Thermal insecurity: Violence of heat and cold in the urban climate refuge

Abstract

Often described as a silent killer or invisible threat, heat contributes to more fatalities than other types of climate change-exacerbated extreme weather, and the impacts are especially pronounced in racialised and segregated urban communities. In an era of climate urbanism, efforts to scientifically categorise heat and link heat to health impacts are helping to support early warning systems and urban investments in heat mitigation infrastructure, bolstering climate urbanism branding strategies. Meanwhile, relatively little research has examined lived experiences with heat-related dangers, and cold rarely features in climate health discourse even though it contributes to many more fatalities than heat. Here, I present household interviews on thermal lived experiences that inform a notion of thermal (in)security, asserting that heat and cold-related threats are forms of structural violence intertwined with housing, energy and related social determinants of health. Juxtaposing city-level climate refuge narratives with lived experiences on the ground, I find that residents’ thermal insecurities are linked to the interpersonal, contractual and bureaucratically-structured relationships that constrain adaptations to heat and cold. This research contributes to an emerging critical heat studies agenda, which aims to shift thermal discourse from its current meteorological orientation to instead centre people’s everyday adaptive thermal practices and struggles.

Introduction

In August of 2020, the Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation founded the Extreme Heat Alliance – comprising 30 international cities and organisational partners – to address the threats posed by urban heat. Director Kathy Baughman McLeod (2020) stated that creating a standard practice of naming and ranking heat waves (as is done with tropical storms) would be the Alliance’s top priority for addressing what she called an ‘invisible threat: a “silent killer” lurking in relatively clear view’. In August of 2022, the City of Seville, Spain named a two week-long temperature event Zoé, proudly becoming the first city to officially name a heat wave. When naming heat waves was proposed by the Extreme Heat Alliance, it was not a new idea. In 2017, a European heatwave was (nick)named after the archangel Lucifer (The New York Times, 2017), and others have called for systematic heatwave naming (Stone, 2019). For decades in fact, urban public health professionals and climatologists have bemoaned the invisibility, silence and slow violence of extreme heat. Eric Klinenberg’s seminal work on the 1995 heave wave in Chicago raised awareness that over 700 heat wave-attributable deaths had occurred during that summer, largely without notice (Klinenberg, 2002). One year after Klinenberg’s publication, a devastating heat wave struck Europe. Possibly the longest and most intense since the meteorological record began in the 17th century, as many as 70,000 deaths may be attributable to that 2003 heat event (Robine et al., 2008). In subsequent decades, lack of awareness and indifference to heat have been cited as core barriers to addressing the climate health crisis, and scientific efforts to link climate change to heat, and heat to health (thus causally connecting climate change to human health experiences) are being deployed.

Heat is among the foremost health threats exacerbated by climate change (Mora et al., 2017); it can directly cause illness and injury, aggravate existing health conditions and lead to premature death. Impacts are especially acute in cities, where thermodynamics of the localised urban atmosphere exacerbate larger scale meteorological phenomena. Although heat’s deadliness is becoming more pronounced with climate change (Gasparrini et al., 2017), it has long been an ‘invisible’ public health threat, and the challenges posed by cold continue to be underappreciated, even as evidence suggests cold is far deadlier than heat (Zhao et al., 2021).

Thermal conditions have vastly uneven impacts across race, gender and income (Vaidyanathan et al., 2020) and especially in cities, microclimates vary on a scale that is comparable with urban to rural temperature differentials. Urban microclimate studies linking the built environment to socio-demographics and health outcomes find racially and economically-structured patterns of risk. Low income communities and communities of colour are at greater risk of injury or death during heat events (Gronlund et al., 2015; Harlan et al., 2013; Kuras et al., 2015), and over the last several years US-based studies have illustrated that heat-exacerbating outdoor built environments are coupled with racial segregation patterns institutionalised during the New Deal Era of the last century (Hoffman et al., 2020; Wilson, 2020).

In light of these pervasive and racialised public health impacts, cities have been undertaking heat mitigation, preparedness and equity efforts. Alongside global climate change, thermodynamics of the localised urban atmosphere also influence thermal experience. Waste heat emissions from automobile traffic, air conditioners and industrial activities; sealed soils that reduce land’s cooling ability; engineered materials that decrease reflectivity of the land’s surface; and street-level air stagnation can all be mitigated through urban land use planning and design (Stone, 2009). Efforts to do so in a way that is informed by urban climatology (Janković, 2015) have expanded over the last several decades.

