‘What does it mean to live at a moment of overheating, in a world increasingly marked by the entanglement of climate change, anthropogenic warming, excess, toxicity and uneven development? This book is a compelling, original exploration of how heat and cooling intersect with socio-material fabrics and tensions of urban change, accumulation and acceleration. It offers a distinctive account of heat in its multiple and polysemic manifestations and in the diverse ways it is experienced, produced, mediated and contested amid competing understandings of the present and visions of the future. A timely contribution to urban geography and anthropology.’
Prince Guma, University of Cambridge, UK

‘Set in and around the Kenyan secondary city of Nakuru, this meticulously constructed and theoretically ambitious ethnography of urban transformation offers a brilliant, multi-layered inquiry into how residents navigate urban transformation through the complex cultural prism of “heat” and “coolness”. The author masterfully avoids imposing abstract concepts from the outside, instead teasing out organic insights directly from rich ethnographic data, and bringing the voices of healers, farmers and street hustlers to life in vivid vignettes. By foregrounding the body as the central site where urban pressure is experienced, the text seamlessly weaves together medical, environmental and urban anthropology. This highly original, innovative work not only maps the toxic, overheated realities of contemporary African urban landscapes, but also speculates on viable thermal futures and new forms of urban habitability.’
Filip De Boeck, KU Leuven, Belgium

‘Rahier’s lived ethnography recasts the terms that once characterized anthropology. In City-Heat, crisis becomes heat, witchcraft is toxicity, healing sprouts from the organic, and the decolonial horizon is not an imaginary zenith but an instance of viability with interdisciplinary significance. A must-read for scholars and students alike working on ecosocial inclusion.’

Koen Stroeken, Ghent University, Belgium

‘Rahier’s book does what the best ethnography can achieve: it takes the reader into an unfamiliar social world, depicts it from diverse, even incongruous angles, and makes its inhabitants simultaneously familiar and surprising. Moving a kaleidoscope of storylines held together by one place – the city of Nakuru – it speaks of innovative energy infrastructures and spectral city-planning, young men’s hustling and enterprising women’s “smartness”, herbal medicines and religious practices, food and ecologies. Focusing on the topical subject of “heat”, the book speaks to the very present climate crisis and to creative pursuits of “viability” beyond it, yet it avoids making (over-)heating a framework that flattens people’s lives into a crisis-present or that shoehorns the beauty of what Rahier calls a “pointillist” image into anthropological theory. Instead, the book offers an empathetic and subtle portrayal of struggles to create viable and vital lives and life within, and beyond, the city.’
Ruth Prince and Wenzel Geissler, University of Oslo, Norway