VIRTUAL Manchester Livable Cities

Abstract

This paper repositions burial grounds as critical yet underexamined urban infrastructures through which cities negotiate care, memory, and belonging under conditions of environmental precarity, displacement, and uneven development. It argues that spaces of death and mourning expose the limits and contradictions of contemporary urbanism. Often peripheral in planning discourse, burial sites function as spatial systems where pressures of density, land scarcity, governance, and cultural continuity become materially entangled. Drawing on comparative case studies, the paper traces how burial practices adapt within constrained and vulnerable landscapes. Reviewing cities where burial operates as a vertical, highly regulated system shaped by density and bureaucratic control and coastal communities where erosion and rising seas destabilize long-standing burial grounds, foregrounding climate change as a force that unsettles both land and memory. Additional cases extend this analysis across urban and peri-urban contexts, revealing how informal stewardship, heritage management, and contested governance shape the lived experience of mourning. Methodologically, the research integrates spatial ethnography, participatory mapping, archival study, and design-led inquiry to frame burial as a dynamic and adaptive practice. It contributes to debates in urban planning, landscape architecture, and cultural geography by foregrounding the ethical and spatial dimensions of care within the built environment. Situating burial within discussions of infrastructure, resilience, and heritage, the paper argues that mourning is constitutive of urban life. Burial spaces emerge as temporal infrastructures through which cities negotiate vulnerability, permanence, and collective memory, offering a critical lens on urban livability in rapidly transforming environments.