Ontologies and infrastructures of urban heat in Warsaw

Excessive summer heat constitutes different objects for different people. For climate scientists and epidemiologists, they are quantifiable objects. For policy makers they are potential risks that need regulating. For vulnerable groups they might be a painfully lived through experiences mediated via their bodies. As such, urban heat is not only epistemologically but also ontologically different depending on the perspective. This paper looks specifically at what excessive urban heat is for adults above 65 years old living in Warsaw. It stems from an ongoing project on Embodying Climate Change: Transdisciplinary Research on Urban Overheating (EmCliC). Based on ethnographic research combined with sensors, workshops, focus groups and policy analysis, we  discuss (1) infrastructures that make urban heat in its multiple forms – such as asphalt, warmed up walls of a flat, hot air, people’s bodies, an Urban Heat Island; and (2) infrastructures to recognize heat, used by the municipality (meteorological stations and sensors, policies, institutions, people), by older adults (their bodies, thermometers, weather news, their friends and family) and within our research with older adults (adding sensors to ethnography).

 

The talk included a participatory exercise illustrating what heat infrastructures and ontologies might be. The participants embodied different elements of an urban heatwave, such as sun, asphalt, a crying baby, an older person, a tree, and moved around the room showcasing how each reacts to and constitutes a heatwave, and how they reacts with each other.

 

Part of this presentation has been published as: Boni, Z., Bieńkowska, Z., Chwałczyk, F. et al. What is a heat(wave)? An interdisciplinary perspective. Climatic Change 176, 129 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-023-03592-3

@workshop HEATMATTERS
January 2023, Institute for European Ethnology, HU-Berlin
Transcript of audio summary
(Zofia Boni)

 

So, we’ll be talking today about ontologies and infrastructures of urban heat in Warsaw. It is the two of us presenting, but you could see the rest of the team there. This talk stems from a bigger project that is entitled Embodying Climate Change: Transdisciplinary research on Urban overheating that we’re doing. It’s an interdisciplinary project that focuses exactly on older adults, so adults above the age of 65 years old and their experiences of urban heat in Warsaw and Madrid.

 

And the goal, as you will see, we were trying to combine ethnographic and very subjective experiences of what is heat, when it’s too hot, and how people feel about that, with sort of objective sensor measurements.
Today we will be engaging with three questions: What is the heat wave?, What makes it? and How do different actors and institutions know?

 

We assumed in the project, what we wanted to suggest is a new conceptualisation of heat waves as multiple objects that are not only different when we think about epistemologies but also ontologies, right? So that a heatwave, and I’ll explain in a second what we mean by that, it’s a different thing to climate scientists to epidemiologists, to policymakers and other adults living in Warsaw and in Madrid. Since we work in an interdisciplinary context, we really wanted to emphasise that we treat knowledge as something that is very contextual and depends on positionality, and then why climate scientists and older adults might have very different knowledges about what is heat. We assume that they’re equally valid and equally valid to recognise. So, as you’ll see, for epidemiologists, the danger that comes with excessive heat, starts much earlier than it does for climate scientists. And in both climate science and epidemiology, a heatwave is a very quantified phenomenon that can be measured, calculated and mapped out. And the heat wave is abstracted from the actual life by scientists. It is, in a way, created by scientists because they come up with definitions and calculations, and it seems that they have all the agency in their power to define it, to make it very real and visible, with the use of the maps, for instance.

 

So, we were interested in looking into how those different cities and particularly older adults living in such different contexts deal with that. And whether we can learn something from the Spanish case to implement that perhaps in the Polish one.

 

And one of the arguments we want to make is that, of course, we have to be concerned with morbidity and mortality – as epidemiology teaches us to do – but we also want to point out the well-being and comfort of people’s lives and how heat increasingly affects their daily lives and isolates them actually. And for many older adults living in Warsaw, they would define a heatwave or too hot weather or heat already at 25 degrees Celsius, for instance. So, it begins much earlier than a scientifically understood heatwave starts for scientists and meteorologists And, if we recognise the multiplicity of this perspective and treat this as equally valid, we see that some older adults experience longer periods of heatwaves and climate or meteorological indices or policy warnings indicate.
So, another point related to different ontologies of heatwaves is this idea that there is really a quite striking discrepancy between how climate science perceives heatwaves, which are defined as very rare abnormal events, and the reality of living in summers all over the world, but in Europe as well for older adults, for instance, for whom it is not an abnormal event anymore, but it’s something that’s sort of really a daily experience. And I think that this discrepancy needs to be addressed, because climate science has much more power in defining heatwaves and deciding, what we do about them.

 

(Franciszek Chwałczyk)
As different ontologies offer us different recognitions of heat and means to answer the challenges recognised by those different perspectives they do not offer answers to other existing perspectives. So, to cope with heat, we need to know, how to act within one ontology that would give results within the other and the other way round. For example, we need to know how to act within policy to answer the concerns of the vulnerable groups, and we need to, being a vulnerable group, know how to use the policy to change it, playing by the rules of the policy.
The thing that we are considering is that perhaps thinking about heat in a slightly different way – as infrastructures – and with the use of that concept enables to us to move forward while recognising those epistemological and ontological differences. We are using here quite old, but I think a very good approach to infrastructures: ethnography of infrastructures.

 

Approaching heat infrastructure this way allows us first to acknowledge and bypass this ontological multiplicity, but without ignoring it. And second, to think about a heat infrastructure that would allow to monitor and warn against heat adequately for most parties involved without them agreeing in the sphere of ontology or reducing their meanings and what they think to one chosen ontology of heat like meteorological heat or policy heat or other. The common infrastructure that we found under all other three, that we have analysed is the scientific infrastructure of temperature: Public infrastructure uses meteo stations and degrees to assess the heat wave and thresholds. You see also the Celsius degrees in the citizens infrastructure. They, our participants, often put the heat into the degrees. They say that “Oh, it’s over 25 degrees. That is hot for me.” They use thermometers outside of windows, sometimes inside the home to say how hot it is for them and we, of course, also use sensors that measure temperature.

 

But the problem is, temperature is not enough because of the different thresholds, because of the different aspects. For example, our participants have often mentioned humidity, that it is a big difference for them. And metro stations and public infrastructure also do not use humidity in any way to assess is it a heatwave or not. Recognising what kind of heat ontologies there are is a first step that we have already done. Mapping infrastructures that have a base in one or more such ontologies is the second step, we already started here. And coming up with a sketch of an infrastructure that taps into other infrastructures and ontologies would be a next step we hope to make in the near future. And we hope this would enable us to think about a more, about better adaptation to heat and learn about heat in the city of Warsaw.