Urban heat island effect

Vera Tollmann

Related terms: thermal media, remote sensing, heat maps, heat stress, routing apps, warning apps

The urban heat island effect is the phenomenon in which urban areas experience significantly higher air temperatures than their surrounding areas, typically due to the material characteristics of a densely built environment. Surfaces – horizontal and vertical – made of asphalt, concrete, stone, or glass absorb and reflect solar radiation and artificial heat such as waste heat from human activities (e.g., driving cars, using air conditioning, running data centres). Also, railway tracks made of metal and stone heat up, and the lack of cooling green canopies in streets or parks intensifies urban heat.

This glossary entry moves from positions in critical geography and anthropology reflecting embodied experience to critical feminist frameworks, transdisciplinary perspectives, and humanities scholarship. Altogether, the literature referred to in this text provides entry points for environmental humanities approaches to urban heat island effects and amplifies calls for more transdisciplinary research. Collectively, these environmental humanities approaches reframe urban heat islands from meteorological phenomena to manifestations of environmental racism, colonial violence, and structural inequality experienced through and upon bodies. They call for centring local, embodied, and situated knowledges arising from diverse experiences of place in climate adaptation planning, challenging assumptions of universal thermal comfort and exposure. A study just published in The Lancet indirectly underscores the relevance of these perspectives by reporting that the health impacts of heat are increasing significantly (Kriit et al. 2026).

A modern understanding of the urban heat island (UHI) as a measurable physical phenomenon was established through the empirical work of climatologist Timothy R. Oke (1967, 1973, 1982), who was a key figure in establishing urban climatology as a distinct scientific field. Why are these relatively warmer areas described as islands? On thermal maps, city data abstractions are clearly distinguished from the surrounding countryside, giving the city on the map an island-in-the-sea impression, as land responds differently to heat than seawater. Oke argues that the ‘island’ analogy works not only for climatic representation but also for a geomorphic representation in the sense of the “reference to the abrupt city/rural temperature gradient as a ‘cliff’ to the island” (Oke 1969, 1). As such, the naming can be seen as a rhetorical device that helps the researcher visualise and hold on to their ephemeral object of study and communicate it to the public.

Research in the 1970s was primarily concerned with refining data collection methods, including sampling at vertical and horizontal levels. Horizontal sampling was conducted in mobile mode using cars equipped with measuring instruments to document the spread of the urban heat island effect, yielding information on urban heat islands in the canopy and boundary layers (Oke 1973, 1976). Nowadays, companies like Google are deploying Street View cars in cities from San Francisco to London to scan urban streets with laboratory-grade sensors installed on the cars” (Gabrys 2019).

The 1980s saw Oke move from documenting the heat island effect to explaining its mechanisms. He combined field observations with scaled physical models, energy balance models, and the emerging use of satellite thermal infrared data. This brief epistemology is relevant because it points to both a development towards greater data precision (on the heat island magnitude during daytime and nighttime) and a research gap for the humanities (Oke 1982). As early as the 1980s, satellite data on remotely sensed surface temperature were used to study “near-surface air temperature heat islands”. However, at the time, its use for this purpose was considered limited due to its low spatial and temporal resolution (Roth, Oke and Emery 1988).

The 1990s were devoted to further establishing the research area. During this time, we installed permanent infrastructure for sustained field measurements. In the following decades, research addressed the problem that multi-spectral satellite sensors only ‘see’ parts of the urban surface, while vertical walls and shadowed facets are missing. Data collected with aircraft-mounted thermal scanners and 3D geometry had to be integrated to approach a more complete visualisation of surface temperature (Voogt and Oke 2003). Later, Oke and Stewart (2012) introduced a systematic classification of urban and rural landscapes into 17 standard classes, ranging from compact high-rise to water, in the Local Climate Zone classification scheme. In 2017, Oke, Mills, Christen, and Voogt edited the book Urban Climates, an anthology of contemporary research on urban climatology within their respective fields. The book includes a chapter entitled “Climates of Humans”, creating an opening for research contributions from scholars in the humanities.

