Do bureaucracy and heat have something in common? How is heat problematised and operationalised in bureaucratic realms? For two years, I co-coordinated a course for public officials entitled “Climate Action in Public Places” organised by the Department of Climate Change of the Council of Madrid, where we explored the those questions in relation to municipal action.
During the last session of the course, artist Raquel Congosto gifted participants with a game card. The game invited them to invite think “Outside the Box” (as the game was named). It consisted in three feature: a small booklet with instructions and two sets of cards. In the booklet, one could write down the challenges for the game to be played—that is, the (bureaucratic) endeavors that participants had over the table (i.e. their bureaux). Out of the two set of cards, the first one included fourteen ‘Characters’, which were urban actors ‘alla ANT’: a tree, a sewage system, an elder, a mum with kids, a file, a car, a neighbourhood party, and so on. Each had their respective characteristics. The second set were ‘Tools’, and were created from the ten lectures that the course had offered. From those lectures, Raquel proposed a world in which different actors in collaboration with others and combining their specific characteristics could solve challenges choosing the different paths offered by the tools. Heat, as an invisible bureaucratic problem, was at the heart of all those challenges.