Who Cares When the Ground Shakes? “Standing By” Uncertain Urban Futures Through Configurations of Care

In this article, I elaborate on how different urban actors strive to create certainty while living in anticipation of a major destructive earthquake. Turning to the category of standby mode, I study attempts to stabilize uncertain futures beyond professionalized practices of preparedness. Instead, I include a broader range of actors in the analysis of waiting for catastrophe and avoid a binary of activity/passivity in anticipation of disaster. I approach everyday life in Almaty, Kazakhstan, a city prone to potentially dangerous earthquakes, as a form of standby, or an ongoing state of waiting for a destructive earthquake, while living through smaller, non‐destructive yet tangible ones that occur once every few years and trigger broad public discussion. One such earthquake, which struck on January 23, 2024, is the main case I study in this article, focusing on the forms of organizing anticipation before the earthquake, during, and after it. In doing so, I question the opposition between state institutions and local residents, widely presented in disaster studies, and suggest focusing on the interdependencies among the actors involved in disaster anticipation and on how they jointly shape (in)security through relations of care. I introduce the concept of configurations of care and demonstrate that anticipating a disaster is a dynamic process of redistributing care, in which the actors involved situationally shift their roles and intensity of engagement, forming different configurations and thereby transforming the mode of waiting. Drawing on interviews with urban planners, preparedness experts, and residents, I demonstrate how an earthquake (or lack thereof) transforms configurations of care in waiting for uncertain futures of Almaty.