Cities on fire: Towards an elemental urbanism in the Anthropocene

Abstract

This intervention outlines a new way of thinking about the growing entanglements between fire and urban life in the Anthropocene, calling for a dialogue between urban studies and elemental geographies as a conceptual lens that addresses the changing nature of nature in contemporary urban worlds. As wildfires increasingly impact cities—destroying infrastructure and property, displacing populations, and altering air quality across vast distances—fire emerges not only as risk and hazard but also as an elemental force reshaping the city’s political, material, and conceptual foundations. Our aim is twofold. First, we open a debate on an emerging urban condition of the Anthropocene where fire assumes a reinvigorated presence. Second, exploring analytical pathways for re-thinking cities on fire, we discuss connections between urban studies and elemental geographies—a growing subfield of cultural and political geography which engages with the elements as a way of thinking with Earth’s materialities. The resurgence of fire in the city, we contend, signals the growing presence of “elemental exposures” resulting from global environmental change and Anthropogenic climate and ecological emergencies. Following a review of fire scholarship within urban studies, we suggest an elemental rethinking of fire—not as a spatially distant or exceptional event but as a shared, co-constitutive, agentic, and persistent presence demanding collective responsibility and adaptation as well as novel ways of conceptualizing city–nature relationships. The resulting urban pyropolitics frames cities as dynamic, more-than-human sites of climate transformation and vulnerability, highlighting the unequal distribution of elemental exposure in the Anthropocene city and its racialized, gendered, and classed dimensions.

Introduction

[I]t was the discovery of fire that originally gave rise to the coming together of men [sic], to the deliberative assembly, and to social intercourse.(Vitruvius, 1960: 38)

The history of urbanization is the history of fires and fire extinction.(Peters, 2015: 146)

Over the past decade, more than a dozen large-scale fires have substantively impacted urban areas across the world. In January 2025, wildfires destroyed nearly 18,000 homes and structures in Los Angeles, putting over 200,000 residents under mandatory evacuation orders (BBC, 2025). Only six months earlier, wildfires had wreaked havoc in suburban Athens, rekindling scenes of emergency and destruction seen in 2018, 2021, 2022, and 2023. These cities join a growing list of urbanized areas across the world recently impacted by flames and resulting evacuations, including northern California (US), British Columbia (Canada), Valparaíso (Chile), Maui (Hawaii, US), and Palermo (Italy). The effects of wildfires are not confined to cities in the immediate proximity but can also be felt far away. The orange haze that blanketed New York and other US northeastern cities in 2023 and São Paulo and Brasilia in 2024, resulting from wildfires in distant locations, exposed residents to some of the worst air quality ever recorded. Contemporary urban dimensions of wildfire span across a multiplicity of domains beyond respiratory health, life, and property loss, including insurance access and affordability, critical infrastructure disruption, water provision and security, and increased flood risk (World Economic Forum and World Resources Institute, 2023). But wildfires are not the only contemporary fire risk in cities. As this article was being finalized, Hong Kong’s Wang Fuk Court fire was unfolding, leaving over 160 casualties and 4,000 displaced residents. Housing, informal settlements, industrial facilities, and infrastructures all contribute to conditions for fire risk, driven by a combination of factors such as density, building materials, infrastructural failure, overcrowding, arson, and firefighting resources. Collectively, such conditions and factors signal the combustibility of urban life. Although, on an elemental level, the Earth is a planet with the natural conditions for fire, the drivers and effects of urban fires are unevenly shared across intersectional lines of gender, race, and class. In the context of the Anthropocene and human-induced climate change—which alters how and where fire burns—and with forecasts predicting more frequent and intense fires in the coming decades (UNEP, 2022), we argue that the relationship between fire and the city must be rethought.