This view that the use of satellite data for urban climatology is limited has changed over the past 15 years, as numerous climatological studies detecting urban heat in global cities have been published in the remote sensing field. Among those is a work by Oke, co-authored with Stewart (2021), which incorporates remote sensing data, enabled by advancements in high spectral and spatial resolution, allowing the authors to distinguish between surface and atmospheric heat islands. Other researchers have noted that “big geospatial data” is characterised by “high frequency (temporal resolution), heterogeneity (data types and formats), and high dimensionality (multispectral or hyperspectral channels)” (Dritsas and Trigka 2025). The qualitative progress with the help of big data analysis is also reflected in the EU Copernicus Programme through Earth observation data products (Mitraka et al. 2024). For example, researchers showed that by fusing satellite image datasets from a city in India over a 10-year time period, they could grasp, at a glance, changes in surface permeability and surface temperature. Findings indicate that a decrease in surface permeability increases the likelihood of UHI emergence. A limitation of the findings is a lack of nighttime imagery (Padmanaban et al. 2019). In addition to existing datasets, scientists continue to combine with global warming, and the need to examine local urban micro-climates, citizens become more active in participating in local data collection. For a case study in Washington, DC, the setup consisted of off-the-shelf sensors applied by citizens – a practice widely conceived as citizen sensing – satellite data and machine learning to create a map of air temperature, humidity, and heat stress “to understand intra-urban spatial variability of ambient heat exposure at a relatively high resolution” of ten metres (Wang 2024).

Over the past fifty years, urban heat islands have been measured, mapped, simulated, or modelled mainly in cities across Asia, North America, and Europe, including Beijing, Tokyo, Delhi, Rome, and Bucharest (e.g., Saitoh et al. 1996, Cheval et al. 2024). Researchers note that areas in the Global South, like sub-Saharan Africa, have not yet been studied and require close attention, as the region faces especially harsh temperatures (e.g., Robinson 2025). The Polish city of Poznań was studied both as an urban heat island and a cold island (Półrolniczak et al. 2015). Berlin as a heat island was examined in relation to urban pollution (Li et al. 2018), and Chinese cities were studied alongside water management redesigns, such as the sponge city concept, which addresses damage caused by large, sealed surfaces that heat up and prevent rainwater absorption (e.g., He et al. 2019). Recent studies explore correlations between UHI and heatwaves (Cheval et al. 2024). While UHI describes chronically elevated temperatures in urban areas, heatwaves are acute, temporally confined meteorological events that UHI can amplify, creating compounded health risks.

These studies demonstrate that the urban heat island effect is not an isolated phenomenon or issue but is connected to air and ground conditions, as well as to wave and particle motion. Interestingly, the Berlin study on the intersection of heat and pollution was published in the journal Science of the Total Environment, established in 1972, which focuses on interactions among the atmosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, and anthroposphere. 1972 is also the year which historian Alexander C. T. Geppert called the “Post-Apollo paradox,” to emphasise that space travel was initially developed to carry humans into outer space. However, after the Apollo program ended, space missions shifted toward unmanned Earth-orbiting satellites (Geppert 2018). The “geo-scopic drive” (Geoghegan 2024) for planetary visibility has persisted since.

Thus, the UHI describes a relational effect because it is defined by contrast to the surrounding environment; therefore, its relevance as an object of study is defined by a comparative reference point: the urban outskirts and the countryside. Beyond this more technical understanding, this entry argues that social and environmental humanities conceive the UHI as (1) a relational effect that also indexes atmospheric conditions; (2) a social relation because thermal experience is unevenly distributed across city dwellers; (3) an influence on human-nonhuman relations in the Anthropocene.

Humanities perspectives on UHI

The question of what heat measurement captures, and what it obscures, opens onto the concerns of the humanities. Recent critical scholarship challenges the dominant scientific framing of heat as an abstract, measurable quantity detached from human experience and interrogates the epistemological assumptions embedded in heat measurement technologies. For example, Briegel et al. (2025) demonstrate that satellite-derived surface temperature is a poor proxy for human thermal comfort and heat stress, particularly in dense urban areas during heat waves. 

While traditionally understood through meteorological and engineering frameworks, environmental humanities scholarship reconceptualises the UHI as a lived, embodied, and political phenomenon shaped by histories of racism, colonialism, and social inequality. What is missing in climate risk analysis and urban heat mitigation planning is a focus on thermo-cultural practices and the subjective experience of heat. In its third chapter, the IPCC’s “Special Report: Global Warming of 1.5 °C” (2018) examines the impacts of global warming on natural and human systems and emphasises the need to improve urban microclimates because of the life-threatening collateral risk of heatwaves exacerbated by urban heat island effects. 