Urban heat governance sometimes takes the form of stand-alone plans (e.g. The City of New York, 2017), sometimes situated within overall urban resilience and climate adaptation planning strategies (e.g. Mairie de Paris and 100 Resilient Cities, 2017), emergency medical and preparedness protocols (e.g. Chu et al., 2021), and newly-launched city-level offices or newly appointed urban officials who specifically deal with heat (e.g. Avery, 2021; Martin, 2021). Mitigation and response strategies recognise the unequal burden of heat, often aiming to alter biophysical characteristics of the outdoor built environment in especially hot communities via promotion of latent heat flux (e.g. expanding tree canopy), albedo modification (e.g. white roofing) or provision of shade cover (e.g. solar panel arrays in parking lots) (Dare, 2019). Other strategies have taken the form of awareness-building and attention-setting, either through recent initiatives to name and rank heat wave threat levels (e.g. State of California, 2022), or by informing people – especially those considered ‘vulnerable’ about the threats that they face (Casanueva et al., 2019; Kotharkar and Ghosh, 2022).

While these ‘first generation’ strategies in some sense represent a new form of environmental governance, they often adopt practices from other domains (such as water governance), without considering how the processes and practices through which people experience thermal suffering may differ from other types of environmental threats (Hamstead, 2023). As attention-setting strategies help to make temperature-related change increasingly ‘visible’, there are few efforts to connect scientific knowledge with experiences of thermal suffering or to situate that suffering in economic and political structures that constrain thermal adaptation. Thus, there remains a need to understand ways in which heat and cold remain ‘invisible’ alongside efforts to scientifically categorise, attribute impact, popularly personify and devise urban governance of the weather. What structures various experiences of thermal insecurity, and what silences thermal suffering?

In the sections that follow, I aim to contribute to the human security vocabulary, situating a notion of thermal (in)security in the context of structural violence, climate urbanism and weathering in the face of climate change. Structural violence and climate urbanism provide theoretical frameworks for considering the hidden drivers of thermal suffering, while weathering foregrounds forms of agency that people who are climatologically and politically marginalised exercise within the constraints of neoliberalism. Thermal threats are generally conveyed as meteorological or thermometric indices, Yet, heat and cold are, first and foremost, human experiences – intimate, bodily and political – which cannot be understood from a position of pure objectivity (Hamstead, 2023). Presenting heat and cold experiences among residents of Buffalo, New York, USA, I show how thermal insecurity is embodied in bureaucratic orders, interpersonal relationships and intersectional identities. Concluding with reflections on the importance of foregrounding everyday experiences of struggle, I suggest that people’s practices weathering heat and cold help to reveal spaces, institutions and relationships that elude popular apprehension and public policy.

Structural violence and thermal insecurity

To cast heat as an invisible killer is to imply that it does not register in our consciousness. Yet, there has been little investigation into the nature of heat’s invisibility. In other environmental domains such as toxicity, a structural violence framing has provided insight into health threats that seem to have qualities of invisibility, in the sense that their consequences are not apprehensible or the agents of injuries are not identifiable. Galtung (1969) described structural violence as a human potential shortfall – occurring where suffering persists even when it could be alleviated. The state’s role in both promulgating and failing to prevent structural violence through laws, bureaucracies, development policies and the like has been central to the study of structural violence, as have attitudes, norms, practices and social relations that contribute to health disparities and premature death. By ‘embed[ing] individual biograph[ies] in the larger matrix of culture, history, and political economy’ (Farmer, 2004: 317), the effort to frame health-related injuries and inequities as violence is ‘an attempt at scandalization’ (Winter, 2012: 197) which connects visible forms of injury to the exploitative practices that are normalised under late capitalism.

A review of public health research on structural violence found that the literature links outcome categories such as health inequity, injustice, indignity and social disorganisation to structural predictor categories such as social, cultural, economic and political systems (Jackson and Sadler, 2022). Social determinants of health (SDH) – which Jackson and colleagues call a ‘surrogate’ for structural violence – can include housing insecurity, energy insecurity and food insecurity. Borrowing the language of human security that was developed by the United Nations Development Program following the Cold War, SDH bring social and political sciences into conversation with public health. While traditional SDH were often operationalised in the form of (e.g. housing) affordability as a function of financial constraints and quality, more recent articulations of security extend beyond basic poverty definitions to also consider how hierarchical relationships, coping strategies and policies impact access to basic needs (DeLuca and Rosen, 2022; Hernández, 2016). As natural extensions, there have been efforts to articulate climate change and meteorological hazards as (in)securities (Dalby, 2013), since meteorological threats most severely impact people who structurally lack capacities for withstanding environmental disruptions, while creating broader vulnerabilities to national and global political economies. Like other forms of insecurity, climate change and weather-related insecurities do not always take the form of spectacular disruptions, and the related injuries often occur at ‘a speed that decouples suffering from its original cause’ (Ahmann, 2018: 144).

