent itself via proclaimed reforms that purport to improve things but in fact make them far worse.

In so-called Sydney, where I live as a white, Jewish, migrant-citizen on unceded Wangal land, debates about the ‘housing crisis’ are ubiquitous. This is a crisis experienced viscerally by First Nations from the very moment of settler invasion (Watson, 2009), but for the rest of Australia, this crisis may appear newer and more pressing than ever before – an ‘emergency’ unfolding (Kelly, Porter & Kunjan, 2025). With a renewed sense of urgency injected into the political and public discourse, the housing crisis is increasingly used as justification to ‘tear down and rebuild’ the housing stock (O’Keefe, 2024). Developers are capitalising on governments’ push for rapid housing supply to swiftly and offhandedly demolish older properties – often public and affordable housing – and build new (and overwhelmingly unaffordable) ones. This process is so widespread that it has come to ‘rewrite Sydney's skyline’ (Barwell, 2026).

Amidst valid retrofitting options and the human, ecological, and financial harm caused by extensive demolitions (Moore et al., 2024; Sisson & Ruming, 2025), the destruction of tens of thousands of homes as ‘natural’ response to an ‘unnatural’ crisis represents the settler colonial underpinnings of the housing crisis framing (Kelly et al., 2025). Building on the work of Potawatomi scholar Kyle Whyte (2020), we are witnessing a ‘crisis epistemology’ in action, where claims of unprecedentness and urgency are employed to offer both a diagnosis of the problem and a way out of it. Crisis epistemology dangerously frames the crisis (any crisis) as ‘complex beyond anything previously encountered’ (p. 53), thus justifying extreme, injurious interventions. Against this colonial crisis epistemology, Whyte articulates Indigenous ‘epistemologies of coordinates’ that ‘emphasize coming to know the world through kin relationships’ (p. 58), explaining: ‘A world or situation that has members with active kinship relationships of care, consent, and reciprocity is one where the members have the capacity to respond in coordinated ways to change that are supportive of their mutual well-being […]’. (p. 59).

Bringing Whyte's ‘epistemologies of coordinates’ to bear on the current urban conjuncture means reframing what crisis is but also how we should respond to it. Crisis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2007: 54) reminds us, is ‘not objectively bad or good; rather, it signals systemic change whose outcome is determined through struggle’. Indigenous relationalities as Whyte articulates allow us to move beyond deterministic classifications of crisis and automated cause-and-effect responses; they open avenues of collective action that respect and respond to the interconnectedness of people, places, and non-humans in a world in flux. Turning to Indigenous relationalities of ‘care, consent, and reciprocity’ can therefore help us hold together a world of ‘possibilities and alternatives’ that is dialectically ‘bound up with shifting power relations’ (Beveridge et al., 2025). This reorientation does not deny the materiality of brokenness or its uneven effects (‘This is not unprecedented’, but for whom?). Epistemologies of coordinates, however, urge us to reconsider our way around what is broken. Rather than ‘tearing down and rebuilding’, we are encouraged to practice patience: ‘sitting with a system in decline, learning from its history, offering palliative care, seeing oneself in that which is dying, attending to the integrity of the process, dealing with tantrums, incontinence, anger and hopelessness, “cleaning up”, and clearing the space for something new’ (de Oliveira Andreotti et al., 2015: 28).

For many of us in the West, sitting with brokenness rather than rushing to fix it feels profoundly counterintuitive. We are constantly told that things are ‘beyond repair’, and that the only way forward is starting over, prompting us to ‘think big’ and ‘innovate’ in addressing the needs of the hour. Our cities are being endlessly ‘renewed’ through interventions in landscapes, systems, and infrastructure that fail to recognise the deep relationships and reciprocities that underpin them (Watson, 2026). These relations hold the city together – first and foremost as Indigenous territory (Country, in so-called Australia) but also as the places we collectively inhabit and are accountable for. To stop thinking of brokenness as (unprecedented) crisis to be resolved requires that we see ourselves in it, see ourselves in relation to what appears to be broken, and the various factors that led it to break. Trawlwulwuy scholar Lauren Tynan (2021) explains that relationality does not always feel good; it is a practice of ‘being in good relation’ (p. 599) as an ‘ethic of responsibility’ (p. 604) even when things get tough. She writes:

As I write this paper, huge swathes of Country in the states of New South Wales and Victoria (Australia) are on fire or burnt to ashes; 7 million hectares of land destroyed. As a human society we are dependent upon this land, but a lack of relational practice means this land is on fire, in a destructive way. Australian Government agencies have treated fire as a singular entity, without regard for the whole system fire interacts with and the thousands of relationships that depend on good fire. Good fire is slow and healing, it belongs with the land and is a relational entity. Relationships with other kin (such as birds, winds and water) enable good fire to occur. Without these relationships, fire is encouraged to burn without limit, threatening all species, becoming wildfire. (p. 605)