Book Project "City-Heat: Sensing Viable Futures in Nakuru, Kenya"

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, reducing heat to such temperature metrics flattens the complexity of lived experience and obscures the different ways in which communities respond to runaway change. In City-Heat, Nick Rahier breaks with temperature-based understandings of heat and delves into a richer, more emic exploration of its socio-cultural and sensory dimensions. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in Nakuru, Kenya, he examines how his interlocutors sustain viable life under what they perceive as increased heat—socially, existentially, and environmentally—and how they forge pathways into the future to sustain the very possibility of “cooler” horizons. Rahier argues that these hotter conditions give rise to new forms of thermal consciousness that shape how people move, work, relate, and act. Through a broad range of ethnographic terrains covering geothermal energy extraction and spiritual struggle as well as herbal therapeutics and urban hustling, he traces hotter conditions across socio-cultural, spiritual, metabolic, and moral registers amid runaway change.