So far, interdisciplinary approaches have drawn on results from urban planning, public health, environmental science, and sociology (Ghorbany et al. 2024), but the environmental humanities remain largely absent. However, the environmental humanities can engage with UHI as a socio-cultural, political, epistemological, and ethical problem. For example, when asked about the consequences of extreme heat for inhabitants’ daily lives depending on the neighbourhood they live in, the UHI was approached through a more sociological-historical lens. Researchers in the United States observed a pattern of higher temperatures in formerly redlined areas where historically marginalised communities live. Even though redlining was banned by the US Fair Housing Act of 1968, low- to moderate-income households and communities of colour mostly remained in these areas (Hoffman et al. 2020). Also, in Hot Cities. A Transdisciplinary Agenda contributors from different fields introduce recent site-specific cases of ethical concerns, communing and environmental injustice in the urban context, e.g., a tree-planting project in New York City (Steele, Handmer and McShane 2023, 107-109), and conclude with calls for action. Addressing urban heat problems towards thermal justice requires not merely technical cooling solutions but a fundamental transformation of the environment by way of laws, policymaking, and technologies. 

Origins and early research of the UHI concept

The history of the UHI concept stretches back further than modern climatology: The German meteorologist Albert Peppler in 1929 pioneered it when recording the horizontal distribution of air temperature both inside and outside the city, marking a methodological step from single-point measurements to spatially distributed ones and representing an early move toward understanding horizontal urban air temperature distributions. Secondary sources attribute the term “städtische Wärmeinsel” (transl. ‘urban heat island’) to Peppler (see Stewart 2019, 6, 11). Peppler conducted his work in an international meteorological research context spanning Europe, Mexico, India, Japan, and the United States, where researchers became interested in studying local climatology and microscale meteorology. In his own journal, Das Wetter (transl. ‘the weather’), he also wrote about diverse issues such as the car as a tool for meteorological research. Already 100 years earlier, the urban heat island effect had been somewhat recognised with Luke Howard’s documentation in The Climate of London (1833), a meteorological study avant la lettre which provided the first empirical evidence of temperature differences between a metropolis and “various places around it”. Howard took measurements in the 1810s and 1820s and discovered that London was warmer than the countryside. He stated that the urban effect “is not produced suddenly”, instead it builds up throughout the day by rays reflected from walls exposed to the sun: “Many of my readers must recollect having felt the heat of a Western wall, in passing under it long after sunset.” (Howard 1833, 10) Current research in the humanities combines embodied knowledge, such as referred to here in the 19th-century writing, with feminist media theory, anthropology, visual studies, and ethnography.

The cultural historian On Barak traces a “coastal turn” (Barak 2024, 81) at the Mediterranean Levantine coast from Beirut to Alexandria beginning in the late 1800s by combining a materialist perspective with cultural analysis. According to Barak, the turn involved new transportation infrastructure and architecture built from asphalt (made of petroleum) and concrete (made of sand and cement). The local oil-refining industry emits greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, thereby contributing to rising surface temperatures. The way Barak describes the historical developments along the coastline lets the reader picture the heat island phenomenon in a 3D model at fast motion: The more areas carpeted with asphalt and concrete, materials which are “capable of absorbing up to 95 per cent of the sun’s energy”, the hotter it gets (Barak 2024, 99). According to Barak, “pollution and the UHI effect were mutually reinforcing phenomena” (Barak 2024, 95). As he argues, the politics of the British Empire and the advances of capitalism and cosmopolitan leisure are intertwined with thermal dynamics. In addition to intensifying urban heat, the concrete and asphalt cover also disturbs the water cycle (Barak 2024, 109).

The urban political ecology collection Turning Up the Heat, edited by Kaika et al. (2023), situates heat within broader frameworks of climate emergency, incorporating feminist political ecology, postcolonial perspectives, and attention to more-than-human ontologies and situated knowledges from Global South contexts. Different from urban political ecology’s focus, “elemental urbanism”, as Farias and Kemmer dub it, “calls for a more speculative approach attentive to the material overflows, environmental affordances and ontological experiments through which elements come to matter in contemporary urbanism” (Farias and Kemmer 2024, 6). With this approach in cultural anthropology, the more-than-human perspective on urban environments is further developed and combined with a media ecological approach in media studies (see Starosielski 2021). 