This article has a dual purpose. First, we aim to open a debate on an emerging urban condition of the Anthropocene; one in which fire assumes a reinvigorated presence. We outline how cities are being rethought in the context of the increasing occurrence of fire—not only as sites of densely built infrastructure and concentrated human activity but also as vulnerable, dynamic environments shaped by a return of elemental forces, prompting new ways of governing, experiencing, and imagining urban life amid climate volatility. Here, by engaging with fire as more than a physical phenomenon, we signal shifts in the relationship between city and “nature” that are unique to a planetary condition marked by climate change, ecological crisis, and the legacies of colonial capitalism. Under a growing presence of “elemental exposures” —dramatic increases in vulnerabilities to and encounters with the elements, such as fire, water, and wind—the Anthropocene emerges as central to the contemporary global urban experience. Second, in putting forward analytical pathways for considering a renewed relationship between fire and the city, we seek to discuss points of connection between urban studies and elemental geographies—a growing subfield in cultural and political geography which engages with the elements as a way of thinking with Earth’s materialities (e.g. Adey, 2013; Engelmann and McCormack, 2021; Farías and Kemmer, 2024; Nieuwenhuis and Chen, 2024). By using fire as an empirical entry point and foregrounding elemental exposures as a “matter of concern” (cf. Latour, 2004), we seek to carve out a space within urban studies for inquiring into how urbanity is “susceptible to the composition of elemental worlds” (Engelmann and McCormack, 2021: 1421). Our intervention foregrounds both an urban geographic imagination and an urban politics inevitably mediated by the city’s differentiated entanglement with Earth’s materialities.

Fire has always been integral to cultural, political, and economic ecologies. Geographer Clark (2011: 164) writes that it is hard to “imagine a ‘biopolitics’ that was not first and foremost a ‘pyropolitics’ —centered on the regulation, manipulation, and enhancement of fire.” Human use of fire enables the pyrotechnologies of illumination, allowing humans to read, and provides the heat required to cook, bake bricks, clear landscapes, wage war, travel, and of course generate the electricity that sustains the infrastructures on which the modern city rests (Clark and Yusoff, 2014). Being elemental, fire is foundational to humanity’s biological, cultural, and social evolution, blurring the very boundaries that distinguish these registers. Indeed, quoting Pyne (in Clark and Yusoff, 2014: 208), humanity’s management of fire “marks a divide in the natural history of the Earth”; and is key to “our species’ acquisition of geological agency” (Clark, 2022a). In the Anthropocene in particular—whether understood as a science-based category pointing to humanity’s impact on geophysical processes or, as in this intervention, as the historical product of capitalism and colonialism (Davis and Todd, 2017)—fire is deeply enmeshed in the (re)making of human-made environments. Moore’s (2015) notion of the Capitalocene reminds us that fire was foundational to the rise of “cheap natures,” enabling a capitalist economic model built on access to inexpensive energy gained from burning the fossilized organic substrate. Today’s fires reverberate from an elemental regime of exchange that began some 550 years ago.

Despite its centrality to the emergence of the modern world, however, fire has not featured prominently in urban or geographic scholarship (exceptions include Brodesco and Brighenti, 2021). The planet’s Anthropocenic condition—marked by rising temperatures, extreme weather events, and a racial capitalism built on dispossession, exploitation, and domination of both natural worlds and human populations—provides credence to the view that contemporary politics and spatial imaginations, from geo- to urban, must engage more substantively with the elemental.

Fire in the city

Indispensable for human habitation, fire is both a hazard and a resource. From building codes and construction materials to planning regulations and insurantial logics, Western urbanism has long been entangled with practices of maintaining fire both at bay and under control. Recent research published in Nature and Science warns of an increase in fire risks in cities worldwide, a trend linked to core Anthropogenic processes (Guo et al., 2024; Shi et al., 2025). Data from Global Forest Watch—an online platform that monitors forest conditions—indicates that “forest fires are becoming more widespread, burning at least twice as much tree cover today as they did two decades ago” (World Resources Institute, 2024). In 2024–2025, global wildfires burned an area roughly 40% of the size of the US, especially impacting South America, Eastern Siberia, and western North America (Kelley et al., 2025). Increases in the frequency, severity, and intensity of wildfires are associated with accelerated land use changes as well as temperature rises, decreases in precipitation, and drought conditions linked to climate change (Jones et al., 2024). Particularly in cities, given the rising Urban Heat Island effect, increases in air temperature have been shown to impact the frequency of fires (Guo et al., 2024; Shi et al., 2025). In 2021, the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group (2021), a network of cities committed to climate action, issued guidelines for cities at risk from wildfires, recommending fire risk mapping, the use of green infrastructure to reduce wildfire risk, and the integration of wildfire management into spatial planning.

