Heat and the city: Thermal control, governance and health in urban Asia

Abstract

This special issue focuses on the under-studied but increasingly pressing issue of urban heat. Cities are getting hotter, both due to the global crisis of climate change, and the related phenomena of Urban Heat Islands, which locally amplify increased global temperatures and exposure to solar radiation. We know a great deal about how heat is affecting cities from a scientific and public health perspective. Urban studies scholarship, however, has been slower to foreground heat as a social, spatial, and political category of analysis, at least in comparison to discussions of carbon emissions and their control, energy and infrastructure, rising sea levels or flooding, and activism towards sustainability. While many of these themes also figure in this collection, our focus is on the varied phenomena of urban dwellers feeling, avoiding, suffering under, mitigating, culturally interpreting and attempting to anticipate and plan for, the reality of elevated air temperatures and solar radiation. What we call thermal control, governance, and health is the multi-level and multivalent social and material response to uncomfortable and potentially injurious temperatures, an elusive topic this special issue makes visible and constitutes what we hope will be an ongoing urban research agenda.