Nixon (2011) used the term slow violence to describe problems of representation, apprehension, visibility and recognition in environmental injustices. Among the strategies for combating climate denialism, Nixon described political and scientific efforts to redefine the speed of climate change. Similarly, cities across the globe are deploying new forms of event-making that work the temporal scale of heat. By naming, humanising and demonising the weather, cities experiencing thermal health crises aim to combat what Ahmann (2018: 144) calls the ‘anesthetizing effects of routine’. Reorienting our apprehension of heat around a sense of meteorological punctuation and eventfulness associated with various heat risk categories, extreme heat events then become historical points of reference that, in principle, prepare us for future health impacts under a warming climate.

Deepening the theoretical basis for (un)eventful and (un)spectacular violence, Winter (2012) offers that problems of apprehension are not a matter of optics, but rather

an indifference that is structurally bound up with the discursive limits of intelligibility. To see is to encounter objects in a field of visibility, a field that is constituted through a series of political, cultural, and scientific procedures that determine what objects and problems are intelligible. (p. 198)

Like McLeod’s (2020) characterisation of heat as a ‘killer hiding in plain view’, structural violence may be seen, felt, or heard, and yet unproblematised. Winter draws from a usage of structural violence predating Galtung, in which students of poetics understood the violence of Greek tragedy to be inherited across generations, binding people together through a shared curse. In this usage, structure refers to repetition and reproducibility. Apprehension does not alleviate violence, but instead enables its repetition and further reproduction as the violence becomes normalised – within our field of view, yet unproblematic. While it may be tempting to think that problems of heat apprehension are optical, humans’ unparalleled thermoreceptivity casts doubt on possible claims that optical perception is needed to apprehend heat. Rather, structure as repetition and reproduction suggests that thermal insecurity has become naturalised as yet another consequence of urban neoliberalism.

Neoliberal urban environmentalism and climate urbanism

As cities undertake climate security investments, serious concerns about the extent to which these investments will protect those who are most vulnerable to climate change are being raised. Instead of ameliorating environmental injustices, some have argued that urban environmental policy is a terrain in which processes of neoliberalisation are repeatedly (Béal, 2015) forming a new ‘basis for differentiated economic accumulation’ (Whitehead, 2013: 1348) through competitive marketing, branding and promotional opportunities (Brand, 2007; Long and Rice, 2019), and generally delimiting the possibilities for urban climate policy (Whitehead, 2013).

Alongside privatised housing and health services, private capital is being mobilised for ecological and climate security-related infrastructural investments (Long and Rice, 2019; Robin and Broto, 2021). Among these efforts includes the transference of microclimate techniques practised in non-urban environments to create controlled enclosures (Marvin and Rutherford, 2018). Such ecological infrastructure investments and enclosures can lead to population displacement; processes that have been labelled ecological gentrification (Dooling, 2009), climate gentrification (Anguelovski et al., 2019) and eco-gentrification (Robin and Broto, 2021). Ecological and climate-secure enclaves that enable people to live climate-resilient lifestyles then become a privilege of the wealthy, educated classes. It is the most vulnerable residents, ‘climate victims’, who get left behind as ‘priorities are focused on the urgent task of securing vital infrastructures as well as capital systems of circulation and reproduction’ (Long and Rice, 2019: 1003), causing greater vulnerability through spatially-differentiated processes of capital accumulation (Dooling, 2009). In this sense, climate urbanism, disaster capitalism and green gentrification are contemporary reincarnations of older forms of redlining (racialised spatial organisation controlled by land use, banking and real estate institutions) that discursively construct cities’ relation to the climate, while failing to address fundamental determinants of vulnerability like job accessibility, housing and health services (Brand, 2007) that are intimately connected to climate-related insecurities for at-risk residents. In the context of privatised urban services and related insecurities of basic needs, particular types of (hierarchical) relationships structure who has agency over the built environment, health and climate security.

Weather politics and intersectionality

Ecofeminist literature concerned with climate and weather extends beyond critiques of institutionalised violence to also emphasise forms of agency, capability and resistance that people enact in the face of political–climatological marginalisation. In particular, studies of weathering centre people’s everyday embodied and mundane experiences with heat, humidity, wind and cold to examine how people, place, power and weather co-constitute each other. For instance, Oppermann et al. (2018) draw on social practice theory to examine bodily experiences of heat, how heat is co-produced through the everyday practices of outdoor workers who struggle to avoid ‘going tropo’ in Australia’s monsoon tropics, and how those practices are deeply constrained by relations of political economy. Such weather portraits are concerned with how power shapes weather relations, and the tactics that people use to co-constitute a ‘weather world’ with nature. Weathering is informed by the notion of structural violence; yet in also centring everyday lived experiences, it takes a position ‘between the neo-liberal heroics of resilience and the victim politics of vulnerability’ (Neimanis and Hamilton, 2018: 83).