Recognizing fire as an urban problem is not new. Fire has long been a fear for urban residents (Bankoff et al., 2012). The 1666 Great Fire of London and the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, for example, destroyed substantial parts of these cities while leaving tens of thousands of residents homeless. So-called “fire-storms” (Feuerstürme) generated by bombing raids during the Second World War burned down large sections of many cities, most famously Dresden and Tokyo (Primoratz, 2010). Modern urbanism, population growth, and industrialization required greater control over and management of fire, which suspended its unpredictability from everyday life (Bankoff et al., 2012). The 19th- and 20th-century replacement of timber with bricks, concrete, and steel as building materials, alongside the emergence of modern fire prevention techniques, specialized firefighters, fire escapes, and the onset of central heating systems, stoves, and boilers, significantly reduced the frequency and risk of urban fires in the West (Attlee, 2021; Garrioch, 2019; O’Malley and Hutchinson, 2007). With the notable exception of 19th-century American consumer society, in which fire’s volatility was often celebrated as “hot money” that needed “burning” (Immerwahr, 2024), fire risk and its elemental presence largely disappeared from everyday urban life in the west—spatially, socially, culturally, and affectively. The architectural historian Zografos (2019: 169) describes the gradual transition from the hearth to fireplaces, radiators, and eventually underfloor heating as the repression and “dislocation” of what was once the central element of social space, noting that in the contemporary city “the spaces fire once inhabited are redundant.” Yet, in some affluent households in the global North, fire returns or is maintained on account of the cultural and emotional relationships with the fireplace (Ambrose et al., 2024). It needs mentioning, moreover, that this “forgetting of fire” is only possible by infrastructures that willfully ignore the domestic solid-fuel fire on which billions, mainly in the global South, still depend for cooking, heating, and social life (Castán Broto, 2019; Silver and Marvin, 2017).

Today, the popular view that fire is mostly alien or external to the city is coming into question. Fire’s ecology is deeply entwined with urban processes such as sprawl, land clearance, deforestation, industrial activity, greenfield development, strategic planning, infrastructure deployment, and urban growth more generally. Yet, despite greater exposure to fire, there is a noticeable lack of data and analytical approaches to adequately examine the urban dimensions of wildfires and their uneven impacts. Traditional notions used for this—such as the wildland–urban interface (WUI), which focuses on areas where “housing and structures [exist] close to or within natural vegetation” (Chen et al., 2024: 475)—are based on flawed assumptions around physical and conceptual distinctions between the city and its hinterland, urbanity and nature. Fire researchers warn that today’s wildfires have made the term WUI outdated, as wildfire is no longer confined to non-urban areas. They argue instead that these fires must be understood as “urban fires initiated by wildfires” (Calkin et al., 2023: 2, emphasis in original). Fire that encroaches on the peripheries of a city can morph quickly into an urban conflagration which, we argue, demands a refocusing of attention not on fire in wildlands but on fire interacting with the built environment. As Pyne (in Curwen, 2017) notes, “It’s no longer just the case that we’re building homes where the fires are … The fires seem to be going where the houses are.” Unlike wildfires, which consume natural vegetation, urban fire feeds on high-density urban environments—buildings, vehicles, and infrastructure—accelerating the fire’s spread and increasing its intensity. While wildfires are often perceived as “natural” —distant, abstract, and often simply left to burn—urban conflagrations are treated and securitized as immediate and existential threats to life and property. Under these conditions, the WUI becomes a mediated capitalist colonial geography of private property in land which functions to redistribute responsibility for wildfire risk management onto individual homeowners rather than the state (Asiyanbi and Davidsen, 2023).