Terminology

With the latest rise in global temperatures, urban heat islands pose significant challenges to public health and overall urban liveability (Veettilm and Das 2026). Over the past centuries, “cool comfort” (Ackermann 2002, Starosielski 2021, Höhne 2022, Furuhata 2022) became the dominant cultural paradigm. Today, this popular paradigm is slowly challenged by academic frameworks such as “thermal discomfort” (Hsu 2024) in the humanities, “heat resilience” in policy contexts or “survivability”, “workability” (see Sherwood and Huber 2010, Andrews et al. 2018, Lin et al. 2026), and “liveability” (Vanos et al. 2023) defined by physiological thresholds of bearable (indoor) heat in climatology and public health. What is at stake is to act on urban thermal conditions (and environments) and make way for transforming the city. The perspective on air conditioning has shifted, as Stefan Höhne writes, “from a luxury to a sociotechnical system on which we are increasingly dependent, perhaps to preserve life itself”, also pointing out financial and ecological costs (Höhne 2022, 73).

Labour issues under conditions of extreme heat exposure were observed in southern Pakistan and in areas of central North Africa (Chad, Algeria). The vocabulary is carefully chosen, and ‘liveability’, ‘survivability’ and ‘workability’ as research notions aptly dramatise the situation. Areas in South Asia, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia are also expected to develop more severe living conditions in the future. This could make it harder to work because of heat stress, particularly in heavy labour and farming, ultimately leading to greater poverty and inequality (Andrews et al. 2018). Heat stress is a physiological and biometeorological condition of thermal strain on plants when environmental heat load exceeds the body’s capacity for thermoregulation. Clancey et al. argue that the myriad challenges posed by heat cannot be fully addressed until the thermal environment of cities is made an interdisciplinary concern in its own right, a consensus already reached regarding the larger, related crisis of climate change (Clancey et al. 2024, 2858). In environmental humanities scholarship, heat stress is understood not merely as a medical condition but as an embodied experience shaped by social position, access to resources, and structural inequalities, among other issues.

Measurement techniques shape what counts as ‘heat’ in scientific discourse and tend to obscure embodied thermal realities. In the discipline of urban planning, Zoé Hamstead makes an argument for opening up research to interdisciplinary approaches: “Technologies such as infrared satellite imagery, ambient weather instruments, and micro-urban heat island maps make thermal patterns across the built environment visible at increasingly granular scales. At the same time, by narrowly defining heat as a meteorological state, such technologies have the potential to invisibilize human heat experience and drivers of heat inequity. By drawing on a more pluralist body of environmental and climate justice scholarship, heat studies that inform planning could better address how people’s heat adaptations and struggles are politically structured.” (Hamstead 2023, 154) For example, at the UCLA Heat Lab in Los Angeles, founded in 2020, an interdisciplinary research team studies thermal inequality (e.g., in prisons, homes, and sweatshops). The focus on the physiological aspects of high temperatures (in relation to age or sleep), heat stress, and heat vulnerability have been researched in further detail in recent studies through an intersectional lens (see Hamstead 2023, Hamstead 2024, Hsu 2024, Kotsila et al. 2025).

Critical Heat Studies: A feminist intersectional approach

In contrast to dominant meteorological approaches, which portray heat as “disembodied, depoliticised, and ahistorical,” Hamstead advocates for a reconceptualisation from heat-as-meteorological-event to heat-as-thermal (in)security (Hamstead 2023). She developed tShe proposes “Critical Heat Studies” as a framework rooted in feminist theory and ecofeminism that challenges urban climate scholarship and considers local embodied and lived experiences impacted by bureaucratic violence (Hamstead 2023, 2024).

Kotsila et al. (2024, 2025) contribute to the framework of Critical Heat Studies by exploring how migrant status intersects with urban heat injustice. Their participatory research with migrant residents in Barcelona’s El Raval neighbourhood uncovers what they call the contradiction between “thermal versus emotional comfort” (Kotsila et al. 2025, 1474) – spaces perceived as ‘public’, ‘open’, and ‘cooling’ may also be experienced as unwelcoming due to racialization, hypervisibility, and questions of belonging. Their work broadens the idea of “vulnerability as an embodiment of intersectional injustices,” while also acknowledging marginalised positions as sites where “radical adaptations can emerge” through self-organised networks of solidarity and resistance (Kotsila et al. 2025, 1478). This approach redefines adaptation beyond technocratic top-down interventions to include everyday knowledge and practices of marginalised residents, addressing the root causes of their vulnerability.