As climate urbanism orients around leveraging meteorological technologies and technocratic logic that support capitalist exploitation, everyday household experiences with heat rarely serve as an evidentiary basis for urban heat mitigation strategies. Critical Heat Studies is a climate justice agenda which questions the overabundance of meteorological heat discourse as a symbolic form that has imperial, colonial and military roots, and which obscures the structural drivers of heat inequity (Hamstead, 2023). Far from being an objective statistical fact, heat is deeply cultural, embodied, place-based and political.

While most studies examining thermal health concerns and inequities have either studied urban microclimate patterns (e.g. Mitchell and Chakraborty, 2015), undertaken surveys of heat perceptions (e.g. Hass et al., 2021) or engaged urban manager perspectives on thermal governance (e.g. Hamstead et al., 2020), to date there is very little discussion of everyday lived experiences with heat and cold, the tactics that people use to cope with thermal threats, or ways in which intersectional identities and power relations structure adaptive practices. By expanding the object of study to everyday and mundane ways in which heat and cold injustices are embodied, we can deepen our knowledge of thermal insecurity and its invisibility. Here, I use household experiences with heat and cold to centre stories of thermal embodiment and weather-related survival strategies of at-risk residents. I suggest that such experiences are fundamental to understanding what stands in the way of climate security.

The thermal landscape in Buffalo, New York

Buffalo, New York is a municipality of Erie County, lying along Lake Erie to the west, Lake Ontario to the north, and directly south of the Canadian province Ontario. It is infamous for cold winter weather and heavy snow. The ‘Snovember Snowpocalyse’ of 2014 which brought over seven feet of snow to parts of the Buffalo region still remained on the minds of many residents and emergency personnel with whom I spoke during my field work from 2017 to 2020. Although few may associate heat threats with a city in which snowstorms are described as events that herald the end of times, a study examining heat-related mortality in 91 counties of the northeastern United States between 1988 and 1999 found that in Erie County, all-cause mortality increases by approximately 14% during 90°F/32°C days compared with 70°F/21°C days. The County ranks 25th for all-cause mortality, and with a smaller confidence ratio than 22 other counties with higher excess heat-related mortality estimates (Madrigano et al., 2015).

Of the 255,284 people residing in the city of Buffalo, non-white people have a slim majority and 10% of city residents are estimated to be foreign-born (U.S. Census Bureau, 2019). The poverty rate is 30% and 28% of people do not own a personal automobile, rendering a sizeable proportion of residents dependent on a public transportation system that often involves long wait times, and on other forms of active transportation that can expose people to harsh weather conditions. By some measures, Buffalo has the oldest housing stock in the country, with 58% of occupied units built before 1939 and 81% built before 1960 (U.S. Census Bureau, 2019), many of which are in need of weatherisation.

A refuge in the Rustbelt?

In Buffalo and other Rustbelt cities of the US – which since the 1970s have experienced economic, population and tax revenue declines due to industrial abandonment – the climate crisis is being leveraged to motivate an influx of new residents. In 2019, The New York Times, The Guardian, Grist and The Buffalo News published headlines claiming that one can escape climate change in cities like Buffalo, New York and Duluth, Minnesota. These Midwestern and post-industrial cities are billed as climate Edens: cool temperatures, fresh water, stable energy production, ‘cheap’ land and infrastructure capacity to accommodate a growing population. During his 13th State of the City Address in February of 2019, Mayor Byron Brown officially announced ‘that Buffalo will be a Climate Refuge City’ (City of Buffalo, 2019). Since then, other headlines have read: ‘Could Western New York turn climate change into an economic advantage?’ (Vaughters, 2021), ‘How to escape climate change? Move to Buffalo, one expert says’ (McNeil and Pignataro, 2018), ‘Want to escape global warming? These cities promise cool relief’ (Pierre-Louis, 2019) and ‘Some northern cities could be reborn as “climate havens”’ (Rossi, 2019).

These narratives draw upon climate fears and progressive political culture to situate a city as a destination along climate migratory pathways. In so doing, the aspiration is to draw new residents and stimulate new development processes that can remake the city as a climate utopia. For a city like Buffalo, climate refuge rebranding campaigns are in part about combating the stigma of decades-long deindustrialisation and depopulation by attracting people who are depopulating and abandoning other places. If climate migrants do help cities that experienced processes of economic decline to rise from the ashes of their post-industrial past, it will be due to existential climate crises happening elsewhere. Climate haven claims are not going uncontested, however, as community leaders have voiced concerns about climate insecurities in Buffalo as well as climate gentrification, especially given the already highly segregated and racially and economically unequal landscape of the city (Liacko, 2022). In the context of such political discourse, there is merit in centring people’s everyday, often mundane, routine, ritualised experiences with thermal insecurity as a form of weather and climate culture counter-storytelling that needs to be brought into conversation with climate security initiatives.

