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 runaway change.

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 in the Kenyan city of Nakuru, 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 in a city undergoing rapid change across infrastructural, spiritual, metabolic and moral registers. Nick Rahier argues that hotter conditions shape how people move, work, relate and forge viable pathways toward ‘cooler’ horizons.