The WUI model, which sees fire through binary lenses of “urban” and “wild” places, not only excludes fire from the city but, as we will discuss later, also attaches it to the colonial category of the “wild.” It assumes a static interface rather than a dynamic and fluid interplay of elemental forces and urbanity. Within the colonial experience, the static urban interface is meant to signify a controlled and ordered geography, standing in opposition to the “wild” hinterland. Fire, due to its common uncontrollability, challenges these false premises and blurs the lines between ordered city and wild hinterland. Under changing climatological conditions, fire breathes in densely built and combustible environments designed with outdated climatological preconceptions and a relationship with earthly elements based on their exclusion. What is required, we argue, is an elemental rethinking of fire in the city—not as a spatially distant or exceptional event but as a shared, agentic, co-constitutive, and persistent presence, demanding not only collective responsibility and adaptation but also novel ways of conceptualizing city–nature relationships.

Encountering fire in urban studies

Within urban studies, fire has been considered primarily as a human hazard linked to specific characteristics of the built environment, such as overcrowding, building materials, cable infrastructure, and the unregulated mixing of industrial and residential activity. Work within the discipline has foregrounded an urban politics of fire risk and vulnerability within diverse spatial, material, and political configurations of the city (Gurran et al., 2021; MacLeod, 2018; Murray, 2009; Rozena, 2022). Here, urban fires are decidedly a human event; never a natural disaster, but rather the outcome of a “hidden structure of marginality and social insecurity” (Murray, 2009: 165). Mike Davis’ review of the proliferation of luxury “fire suburbs” in Los Angeles dissects how an urban politics of fire reflects larger class struggles. Here, strategic discourses around “natural hazards” and “public safety” mask the mechanisms by which wealthy neighborhoods take a disproportionate share of public resources—an Ecology of Fear that “deliberately [puts the city] in harm’s way” (Davis, 1998: 9; see also Davis, 1995). In the 1970s, a wave of arson affected disenfranchised neighborhoods in the US. In New York’s South Bronx, fires destroyed 80% of the housing stock and displaced 250,000 people (Vázquez Irizarry and Hildebran, 2020). Urban historians have uncovered these arson attacks as the “business of arson-for-profit,” fueling a racially stratified property market that can be traced to the interaction between absentee landlords and state-sponsored fire insurance (Ansfield, 2025). London’s 2017 Grenfell Tower fire, furthermore, illustrates how fire exposes and intensifies pre-existing conditions of marginality, discrimination, and injustice. The specific risk came from combustible cladding, which, as Melser (2023) notes, emerged from systemic tensions between tenant safety and the financial concerns of core stakeholders within housing markets. This exposure to fire resulted in widespread displacement, slow violence, trauma, democratic disavowal, and complex processes of unhoming and rehoming (MacLeod, 2018; Preece and Flint, 2024; Rozena, 2022).

Such urban pyropolitics, a term which addresses the cultural logics, operational management, and political impacts of fire on the scale of the city, is not exclusive to the global north. In fact, low- and middle-income countries account for as much as 95% of the 300,000 annual deaths from fire (Twigg, 2017). Research in the global South highlights how informal settlements and conditions of urban poverty, combined with lax planning regulations and building standards, amplify the harmful impact of fires whilst exposing systemic and intersectional vulnerabilities (Chance, 2015; Murray, 2009). As Adey (2024) points out in his discussion of fire evacuations, the presence of fire in the city is never apolitical; or, in the words of a survivor of a large fire in Durban, South Africa: “Where there is fire, there is politics” (in Chance, 2015: 394). We argue for an understanding of urban pyropolitics that is historical and situated along intersectional lines of class, gender, ability, and race, in which exposure to fire acts as a function of the devaluation of working lives, social neglect, and the broader prioritization of the logic of capital.