Thermal lived experiences

During the summer of 2018 and winter of 2018–2019, several graduate students and I conducted interviews on heat and cold with 21 residents. Twelve of the participants identify as female; nine as male. Twelve identify as white, eight as Black and one as Asian. Their incomes range between more than $200,000 (N = 1) to less than $20,000 (N = 5), and most participants (N = 15) are between 25 and 64 years of age. Most participants live in apartment buildings with at least two units (N = 14) and their structures were built before 1920 (N = 17). Additional thermal experiences are drawn from a focus group that we conducted with local residents, as part of a project to evaluate a community-based home energy efficiency programme (Kristich et al., 2022). Many of the thermal stories revolved around home and energy, with a smaller proportion about transportation and occupational experiences, about responsibility for and empathy towards children, pets and concern for people who are unhoused.

Bodily thermal experiences

Most of the residents we interviewed described pain, discomfort and safety concerns associated with hot and cold weather, sometimes related to their medical conditions. Exhaustion, difficulty breathing and fainting (or near fainting) episodes were common summertime symptoms, and headaches, muscular tightness, including neck and back pain or leg cramps, were common wintertime symptoms. Less common summertime experiences included swelling, loss of appetite, restlessness at night while trying to sleep, and feelings of aggressiveness. Some residents reported wintertime sicknesses such as asthma, and difficulty acclimatising. For instance, one resident who recently relocated from Florida gets headaches and muscle aches due to the cold, and reported feeling cold in her home ‘literally every day’. Another resident reported feeling ‘cold all the time’, and ‘healthier in the summer’.

Several residents linked heat and cold-related symptoms to their medical conditions such as heart disease, musculoskeletal problems (e.g. ruptured disc) and arthritis. One described needing to use air conditioning during the summer because of asthma, and another said that the cold weather exacerbates her asthma, causing shortness of breath. Another described having difficulty walking on the ice because of bad knees. One interviewee who described feeling aggressive in the heat and avoiding the outdoors during extreme temperatures is medicated for schizophrenia, and this medication can exacerbate heat and cold-related health problems.

Residential materiality of thermal (in)security

Residents described thermally uncomfortable housing conditions (especially in winter), and efforts they have undertaken to insulate their homes. Most of the interviewees reported draughty windows and doors.

During the blizzard in January, the inside front door blew open. Both the outside doors to the house and the inside doors are terrible—warped, ill-fitting, peeling veneer, missing weather stripping, gaps between the doorknobs and the hole in the door, and loose glass. The basement door is missing entirely.

Several interviewees described heat escaping through the windows, as well as uneven thermal conditions throughout their home (in particular, poor heat distribution): ‘hot and cold spots’; ‘the floor is cold, one room is so cold it is unusable’.

Residents go to great lengths to reduce draughts, address uneven distributions of heat, shut off unusable rooms and insulate their homes. One described adding silicon weather-stripping to windows, gaps and siding and cement filler to weather-strip the cement line. They used duct tape to seal gaps in the basement ducts, and upgraded windows and doors because all windows except for the two next to the front door and on the third floor had been cracked from the heat.

One resident avoids using baseboard heaters because they are too expensive, and only uses space heaters when she has guests and people are in the living room. To compensate for the lack of heating, she uses weather foam and draught blockers in every window. In the living room, she uses heavy duty, floor-to-ceiling drapes to block the windows and keep the cold out. Her front balcony door is DIY weather stripped by stuffing the frame edges with newspaper and sealing the frame with packaging tape. This takes her quite a while to set up and the door got blown in during a wind storm, breaking the seal that she made on it with tape and ruining the weather stripping. In the back room (which she keeps closed off), she installed a plexiglass cover over the window. She built a cardboard wall from packing boxes that she uses to block off the front section of the home. Her cardboard wall helps to prevent draughts from reaching the rest of the house.

Several interviewees reported losing power for a few hours to a few days; in one case, a resident had to make do in the high 40s for three days after the thermal coupling on their furnace broke. More generally, some renters described substandard and unhealthy home conditions.

There is no fire extinguisher, there is no fire escape, the carbon monoxide detector was just installed recently… A lot of heat escapes through the windows. The heat can only be controlled by the residents in Apartment 1—luckily, they are friendly … but the landlord is uncooperative.