Tschakert and Karthikeyan, at the intersection of human geography and anthropology, focus on heat, corporeal experiences, and people with disabilities because “(u)nderstandings of heat constructed via instrumental records, thermostats, meteorological symbols, and graphs, and urban heat island simulations […] have little space for addressing differential social vulnerabilities” (Tschakert and Karthikeyan 2024, 436). Additionally, Tschakert and co-researchers propose: “They introduce the concept of ‘heated urban bodies’ to critique the neoliberal idea of a resilient subject and to instead foreground differential corporeal struggles as intrinsic parts of a feminist responsivity” (Tschakert and Karthikeyan 2024, 449). Petra Tschakert was a contributing author for the chapter on natural and human systems of the IPCC special report on 1,5 °C global warming, which emphasised that urban heat islands increase the risk for human health during heatwaves (Hoegh-Guldberg, Ove, et al. 2018).

Expanding Media

Cultural and media studies offer critical frameworks for examining the representations deployed in urban heat island research. These include Early Warning Systems (EWS) like MeteoAlarm, routing applications like Extrema, CoolWalks or HEAL, and climate heatmaps from the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S). The latter are integrated into chronological climate data applications like Thermal Trace (to visually communicate the geographical distribution of heat stress) and mobile warning applications like NINA or HeatAlert, which include behavioural guidelines for heatwave situations. Such climate heatmaps can be discussed as operational images (Parikka 2023) or as post-operational images, and as procedures and methods of Evidentmachungen (‘demonstrations of evidence’; Schneider 2018, 205-210). Heatmaps are a data visualisation technique that uses colour gradients to represent the spatial distribution and intensity of thermal data, typically derived from satellite-based land surface temperature measurements, meteorological station networks, or modelled air temperature data. However, critical scholars interrogate heatmaps also as epistemological and political devices that shape what counts as heat knowledge and whose thermal experiences become visible or actionable. The measurement politics identified by Briegel et al. (2025) extend to heatmap visualisations that rely on these data. By flattening complex microclimatic variation and embodied thermal experiences into two-dimensional colour gradients, heatmaps can obscure the very thermal realities they purport to represent, particularly in dense urban areas where factors like shade, wind, humidity, and building morphology significantly shape actual thermal exposure (Hsu 2023). The aesthetic politics of heatmaps concerning which areas are rendered “red” or “dangerous,” how temperature thresholds are established, and whose thermal experiences are measured thus constitute critical sites for environmental humanities inquiry. The focus on the physiological aspects of high temperatures, heat stress and heat vulnerability has been researched in further detail in recent studies by applying an intersectional lens (see Hamstead 2023, Hamstead 2024, Hsu 2024, Kotsila 2025).

Heat maps appear as immediate, intuitive visuals, but their data infrastructure is complex – involving reanalysis models, multi-satellite fusion, and decades of calibrated ground measurements. Beyond the Sentinel missions, Copernicus incorporates data from other space agencies’ satellites (the “Contributing Missions”) and in-situ measurements from ground-based and airborne data networks covering oceans, land surfaces, and the atmosphere. For urban heat mapping specifically, companies like ECOTEN combine Copernicus Earth Observation data with socio-demographic data to create Urban Heat Vulnerability Maps; it would be relevant to critically examine the political agenda and influence of these maps.

Literary scholar Hsuan L. Hsu states that air conditioning usage is inseparable from the urban heat island effect, which becomes “(f)urther intensified by nonporous and reflective building materials designed to keep air-conditioned interiors sealed off from their surroundings” (Hsu 2024, 58). At the same time, ACs have “desensitising effects” on humans who benefit from cooled spaces (Hsu 2024, 143). In a 2023 essay, Hsu refers to thermoception – the sensory capacity to perceive temperature – “as a sensory tool that is deeply entangled with racial geographies and histories of racialization” (Hsu 2023, 770). He uses the term ‘thermocline,’ derived from oceanography, as an analogy to picture the temperature layers “across space that align with, reproduce, or amplify social differences such as race, class, and gender” (Hsu 2023, 773). Through analysis of works by Black authors and artists, including Spike Lee, Saidiya Hartman, and Rashid Johnson, among others, he demonstrates how thermal disparities function as atmospheric media of environmental violence and offer an immersive aesthetics of heat perception that is registered through bodily sensation. Furthermore, his approach foregrounds how heat is experienced differently across racialised bodies and spaces, paying attention to what conventional heat metrics render invisible: “thermal racism” (Hsu 2024, 103).