Wildfires have received relatively limited attention in urban studies. Recent work on the political ecology of air has focused on the health implications of wildfires—both near and far from urban centers (Cook and Kerr, 2024; McManus, 2021). In these accounts, the emphasis usually falls more on air and its qualities than on fire itself (exceptions include Ptak et al., 2024). Using a case study of the bushfires of eastern Australia in 2019/2020, for example, McManus (2021: 243) describes a moment when “smoke became a quotidian experience for millions of people not in direct danger from flames.” Similarly, adopting a perspective that emphasizes the earthly elements, Cook and Kerr (2024: 1315) locate wildfire smoke as one of several toxic elemental entities that reveal the agency of air in shaping urban environments—a “combined toxicity of particulates [that] is enhanced by temperature gradients [and] mapped to socio-economic inequalities.”

A growing focus on urban resilience and urbanization in the context of climate change challenges the historical logic of fire suppression that for centuries has shaped the encounter between city and fire. Goldstein et al. (2015), for instance, drawing on case studies of collaborative wildfire planning at urban peripheries, argue that resilience is not simply the result of the coming together of diverse human stakeholders—residents, local authorities, and firefighters—but rather emerges from recognizing the mutual interdependence between social and natural worlds. This recognition overcomes the 19th- and 20th-century logic of fire exclusion which, as the so-called “fire suppression paradox” shows, actually increases the risk of catastrophic fires. Awareness of relationality in the city’s encounter with fire is also advanced by Keil (2020: 2360) in this journal, in the context of an urban political ecology for the age of planetary urbanization. “[I]n an era of never-ending storms, floods, and fires,” he writes, the outside of the urban—once thought to be absent—now increasingly conditions the contemporary city. Transcending a planetary urbanization that seemingly has lost its “constitutive outside,” Keil sees this outside as enfolding natural forces as much as humanly shaped domains and processes such as mining, forested, and agricultural environments. In the Anthropocene, as Connolly (2019, cited in Keil, 2020: 2361) argues, “cities are [not only] produced through socionatural metabolic flows originating ‘elsewhere’, but … their specific sociopolitical contexts and spatial configurations [also] have strong implications for how these various non-human natures are urbanized.” As such, at stake in an elemental urbanism for the Anthropocene is not only how fire politicizes the city but also how fire itself is urbanized; how, as an earthly element, it is shaped by and constitutive of urbanization dynamics.

Towards an elemental urbanism: Pyrography meets the city

The Anthropocene confronts city dwellers and practitioners with the realization that the elements have never existed separate from the urban: air circulates through bodies and buildings; wind carries fire from one roof to another; water floods the streets. Every element constantly exerts a physical, affective, and imaginative force on the built environment and its users. Acting like media—described as “our infrastructures of being, the habitats and materials through which we act and are” (Peters, 2015: 15)—elements such as water, air, and fire not only constitute the urban in “concrete” form, foundational to the architecture that sustains it, but also shape its lived experience through snow, wind, and light. “Elemental thinking” (Nieuwenhuis and Chen, 2024) challenges the imagination that cities, as collective infrastructures, exist in a perfectly suspended realm of meteorological certainty. Its method is to remind us that the elements bend, melt, evaporate, and fracture from one state to the next, enabling endless assemblages, including the city. A (re)turn to thinking through and with the elemental (Adey, 2015; Engelmann and McCormack, 2021; Macauley, 2010; Nieuwenhuis, 2016), providing both a return to a past and a fleeting glimpse of a future without humans, exposes the relatively short-lived myth of a city beyond or separate from nature. The elemental harbors not a promise but a possibility to challenge, experiment, and imagine worlds beyond instrumental epistemologies that juxtapose nature and culture, thought and emotion, body and mind, object and subject, human and non-human (Morton, 2007). Elemental geography offers a mode of thinking that is not centered on a thing in conventional imaginations of objects with surfaces and limits. Instead, elements enjoy the indeterminate qualities of light, air, darkness, heat, and wetness, yet simultaneously they appear ephemeral in the form of clouds and indeterminate like flakes of snow.