The doors are horrible – they have cracks in the bottom blocked with draught dodgers. The crawl space under the dining room and living room is not insulated, energy wasted, the floor is cold. One gutter is dumping water, … may be going into the crawl space.

Some described air conditioning units as unsafe, because robbers could break in through a first-floor window air conditioning unit. Others said that air conditioning was unaffordable or unhealthy.

Thermal security strategies

Some residents keep their thermostat at uncomfortable temperatures in order to afford energy bills. Three residents described keeping their thermostat at 58°F/14.5°C in the winter; one said they sometimes heat the home to 60°F/15.5°C if they have just finished a cold outdoor activity, but this is very rare, and another said she believed that during the day, the sun heats the home to 62°F/16.5°C.

In addition to thermostat control and DIY weatherisation, other coping capacities to deal with thermal discomfort include drinking warm liquids, using electric blankets, sleeping bags, hot water bottles, microwaveable bean bags, and ThermaCare stick-on patches, taking hot showers, using a car or staying at work to keep warm (including during power outages), stopping in a public place to keep warm while waiting for the bus, eating soup and grits, using a spritzer bottle in front of a fan to stay cool, keeping an ice cube in the mouth or applying it to pressure points, and finding rides or an Uber on hot days rather than walking or riding the bike.

People described wanting to see more splash pads, trees, a dog park with shade, more public pools, free water and water fountains, extended hours at places with air conditioning, more accessibility to community solar and geothermal, hellstrips landscaping, and more effective building inspectors and housing courts to keep landlords accountable.

Responsibility for the thermal security of others

People described feelings of responsibility to pets, children, and elders and concern for people who are unhoused. One woman who described the intersectional burden of being a mother, Bangladeshi immigrant and person living in poverty:

came with my two sons who are 7 and 10. They had a very hard time. I could not afford to stay in any other city. I knew that it was cold. I started with $350 [in monthly rent], was happy to have two bedrooms. But when the winter weather came, … the children had a very hard time. I used to wash my dishes and used to cry; I didn’t let anyone know that I was crying because of cold. Surviving in a different weather is very hard.

This mother expressed difficulty accessing community services, which she believed would be more accessible had she migrated as a refugee with access to refugee institutions. For her, the intersectional burden is also one of isolation, where she does not share her cold-related trauma and responsibilities. Another interviewee works at a school where she provides care outdoors. She diligently watches the weather, informs parents of what clothes and gear to bring for their children, and makes sure that the kids have all their winter clothes.

Ten residents said they adjusted their thermostat or made other thermal adjustments in order to protect their pets. Several interviewees said they would keep the winter temperature lower if it were not for their dog, cat, or fish. One interviewee was especially concerned about the risks that hot weather could pose for his short-snouted dog. ‘The air conditioner is for the chinchillas’, another said.

Several residents had heard of cold-related deaths on the news; in one case a person was trapped in their home in the nearby suburb of Williamsville and died, and several people had heard about an unhoused person who died. ‘Something should be done to help the homeless stay warm’.

Bureaucratic barriers

Nine of the interviewees had engaged with the state’s Home Energy Assistance Program (HEAP), which provides financial assistance for energy bills. While two residents relayed positive experiences, most interviewees who had engaged with the programme described it as an experience of frustration. At the time we spoke, one resident had applied for and received HEAP five years ago. The first time she applied, the process was relatively easy, but it was a nuisance to go downtown and took up a better part of her day. The second time she applied, she went to a HEAP outreach event, but got denied because she did not have sufficient proof of unemployment, and then had to wait 30 days before reapplying. She got approved, but has not received the payments yet, so she has been paying her utility bill throughout the winter. She said ‘HEAP sucks and needs to be re-engineered’. The process has too long of a waiting time (up to 90 days to get the certificates) and does not solve what she described as the ‘real issue’, that the housing stock is too old to adequately and efficiently heat and cool.

Another resident applied for and received HEAP in January of 2018. While they were waiting for the certificates, they continued to receive letters from the utility company threatening to shut off the heat. The process took a long time and it was complicated to go downtown and apply. They believe that weatherisation programmes are politically motivated. There are different districts for programmes that exclude certain addresses, and they experienced difficulty locating the districts where they are eligible. One programme that they were looking into had a 42-month waiting list. They are paying out of pocket for window upgrades because ‘a grant would take forever to find and receive’.

Another resident applied and was approved for HEAP in 2017. They also tried for cooling assistance, but did not get it. They described it as ‘a frustrating experience that started in November, and payments didn’t go through until April–August’. They took multiple mornings off from work to go to the interview for HEAP because the instructions were not clear (e.g., they did not know they had to bring pay stubs). They described long lines, as it seemed that only four people were working there.

