This conclusion presents a framework for understanding neighbourhood ecologies as dynamic socio-ecological networks formed through everyday acts of environmental stewardship across Sydney’s urban spaces. While popular interest in community gardening, urban beekeeping and local food systems has flourished, academic exploration of their broader relational dimensions within settler-colonial cities remains limited. We build on Massey’s ’throwntogetherness’, Appadurai’s relational locality, and Tsing’s “polyphonic assemblages” to ask what specific connections materialise when ordinary residents become socio-ecological stewards through practices like gardening, foraging and community cultivation. Through place-based creative ethnographies—including non-representational photography, participatory mapping, and design activism using campaigning artefacts—we trace how neighbourhood ecologies transform urban environments despite urgent climate pressures from fires to housing crises. Our research reveals stewardship practices thriving across Sydney’s neighbourhoods: home gardeners developing environmental sensibilities; community groups cultivating public spaces; residents recoding streetscapes through verge gardens and seed swapping; knowledge networks emerging through workshops and walking tours. We demonstrate how small-scale stewardship practices develop ecological literacy, foster social connections, and create prefigurative alternatives within neighbourhood ecologies. Situated against colonial histories yet grounded in Country, these practices offer redirective approaches to urban futures that foreground more-than-human relationships while acknowledging the political complexities of environmental care in expensive, contested cities.