Throughout this book, I have shown that urban design offers a valuable lens for understanding how societies place and organize care. But I have also shown how urban design is key to addressing issues of care in contemporary cities worldwide, issues that span the changing place of care in contemporary society, the impacts of urban change on wellbeing and flourishing and the degradation of environments in the Anthropocene. To briefly recap, across the book’s substantive chapters, I have focussed on the potential for urban design to perform care through the placing and staging of care relations, the making of accessible urban places, the shaping of atmospheres both affective and aerographic, strategies enabling ongoing attunement through materiality to the changing contexts and contingencies of caringscapes, the cultivation of positive place-attachments and through care for the resources of a common world shared across the generations. Between them, these chapters and themes embrace all the dimensions of urban design that Carmona (2021) identifies, from the social to the perceptual, morphological, functional and temporal. These dimensions, though not always picked out explicitly, weave through all the chapters. The case study analyses have also explored the significance of design governance for care relations and practices.

Each of the chapters has, hence, opened up a new and distinct perspective on the role of urban design, both as built form/ place and as practice, in relation to care. As we have moved through the book, however, each chapter has also built on earlier ones, advancing an understanding of the scope of urban design regarding practices and relations of care both in the present and the future. Throughout the book, we have moved gradually from what might be thought of as a humanistic exploration of the potential of urban design to shape care practices that pertain to particular social groups to explorations of its potential to shape more complex webs of relations and interdependencies encompassing human and non-human actors. These relations include placebased attachments and inescapable dependencies of human life on the earth’s physical resources and environments in order to meet basic needs, perform care effectively and build positive legacies for future generations.