Residents on food stamps are automatically enrolled in HEAP, and the food stamps recipients with whom we spoke generally reported positive experiences with HEAP. However, some residents who do not qualify for food stamps do qualify for HEAP, and for those recipients, HEAP can be a frustrating and anxiety-inducing experience due to bureaucratic hurdles and the requirement that the recipient receives an energy disconnection notice for non-payment.

Some HEAP recipients had become experts on how to navigate the heating assistance bureaucracy. For instance, one reported that the first time they applied for HEAP, they had to take multiple days off work in order to provide the proper paperwork because the instructions on the website were difficult to understand, but the following year they arrived to the HEAP office early and the process took only two hours. Several interviewees informed that ‘If you let bills go, HEAP will pay’. One interviewee described their memories of receiving shut-off notices in the past:

In previous years, like 22 years ago we did have HEAP. We did have electrical assistance. We had four children. I had lost my job and my husband was working an hourly job selling car parts and he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Back in the day, we used to play that game. That’s a game. Because if you have an income that’s in-between, and you don’t receive SNAP, you have to wait for a shut-off notice before you can receive a HEAP benefit. And it’s a stupid game and I don’t like it. But we did play the game. Because we were in a situation where if you pay this then you can’t pay this.

Several residents reported difficulty receiving other energy-related benefits, including cooling and weatherisation assistance. Some residents did not qualify for weatherisation assistance due to baseline income, and others did not qualify due to their tenant status, as state-funded weatherisation benefits are only available for homeowners. One resident complained that the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority will provide free energy audits, but no assistance to make the recommended changes, and therefore the audit that they received felt like a waste of time.

As described by the one resident above who refers to the ‘game’, energy expenses are often one component of the complex trade-offs that people make across housing, energy, food, medical and other expenses like phone or water utility bills. Several residents said that they would pay for rent or utility bills before other types of expenses, sometimes forgoing medicine, food, or other basic household necessities. Others said they would forgo a utility bill in order to purchase necessary medicine and food. Several homeowners said they would prioritise their water bill, since the city-run water utility will shut off water and use unpaid water bills as grounds to repossess people’s homes. In general, juggling various types of payments in order to make ends meet is a regular activity for some interviewees. As one resident put it, ‘Every month I steal from Peter to pay Paul’.

These thermal stories reveal the inhumanity and structural violence embedded in housing and energy institutions. Even though all of people we interviewed were housed, more than a third described struggling to protect themselves from the elements while inside their homes. Especially for people with intersectional burdens such as underlying health conditions, caregiving responsibilities, or lack of thermal acclimatisation, substandard housing and energy conditions add to these burdens and articulate with other dimensions of health, security and structural violence. Although energy assistance programmes are designed to compensate for the inadequacy of residential infrastructure, these stories reveal some of the inefficiencies, and potential inequities in the way that energy assistance programmes are designed. And although dominant narratives cast the city as a climate haven, counter-stories imply that this narrative does not align with some experiences of long-time residents living in poverty, as well as new Buffalonians or new Americans who are unaccustomed to a harsh winter climate.

Interpersonal, bureaucratic and intersectional politics of thermal insecurity

In relaying stories of thermal insecurity, people often described cold and heat as ongoing, routine struggles that are highly relational in the sense that hierarchical relationships are structuring these routine struggles. Thermal insecurity-related power structures take several different forms, including the relation between landlord/tenant, public bureaucracy/benefit recipient and utility provider/customer. In most (but not all) instances in which such relations were mentioned, the tone was one of negativity, frustration, or stress. These interpersonal, contractual and bureaucratic politics provide entry points into understanding the structural violence of heat and cold, as it is these (often hierarchical or care) relationships through which thermal insecurity gets expressed and normalised. Residents described a sense of anxiety and lack of control over the heat and cold, often blaming those who are in control – the uncooperative landlord, the exploitative utility company, and the understaffed energy bureaucracy. While the SDH literature addresses ways in which interpersonal (e.g., domestic) violence interacts with structural violence, this study also suggests that interpersonal and other household-level relationships define the ways in which people navigate chronic health risks.

Specific thermal experiences emerge from intersectional identities, such as gendered caregiving responsibilities which interact with weather to deepen experiences of isolation and marginalisation. In some cases, residents described how their social status – as an immigrant, as someone who is underemployed, or who lives in an underinvested or unsafe neighbourhood – influenced their lived experiences with weather and indoor environmental quality. For many residents, thermal struggles are not necessarily extraordinary, but rather typical, everyday mundane experiences.

