Publication date: 1 October 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781806551491
Number of illustrations: 12
City-Heat
Sensing viable futures in Nakuru, Kenya
Nick Rahier (Author)
Series: Urban Africa
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.
List of figures
Spelling conventions
A note on the figures and the names of interlocutors
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 Mastering geothermal futures
2 Navigating city-heat
3 Medicinal heat
4 Moral heat
5 Overheated stomachs
6 Cooler futures
Conclusion
DOI: 10.14324/111.9781806551491
Number of illustrations: 12
Publication date: 01 October 2026
PDF ISBN: 9781806551491
EPUB ISBN: 9781806551507
Hardback ISBN: 9781806551477
Paperback ISBN: 9781806551484
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City-Heat
Sensing viable futures in Nakuru, Kenya
Series: Urban Africa
Publication date: October 1, 2026
Open Access PDF ISBN: 9781806551491
Paperback ISBN: 9781806551484
Hardback ISBN: 9781806551477
Trim size (hardback): 23.4cm x 15.6cm
Trim size (paperback): 23.4cm x 15.6cm
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.