Elemental thinking is foundational to both Western and non-Western environmental epistemologies. While it was largely supplanted in the West by the more abstract concept of “nature,” which was made subordinate to logos and ratio, thinking with the elements never disappeared in other parts of the world. The ancient Chinese Feng Shui (literally “wind” and “water”), for instance, is still the most widely applied practice for modulating air and atmospheres. Much older is the aboriginal practice of “fire-stick farming,” a practice of burning undergrowth to promote new plant growth, which transformed the entire Australian continent. What has changed in the attention given to the elements today, however, is the context of climatological uncertainty that throws humans and non-humans into radically new and ambiguous material entanglements (Clark, 2011). Cohen and Duckert (2015: 5–6) describe the current elemental (re)turn in the social sciences and humanities as a “re-activism, where the ‘re-’ is not a simple repetition of a previous form but a renewal of non/human ethical enmeshment.” A focus on the elemental, they argue, reveals the “limits of anthropocentricity” and provides a “disanthropocentric re-envisioning of the biomes and cosmopolities within which we [as humans and non-humans] dwell.” McHugh (2022: 385) similarly describes a mode of “elemental becoming” that exposes the myth of anthropogenic mastery and introduces diffracted bodies to feel the “alterity and wildness of the elemental moving as a summons or imperative, opening up possibilities in thinking and living otherwise.” For our purposes, this openness creates possibilities to reconsider and reimagine cities both in their politically charged materiality and in their constitutive relation to the “natural.”

Elemental thinking recognizes elements as both stabilizing and destabilizing forces that take hold of bodies, commanding them to feel, relate, and ultimately shape, perceive, and be in the world. In Adey’s (2013) work on megacities, the elemental appears as air—simultaneously meteorological and affective—pressing unevenly on socially differentiated bodies through micro weathers of dust, smog, and heat, shaping how cities are made and experienced subjectively. Adey (2024) elsewhere addresses how the element of fire appears through the historical lens of high-rise factory conflagrations—revealing how flames have shaped building regulations, vertical evacuation protocols, and the aesthetic politics of emergency response in urban environments. A growing body of research in urban studies engages with air and atmosphere as elemental dimensions of the city—dimensions that, through sensorial/phenomenological approaches, help to capture and interrogate cultural and political aspects and affects of contemporary urban life (e.g. Choy, 2020; Gandy, 2017; Ghertner, 2020; Graham, 2015; Nassar, 2022). Thinking elementally, we argue, helps illuminate the entangled relations between the material fabric of the city and the embodied urban experience, offering insight into how the city shapes both the deeply intimate and the broader politics of subjectivity. Drawing on a particular strength of critical urban studies, by way of calling for a consideration of situated (Schindler, 2017), provincialized (Lawhon et al., 2014), or grounded (Ernstson and Sörlin, 2019) engagements with place, we propose an elemental thinking of the coming together of fire and the city—one that acknowledges earthly materialities whilst working with and through the socially differentiated and fragmented experiences of fire in the city.

So, what does it mean to think cities and urbanity elementally from the vantage point of the combustibility, heat, allure, and atmospheres of fire? Coming to terms with “the elemental city”—“a city which is built with elements and not against them” (Farías and Kemmer, 2024: 3)—means engaging with the representational, affective, and political power of imagining “cities on fire” and the inevitable reality of the uneven, embodied, and situated entanglement with combustion, heat, and smog. Inspired by environmental historian Pyne (2009, 2012, 2021), whose work uncovers the contingent nature of the human relationship to fire, a mounting body of literature explores the historical coming together of politics, fire, and the elemental interactions that made the city possible and from which cities grew “into geological forces in their own right” (e.g. Clark and Yusoff, 2014: 217; see also Matthews, 2016). Examples include writings on the (gendered) pyropolitics of wildfires in settler colonial societies (Sloan Morgan and Burr, 2024; Zahara, 2020); the historical combustibility of geopolitics (Dalby, 2018); the uneven politics of heat and dry weather (Dixon, 2023; Robinson, 2025); heat health (Johnston et al., 2016; Pearson et al., n.d.); sweaty bodies (Della Bosca, 2024); and pyrotechniques under settler colonialism (Nieuwenhuis and Joronen, 2025). Although this literature does not always take the urban as its locus, this growing body of work highlights the centrality of combustion and heat in shaping, experiencing, governing, and planning urban life. It also reflects a growing recognition of the need to radically rethink how urban environments engage with anthropogenic fire, which—as Farías and Kemmer (2024: 7), who coined the term “elemental urbanism,” argue— “[resists] containment in sociotechnical infrastructures and urban regimes.”