Thermal attunement

Residential interviews confirmed that people are highly attuned to the forces that threaten their health, and that thermal threats number among such forces. While the fact of people’s thermal attunement may seem obvious, it stands in contrast to the behavioural change strategies that dominate the discourse of emerging urban thermal governance, such as naming and ranking heat waves. To be sure, informational strategies alerting people to dangerous weather can help prepare those whose thermoreceptivity is compromised (e.g., elders), or who are not accustomed to the particular weather conditions where they have come to reside. But by and large, people take seriously the ways in which their chronic diseases may be exacerbated by heat and cold, they are attuned to ways in which heat and cold manifest as anxiety, aggressiveness and despair; and they adopt numerous thermal security measures.

As Vannini et al. (2012) pointed out in their study of weathering in the British Columbian coast, Mark Twain’s purported quip that ‘everyone talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it’ could not be farther from the truth. Like weathering wind and rain, thermal endurance is also an active disposition. (In our study, thermal adaptations most prominently took the form of DIY and low-cost weatherisation.) During the first decades of the US Weather Service’s storm naming practice, meteorologists argued that unnamed (and male gendered) storms are not taken seriously (Skilton, 2018). Yet, residents in our study treat the weather – unnamed as it is – with gravity. Indeed, some thermal adaptations are elaborate, as in the case of one resident who built a cardboard wall out of packing boxes within an existing room to protect herself from the routine winds of the winter season. This suggests that awareness may not be the primary factor standing in the way of thermal health. Rather, health-protective barriers may be more a function of who has agency over the built environment, particularly in spaces considered to be part of the private sphere – structured by landlord/tenant or energy provider/customer hierarchies – and oftentimes considered beyond the purview of urban planning or environmental policy. These barriers take place in private spaces that escape the detection of weather bureaucracies; they can elude city governments’ thermal management efforts.

Climate urbanism place-making and displacement

The climate refuge, climate Eden, climate haven, has emerged as a new form of urban branding. Climate destination place-making can go hand-in-hand with displacement (climate change gentrification) as a form of climate injustice that emerges at the intersection of climate migration into cities and the direct health impacts of climate change. Here, I have described a climate urbanism narrative in which cities once stigmatised for their severe winter weather and economic decline are now billed as places to seek refuge from the insecurities and unpredictability associated with climate change. But this narrative does not align with the experiences of many residents.

Ideally, climate refuge claims are aspirations and discursive tools for agenda-setting and mobilising resources to bear on a problem. But in the worst-case scenario, the discourse is leveraged to drive an influx of new residents who can buy into climate-safe enclaves, while leaving climate victims behind. Capitalising on climate disasters happening elsewhere, climate Edens then become part of the ongoing, repetitive tragedies of colonialism and capitalism. Counter-storytelling centres people’s everyday, often mundane, routine, ritualised experiences with structural violence in the context of climate branding initiatives.

Conclusion

Thermal (in)security is a form of structural violence shaped by interactions between atmospheric conditions and economic, political and social struggles. It may manifest as a direct health impact, or indirectly as people make trade-offs across medical, nutritional and energy needs. While energy, housing and food insecurity have been widely defined, thermal insecurity has not been fully articulated in health policy or climate discourse. Instead, heat and cold are largely represented as disembodied and depoliticised meteorological states.

Heat governance and climate refuge are emerging frames around which climate urbanism is reorganising. Research has shown that first-generation heat governance practices have been overwhelmingly focused on information campaigns (including recent efforts to name heat waves), and public investments in the outdoor built environment such as tree planting. Far less attention has been paid to private residences and indoor spaces where people may be experiencing the most heat risk. Meanwhile, urban governance of cold is marginalised as a form of urban environmentalism even though it contributes to many more fatalities than heat. The notion of thermal insecurity – informed by people’s everyday experiences with heat and cold – inserts a new discourse into urban studies of environmental governance, which problematises the public sector’s neglect of ‘private’ built environments and its reluctance to intervene in ‘private’ relations.

This paper drew on notions of structural and slow violence to show how the politics of heat and cold play out in everyday, routine practices and household-level interpersonal, contractual and bureaucratic relationships against a backdrop of urban climate refuge branding which threatens to compound residents’ climate change-exacerbated insecurities. At the same time, people struggle within and around these relationships to access thermal safety, often doing so with a sense of pride and creativity. Global narratives of heat’s ‘silent’, ‘invisible’ deadliness allude to a sense of socially-structured causation. And yet, interventions have tended to only address attention-setting among those who are considered ‘vulnerable’ or on built environment modifications in relatively visible ‘public’ spaces. This study shows that the invisibility of thermal threats may have less to do with a lack of awareness about the dangers associated with changing weather, and more to do with a reluctance to problematise everyday exploitations and inaccessibility of basic needs. Thermal security adds to the vocabulary of human security, while centring everyday practices, adaptations and forms of structural violence that are embodied as heat and cold.