London sat under a heavy heat last week. The kind of heat that changes how people move through a city: where taking the Tube feels like stepping into a sauna, and where choosing to walk means crossing places like Waterloo Bridge, where exposure to heat reshapes the experience of every step more than the route itself. Pavements held onto warmth well into the evening, school gates shifted to earlier finishes, and daily routines adjusted quietly without much warning.

Before the week fully unfolded, the Clean Mobility Collective community gathered in a cozy bar in London for Community Drinks with UMI Fund. It was an informal start to a packed week, with some reconnecting and others meeting for the first time. Any first-time nerves quickly softened with stand-up from Brikesh Singh, whose sharp humour about carbon offsets and the sector’s contradictions set an easy tone, followed by a live guitar and vocal set from Steve Campbell. The evening offered a simple kind of grounding before the intensity of the week ahead.

London Climate Action Week unfolded inside that atmosphere — not as a distant climate gathering, but as a city trying to understand itself in real time.

Across venues and conversations spread throughout the city, climate was not an abstract agenda. It showed up in how people moved, how they paused, how they adapted their day. Beneath many of these conversations, one question kept returning in different forms: what are cities actually built around?

For the Clean Mobility Collective, that question came into focus during a session hosted by our European partners at the Clean Cities Campaign as part of the Curious Cities Assembly — a conversation called Mobilities of Care.

MOBILITIES OF CARE

The room brought together partners, friends and curious minds from across regions and across the mobility field.

Aslihan Tumer, Director of the Clean Mobility Collective, reminded the room that transport is usually described as connecting people to jobs, goods, and opportunity. But it also connects people to each other. From that shift, a different picture of the city appears, one shaped by everyday movements that rarely show up in transport models: school runs, grocery trips, care for children and older relatives, and the ongoing work of sustaining daily life.

Neha Saigal (Intertidal Lab), working on gender, climate, and mobility systems in India, built on this by pointing to how mobility is usually measured. Most systems focus on what is easy to count: scheduled, priced, or economically productive trips. Care moves differently. It shows up in short, repeated, and fragmented journeys that often remain invisible in planning.

This invisibility matters. Transport systems are often designed around speed and efficiency, assuming flexible time and predictable movement. Care does not fit that logic. In many parts of India, Neha noted, care-related trips are often short — under 30 minutes, sometimes under 15 — and made on foot, by bicycle, or informal transport. They continue even under climate stress, from heat to air pollution, because they cannot simply be postponed.

She shared examples from India where subsidised or free public transport for women has reduced costs and freed up household resources, with money often redirected to childcare and healthcare. These are not complete solutions, but they show how mobility policies already shape everyday care and time use — even when care is not explicitly part of their design.

Alongside this, Maud de Vries, CEO of BYCS, brought the discussion closer to the scale of neighbourhoods. She pointed to how small, everyday interventions — like introducing bikes into local areas — can quietly reshape how care is experienced in daily movement, especially for those who move on behalf of others.

By the end of the discussion, care was no longer an external theme to transport. It had become a way of reading it. Mobility appeared less as movement alone, and more as the conditions that make movement possible — or difficult — in everyday life.

A WEEK SHAPED BY HEAT AND LIVED EXPERIENCE

Outside this session, London Climate Action Week unfolded across a city constantly negotiating its own physical conditions. The heat shaped how people moved and gathered, but also how they spoke about the city itself.

At the Clean Air Fund Hub, conversations with parents, scientists, and campaigners returned repeatedly to air — not as an environmental metric, but as something that shapes daily life unevenly and often invisibly.

At the C40 Cities A City for All session, former Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo reflected on the long process of reclaiming streets from car dominance and returning space to people. Paris, she noted, has been steadily expanding cycling infrastructure, public space, and street life.

Alongside her, city leaders including Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr (Mayor of Freetown) and Kate Gallego (Mayor of Phoenix) spoke from very different urban realities, with reflections shaped by questions of access, safety, and how cities adapt to heat, inequality, and rapid change.

CHILDHOOD AND INDEPENDENCE

Across multiple sessions, childhood appeared as a recurring lens. Researchers, doctors, and advocates described how children’s independent mobility has narrowed over time, replaced by more structured routines shaped by traffic, road safety concerns, and growing exposure to air pollution.

But another idea returned repeatedly: when cities are designed so children can move safely and independently, the effects extend far beyond childhood. They shape public health, street design, and the way neighbourhoods function for everyone.

CARE, MADE VISIBLE

Hopefully, care will now no longer be something that sits at the margins of these conversations, but a way of reading everything else. Mobility then appears less as movement alone, and more as the conditions that make movement possible — or difficult. Time, safety, infrastructure, proximity, and responsibility all shape how people move through cities.

Care is not an addition to transport systems. It is already part of them, whether recognised or not. Recognising this does not simplify planning — it makes it more layered, more demanding, and more grounded in lived reality, but also more accurate.

Cities are not shaped only by policy or infrastructure. They are shaped daily by care, by constraint, and by the small movements that rarely appear in official systems. The question that remains is simple, and still open: not whether care exists in cities, but whether cities are designed with it in mind.

London Climate Action Week did not resolve the questions it surfaced, but it made them harder to overlook.