Building on this conceptual approach, Jancewicz and Wrotek (2024) think of thermoception as embodied knowledge encompassing bodily sensations, perceptions, and adaptive actions in response to heat. Their interdisciplinary ethnographic research with older adults in Warsaw and Madrid demonstrates that individual heat exposure cannot be understood through environmental measurements alone but requires attention to how people’s situated and embodied knowledge shapes their thermal experiences and adaptive practices. Robinson (2025) presents a comprehensive critical geographical review that advocates for heat studies across multiple scales of governance and infrastructure systems, extending to nested scales of bodily experience. The author urges increased multidisciplinary scholarly focus on heat beyond simple binaries of hot and cold, outdoor and indoor, the human and the physical, instead critically analysing continuities, regulations, and disruptions.

The theoretical concept of elemental media (Peters 2015) expands on environmental perspectives within media studies by framing air, earth, water and fire as media, or, in Starosielski’s words, “Peters infuses theories of mediation into the study of landscape and environment” (Starosielski 2021, 305). This research emerged in the context of an infrastructural turn in media studies. On the other hand, a heatwave can cause a data centre outage (Vallance 2022). Concepts such as ‘citizen sensing’ (Gabrys 2022) were introduced to empower citizens and take measurements where the city administration does not. Media and culture scholar Jennifer Gabrys has been pioneering in this field since 2013, focusing on practices of environmental sensing and citizen engagement to transform environmental awareness by moving into active “techno-geographical relations” (Gabrys 2016, 79 and Gabrys 2019). The aim is “to democratise the collection and use of environmental sensor data to facilitate expanded citizen engagement in environmental issues” (Gabrys 2016, 272). At the same time, in a co-authored article, Gabrys problematises the influence of sensors on environments, writing that “citizen sensing practices are reworking the sites and distributions of environmental monitoring toward other configurations that are more multiple and collective” (Gabrys and Pritchard 2016, 354). Gabrys’ case studies mostly concern air pollution in different (post-)industrial settings and focus on evidencing harm. This approach could be used to collect data on harmful temperatures.

This view of a planet in crisis as approached through sensors and sensing practices significantly differs from the “one world” of the Spaceship Earth metaphor. Rather, it is composed of multiple sites with disparate and uneven effects, where pollution and climate change impact environments, humans, and nonhumans, with greater or lesser severity in relation to situated conditions (Gabrys 2019). On a different scale, also aiming to incorporate citizen-sensed data, we find digital twins: Urban digital twins provide knowledge and technologies for data-driven decision support for a broad group of stakeholders towards developing sustainable cities and communities. However, its implementation is associated with several problems, including data integration and quality, model complexity and uncertainty, computational resources, spatial and temporal resolution, and validation (Vitanova et al. 2025).

In this sense, citizen data can critically engage with ground measurements, in situ data (observations), numerical simulations (modelling outputs), digital twins, and remote sensing measurements. A can be observed. On the other hand, research reveals a growing trend toward applying machine learning, moving from supportive to direct predictive roles and using tools such as neural networks (Ghorbany et al. 2024). This comes with the problem of opacity. Therefore, scholars call for greater model interpretability, expanded geographical scope, and an enhanced interdisciplinary approach integrating insights from urban planning, public health, environmental science, and sociology (Ghorbany et al. 2024).

Scholars have recently theorised “thermal media” and “thermal mediation” (Starosielski 2022), as well as “climatic media” (Furuhata 2022), framing heat production and circulation as constitutive for media ecologies. Thermal media such as thermostats or infrared cameras and maintenance while expanding zones of “thermal privilege” and “thermal harm” (Starosielski 2022). In Media Hot and Cold (2022), Starosielski theorises temperature and studies how heat and cold function as means of subjugation and control. Environmental humanities approaches heatwaves as both physical phenomena and social crises that reveal and exacerbate existing inequalities. This theoretical framework resonates with Omer’s (2025) situated analysis of the 2015 heatwave in Karachi, Pakistan, which killed over 1,200 people amid soaring temperatures, electricity shortages, and water scarcity. Omer introduces the concept of “thermal ecology” to describe the shifting material, geophysical, and cultural phenomena that characterise life during a heatwave, where, e.g., bedrooms become heat boxes. Her work demonstrates how extreme heat reconstitutes mediation, as relationships between media forms, systems, and cultures reorganise in response to ubiquitous thermal stress. Drawing explicitly on Starosielski’s analysis of thermal technologies, Omer studies how the heatwave’s thermal effects made visible the role of violence enacted through inadequate infrastructure, inequitable urban development, and political marginalisation as integral to Karachi’s media ecology. Altogether, Omer analyses three instances of “thermal mediation”: citizen-led media activism disseminated through digital infographics and broadcast platforms; the state’s data-driven Karachi Thermal Management Plan for future heatwave governance; community-based visual art interventions documenting ecological destruction through urban development and the Chinese geopolitical, large-scale new Silk Road constructions. Her analysis reveals how Karachi’s thermal ecology is embedded within infrastructures of breakdown and repair, with media processes inseparable from the city’s urban heat island effect and histories of violent, inequitable growth. The heatwave is thus not merely a meteorological event but functions as a catalyst that reshapes existing media cultures while laying bare their entanglement with structural violence.

