A detailed ethnographic account of a secondary African city at the frontline of the polycrisis, tracing how urban residents actively experiment with forging cooler futures under ever hotter conditions.
Heat has become the metaphor of choice through which politics, philosophy, and science speak about the current polycrisis. Heat, in these instances, is primarily translated into temperature metrics such as thresholds and tipping points that feed predictions regarding the planet's future. Yet, conceiving of heat in degrees flattens the complexity of lived experience and obscures the different ways in which communities respond to a hotter world.
City-Heat breaks with temperature-based understandings of heat and delves into a richer, more emic exploration of its socio-cultural and sensory dimensions. The chapters cover a range of topics explored through interactions with a diverse group of interlocutors, spanning from the daily struggles of hustling youths to the work of geothermal engineers, spiritual warfare, pervasive issues of toxicity and pollution confronted by herbalists, and the medicinal practices to which the interlocutors turned in their efforts to forge more viable pathways into the future.
Through these ethnographic terrains, the book traces how the interlocutors sense, and make sense of, what remains viable under hotter conditions across socio-cultural, infrastructural, spiritual, metabolic, and moral registers. Nick Rahier argues that these hotter conditions give rise to new forms of thermal consciousness that shape how people move, work, relate, and sustain the very possibility of "cooler" horizons.