In practice, at the forefront of this renewed engagement with fire are insurance underwriters, urban planners, and firefighters, all of whom played a central role in the modern city’s original effort to banish fire—(re)shaping urban life, space, and collective consciousness in the process (Tebeau, 2003). Today, however, they find themselves at a loss as to how to respond to the increasingly unpredictable consequences of urban fire’s resurgence (Auer, 2024; Petryna, 2024). The 2025 Los Angeles fires revealed a complex “urban pyro-economy”: while the US$61.9 billion in damages (Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation, 2025) led to reduced tax revenues and rising insurance premiums, it also triggered a construction boom and surging demand for materials. In addition to health impacts, the financial cost of wildfires is borne unevenly, disproportionately affecting uninsured residents who are often marginalized by class and race (Hemmati et al., 2025; Ptak et al., 2024). The disparate effects of wildfires are rarely accidental but rather outcomes of an elemental form of governance rooted in settler colonial logics of dispossession.

Wildfires occurring under conditions of settler colonialism must be situated within a broader historical context of plantation economies, in which land is treated as a resource for a single purpose—the expansion and consolidation of extractive monocultures underpinned by slavery, colonialism, and dispossession (Haraway et al., 2015). Within this colonial regime of elemental governance, marked by fire suppression, historical Indigenous land stewardship, in which fire performs an integral role, has been made subordinate and criminalized. The exclusion of fire has desiccated the soil and made the land more flammable, not only creating inhospitable landscapes but also polluting the air above. A stark example is the 2023 mass evacuations of Yellowknife, the capital of Canada’s Northwest Territories, located on the traditional land of Yellowknives Dene First Nation. Triggered by extensive and pervasive wildfire smoke, these evacuations had the devastating effect of destroying Indigenous lifeworlds that were built on millennia of coexisting with fire rather than fighting against it (Nieuwenhuis, forthcoming). Similarly, Brazil’s 2024 wildfire crisis combined climate change-driven drought with fire-based agricultural deforestation. This resulted in over 62,000 km² of burnt land, primarily affecting Indigenous Peoples in the Amazon, but the smoke also brought everyday life to a halt in cities like São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro (BBC, 2024). The necessity to think with fire rather than against it, a fact known since the idea of the Anthropocene was first coined (Clark, 2022a), has meant that Brazil has become one of the first countries in Latin America to re-integrate precolonial Indigenous fire-use practices into official fire management plans.

The Anthropocene continues to reconfigure elemental relationships with profoundly uneven, material, and affective consequences. Locating fire as a historical function of the Anthropocene matters here, and not only on account of rising temperatures and extreme weather. The aforementioned WUI, for instance, articulates the historical colonial distinction between modern settlement and wildlands, mirroring a binary geography based on a civilized urban center that requires protection from an untamed wildland. This elemental separation, which forms one of the cornerstones of the Anthropocene—as a combination of elemental exchange and capitalist colonialism—has become increasingly untenable, as fire, amplified by climate change, consistently breaches such imaginary lines, including the culture–nature binaries, revealing the instability of the colonial project itself. Hoffman et al. (2022), for example, explain how administrative and legislative barriers prevent prescribed and cultural burning within WUI areas in Canada, where regulations prohibit burning within 100 m of dwellings, further exposing already vulnerable and marginalized Indigenous communities, who are disproportionately located in the WUI, to wildfires. Analyzing the causes, effects, and responses to wildfires must be situated and grounded in the specificity of local geographies and histories. Alternatives to the Anthropocene, such as Haraway’s (2016), trace the contemporary crisis to onto-epistemic models of nature built on exclusion and domination. Haraway suggests a reconfiguration of planetary relations based on synergistic coexistence between humans and non-humans; a move that points to longstanding alliances between fire, plants, and people, present in many Indigenous communities for whom fire is an active agent in everyday worlds through cycles of ruin and regrowth (Eriksen and Ballard, 2020; Hoffman et al., 2022).