Both Starosielski and Omer establish that understanding urban heat requires attending to thermal infrastructures as media systems that communicate power relations, govern bodies and populations, and produce differentiated thermal experiences. Their work demonstrates how thermal media scholarship bridges the epistemological critiques of heat measurement (Briegel et al. 2025) with the embodied thermal experiences foregrounded by Hsu (2023) and Hamstead (2024). This approach insists that heat is simultaneously an atmospheric condition, an infrastructural effect, a communicative force, and an instrument of violence.

Cooling island effect?

Ideas for creating cool places exist, and sometimes they are put into practice. For example, the park Hasenheide in Berlin has been redesigned by commissioned park gardeners and urban planners in consultation with the city’s parks department since 2023 to increase its “climate resilience” and the cooling effects of its vegetation, both within the park and in nearby densely populated neighbourhoods. The commissioned park planners, funded by the Federal Office for Building and Regional Planning, measured air temperatures using drones equipped with infrared cameras to gather evidence of the park’s cooling effect (Krenz 2024). The urban and environmental planners at the commissioned office for environmental planning and urban development (focused on climate, rainwater and tree groves) have an A2 drone licence to identify and analyse heat islands in cities. The drones can be used to assess the effectiveness of green spaces in cooling urban areas or to investigate the impact of urban heat islands on public health (Planstatt Senner 2024). In another park in Berlin, Mauerpark, a so-called ‘cooling point’ was temporarily set up in July 2025, one that looked way too small relative to the size of the park and the usual number of visitors – in fact, more like a prototype or showpiece built to studio dimensions. Given the small size, it seemed fragile instead of robust, rather decorative than useful, and like a symbolic gesture, given the size and the roughness of the park, the neighbourhood, the city – planted flowers were too small to cast a serious shadow; it appeared more like a decorative piece of furniture for a private garden. For 2026, the State Office for Health and Social Affairs plan to further develop the cooling point with spray mist technology (dpa 2025). According to a speaker of the Berlin State Office, the pilot project was set up for “testing not only structural elements, but also procedures and administrative processes – such as cooperation between health and parks departments, issues relating to water hygiene, liability and insurance, as well as coordination with the water management sector” (Hildebrandt 2015). This urban prototype follows a role model that has been tested in Paris over the past years on a larger, more complex scale. Paris has been under pressure due to the highest risk of citizens dying during heatwaves, a study showed in April 2023, before the heat dome stuck across Europe in the summer of the same year (Masselot et al. 2023; also relevant to mention in this context, numbers of cold-related deaths are higher, as the same study reported, with London and Dublin topping the list). In Paris, ‘cool islands’ including air-conditioned spaces such as museums and naturally cooler places such as parks and forests were part of the network map, which is navigable via the app Extrema, launched in 2019, that also sends extreme weather alerts (Sherriff 2023). In practice, there still seems to be a large gap between findings in environmental humanities, such as thermal inequalities, and concrete urban political measures to cope with the heat.

Following Nicole Starosielski, “to step outside one’s field” (in this case, into urban climatology) means asking what becomes possible through the study of urban heat island effects. What kind of thinking emerges? What role does the media play in this field? Adopting this “expansive vision of media” (Starosielski, 2021, p. 310), we can engage with and critically contribute to socio-ecological transformation processes.

References

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Barber, Daniel A. 2021. “Active Passive: Heat Storage and the Solar Imaginary”, South Atlantic Quarterly 120 (1): 103-121.

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