Heat and Health in Urban Spaces: A Review from the Perspective of Cultural Urban Studies

In a paper for the “Jahrbuch StadtRegion 2023/2024” on the subject of Cities & Health, Ignacio Farías und Elisabeth Luggauer have dived into the intricate relationship between cities, health, and heat. The article approaches the topic of city and health from the perspective of heat. It reviews influential works from the field of cultural urban studies and focuses on how body, city, health, exposure, and heat are conceptualised in this body of literature. In doing so, we elaborate three conceptual approaches to heat as relevant to health: socio-ecological, genealogical, and praxeological. As a fluid and materialless energy, heat can in its multiple modes of existence hardly be separated from the design of urban spaces.

 
Hence, the paper encourages a multiple and agentive understanding of heat and raises the question of how urban spaces – when conceived and planned with heat and from more than human perspectives – can function as future living spaces.

 
Farías, I. und E. Luggauer | Hitze und Gesundheit in städtischen Räumen. Eine Rückschau aus der Perspektive kultur- und sozialwissenschaftlicher Stadtforschung | Pohlan, J., Othengrafen, F., Güntner, S.,Nuissl, H., Schmidt-Lauber, B. (eds) Jahrbuch StadtRegion 2023/2024. Wiesbaden: Springer VS, S. 197-216 | https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-658-44315-3