In a condition of climate change, which, it should be remembered, is made possible by the modern European manipulation of combustion (Clark and Yusoff, 2014), fire can no longer be imagined as existing separate from politics, nor from the city. Today’s wildfires, we agree, signal “the arrival of the reverberations of that seismic shockwave into the nations who introduced colonial, capitalist processes across the globe in the first half-millennium in the first place” (Davis and Todd, 2017: 774). The past and present of the Anthropocene, marked by dispossession, extinction ecologies, and runaway change, alongside material excess and unmediated exposure to elemental energies, propels the abandonment of colonial paradigms and calls for alternative forms of knowledge to recalibrate our always more-than-human collective elemental entanglements (Petryna, 2024; Whyte, 2018). A recognition of the prospect that more cities will burn elicits imaginations and prompts strategies to rebuild and reconceptualize the city anew. The elemental recalibration that comes with the intensification of urban fire requires a focus on rebalancing the elemental forces that have been differentially distributed, regulated, and endured across the city—a recognition of the city’s uneven entanglement with earthly material vitalities. This shift, we have argued, demands an elemental thinking about fire; not merely as a threat to be extinguished but as a force of transformation that compels cities to live with volatility, design for resilience, account for unequal exposures, and reimagine coexistence within an increasingly flammable world.

Conclusions

The resurgence of fire in the city signals the growing presence of “elemental exposures” resulting from global environmental change and anthropogenic climate and ecologi-cal emergencies. Recent meteorological events around the world show that, whether through fire, drought, or flood, urban dwellers are increasingly exposed to the elements. At stake, we argue, is a new way (or a return to older ways) of encountering and negotiating urban natures; one that emerges from the growing frequency and intensity of unmediated and unpredictable encounters with a range of earthly material vitalities—including fire and heat (e.g. wildfires, heatwaves) but also water (e.g. extreme rain, flooding, drought) and wind (e.g. storms, hurricanes), among others. This change, shaped by a strained Earth and its unruly materiality, is marked by an increase in the intensity and volatility of Earth’s elements; the assertion of a nature that, in tension with colonial modernity, refuses anthropogenic domestication.

We propose a dialogue between urban studies and elemental geographies as a conceptual lens to address the growing presence of fire in urban worlds. We adopt the notion of “elemental urbanism” as a powerful analytical framework for rethinking the city–nature relationship within the Anthropocenic urban condition. Thinking elementally helps explore pressing questions such as: How will the inevitable return of urban fire change cities? As cities heat up and fires spread, who is most exposed? How does fire destabilize not only the experience but the very expectation of what a city is (Clark, 2022b)? And how might an increase in intensity and exposure to elemental materialities both re-shape the city and reconceptualize urbanity? These sorts of questions demand that we think not just about fire, but with it, as an elemental force that exceeds human control, reshapes urban atmospheres, transforms materialities, and reorders relations between bodies and natures. Fire, in this sense, no longer features merely as a risk to be mitigated or a hazard to be domesticated. We argue that it is an active participant in the making and unmaking of present and future urban life, entangled with histories of differentially intersectional exposure, infrastructural inequalities, colonial domination, and planetary crisis. As such, the elemental foregrounds the role of the non-human in the city in the Anthropocene, providing “new vantage points on the vitality and agency of the more-than-human in urban environments” (Farías and Kemmer, 2024: 6). Attuning to fire’s elemental nature compels a rethinking of the city as a negotiated space of volatile and differentiated elemental entanglements. What emerges is a more-than-human geography of combustion—one that challenges inherited colonial assumptions about mastery and progress in the city. Thinking elementally about fire, in other words, opens the potential for a relevant and urgent reading of urban studies—one in which the city is both a site and a product of combustion regimes, where struggles over air, temperature, and burn risk render visible the unequal elemental exposures to anthropocentric climate change.